Lightsquared has issued an update to Flightglobal on the condition of its SkyTerra 1 satellite after it was knocked out by a solar storm:
A network outage over our SkyTerra 1 satellite began at approximately at 13:30 GMT on 7 March. On 10 March, all traffic carried on SkyTerra 1 was transferred over to the MSAT satellite system, which is in place to provide coverage and service redundancy for our satellite network. The MSAT system will continue to carry this traffic for an indefinite amount of time while we make deliberate plans with our customers to move the traffic back. Services will be restored over our SkyTerra 1 Space Based Network as soon as operationally feasible and in conjunction with customer coordination to avoid disruption to their services.
The LightSquared and Boeing team have preliminarily concluded that the original loss of traffic was due to the solar flare experienced on 7 March, that impaired two sensors on the satellite causing the on board computers to go to safe mode. This was a temporary condition caused by the extreme levels of radiation due to the flare. This required a complete reboot of the satellite and checkout of its systems. This is why we made the determination to move customer traffic over to the redundant MSAT system in the interim. A detailed investigation and root cause and corrective action is ongoing.
on March 23, 2012 6:33 AM | Reply
Don't hold your breath. We'll believe it when we see it.
Thanks for the report as Light Squared has been very tight liped.
on May 13, 2012 2:19 AM | Reply
I was told on May 12, 2012 by a usually reliable source that the new Skyterra satellite is still not back in use and they had tried 5 times to move the customers back and failed.
Lightsquared is claiming this is untrue (maybe it worked on sixth attempt?).
Does anyone know the true situation?
on May 14, 2012 3:30 PM | Reply
A LightSquared spokesman has indicated to Flightglobal that the customers of SkyTerra 1 are still not back but will be soon:
"The SkyTerra one satellite is operating nominally and the plan is to return traffic to it over several weekends in June. We have, since the incident, provided all services to our customers over our legacy MSAT network , which continues to provide uninterrupted service.
Since we had all the customers migrated onto the MSAT network, our combined team of engineers decided to take their time and give the SkyTerra 1 space-based network a complete and thorough diagnostic before rushing customer traffic back onto it. My analogy here is that since we had the car up on the rack performing maintenance, check it out thoroughly before putting it back on the road.
Additionally, we conducted individual coordination with our customers to identify times to migrate their traffic back to SKYT 1 that would pose the least impact on their continuing service and operations."