Intelsat’s Zombie Sat still drifting

Chris Forrester | 12-05-2010

The news to date has all been bad over Intelsat’s errant satellite, Galaxy-15. It is drifting steadily, but uncontrollably, towards SES World Skies’ AMC-11 craft. A collision is not expected, but the Zombie Sat is still going to be a pain in the neck for all concerned.



The problem was updated in an analysts call (May 12) when Intelsat’s executives hosted a conference call. They confirmed that all traffic had successfully been shifted from G-15 to G-12. They said if they cannot fix things they will have to suffer an "impairment loss" of $142.4m for the satellite alone.

At the moment the greatest risk is in interference. The wayward satellite, while refusing to listen to ground-based controls to switch itself off, is acting like a giant lighthouse, automatically picking up whatever signals it can grab hold of and seamlessly retransmitting those signals to the ground. Once it gets within the vicinity of AMC-11 it will start collecting signals intended for AMC-11 and thus risk interfering with AMC-11’s own broadcasts.

It is understood that Galaxy-15 will enter AMC-11’s orbital space in about a week’s time on May 22-23, exiting on about June 7. It will be two weeks of serious headaches for AMC-11’s engineers who will have to make alternate plans to probably remove channels from their own satellite as well as possibly moving the satellite away from the threatening G-15’s path.