| Two New Stars in the North American Sky |
[Dec. 9th, 2006|12:02 am] |
Arianespace's Ariane 5 ECA launcher lifted off this afternoon (5:08 PM EST, 22:08 GMT) from Kourou, French Guiana with a pair of North American communication satellites.
The first satellite to be separated was Wildblue Communications' Wildblue-1. The all Ka-band satellite features 35 geographic spotbeams to deliver broadband services to their customers. The Space Systems/Loral LS-1300 satellite increases capacity to Wildblue customers from the 111.1 degrees West orbital location. Wildblue already leases capacity at that orbital slot from Telesat Canada aboard the Canadian Anik F2 satellite so Wildblue customers will continue to point dishes to the same spot in the sky to receive service from Anik F2 or the new Wildblue-1.
Minutes later, SES Americom's AMC-18 was freed from the launcher on its way to service in the 105 degrees West orbital location. The orbital slot is licensed to Gibraltar, but the satellite will beam services into North America. AMC-18 is a Lockheed Martin A2100 satellite with 24 transponders, each 36-MHz wide. AMC-18 has a 15 year lifetime and the satellite gives SES Americom a nice trio of satellites to serve cable headends throughout North America from a desirable spot in the Clarke belt (AMC-4 at 101 degrees West and AMC-1 at 103 degrees West are the other two satellites in the trio).
Both satellites should commence in-orbit testing in about 10 days (after the satellites are placed into a geostationary orbit from their current elliptical geostationary transfer orbit) and in-service date is expected in early 2007. |
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