Telstar Four is no more

This might be of mild interest to the geekiest on here...

A pretty much domestic satellite for the centre of North America (89.0°W) has just died and can't be fixed due to a short circuit killing its power system - makes you wonder what can short out a circuit in space.

It's used by ABC and CBS for newsfeeds and broadcast data, as well as some porn channels, PBS a tad and everyone's favourite in-store feature - a muzak service. Allegedly that means some muzac receivers will have to move their dishes, and the big guys have to relocate a load of transponders to some other satellites.

It's not a hugely interesting story but it's loosely TV related so I thought I'd post, (and yes, I did notice it on slashdot).

A small CNN article about it

NOOOOOOOOO!

NASA TV! Oh, my dear NASA TV on T4 Ch 9 ... oh ... I feel faint ...

EDIT -- whew -- The new satellite location is: AMC 9 Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization downlink frequency - 3880 MHz, Audio is at 6.8 MHz.

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Is it correct that NASA TV ceased to broadcast live transmissions of missions since the late 90s or so due to policy decisions at NASA, because the publice were seeing things on the live feeds that were supposed to be kept under wraps?

I don't think I'm qualified to answer that, but I haven't heard anything about any sort of policy like that.

/conspiracy theory

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It could very well be just conspiracy mania, but since your posting led one to believe that you were a regular viewer of NASA TV, I thought you would be able to confirm or deny whether or not live mission coverage was or was not shown. And if live mission coverage is indeed shown, then it disproves the falsely made claim that NASA were censoring, if necessary, their output.

I've seen some AFAIK live missions happening on NASA TV - eg. clocks corresponding with realtime, and I'm assuming they were live because they were too boring to bear repeating
Was the February 1st tragedy broadcast live on NASA TV by any chance?

Oh! I see. They do show live mission coverage when something exciting is going on, like a launch, spacewalk or landing. When nothing exciting is going on, they usually show a telemetry screen of where the shuttle is exactly over the Earth. Of course, none of this has been going on since the Columbia disaster. When no shuttle mission is on, they show beautiful archival footage of the Earth shot from space shuttles in orbit.

You can find out more about NASA TV, and watch it online at the NASA TV website.


It was, but from the Mission Control room. They didn't have direct video to the Columbia or anything like that. If anything, the local news stations in Texas had the "best" footage of the Shuttle breaking up, and not NASA TV.

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MTS: Thank you for confirming that.

I can now chalk up another piece of evidence against the claims of a certain tv show as being more
disinformation (NASA TV no longer being live), not that the rest of their claims are any more credible,
but its just nice to get the facts established.

This also refutes the notion that NASA TV "live coverage" is on a tape delay.

<http://www.space.COM/sciencefiction/phenomena/shuttle_tv_991227.html>