BBC News, By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, 27 December
2010
Related
stories
The second
European satellite dedicated to delivering broadband internet connections has
launched successfully.
 |
| The Proton climbs into the pre-dawn sky |
The
six-tonne Ka-Sat lifted off atop a Proton rocket from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at
0351 local time on Monday (2151 GMT on Sunday).
The flight
to orbit lasted nine hours and 12 minutes.
The
Eutelsat-operated spacecraft will concentrate its services on the estimated
tens of millions of European homes in so-called "not-spots".
These are
places where consumers cannot get a decent terrestrial connection.
The
spacecraft follows the Hylas-1 platform into orbit. This satellite, operated by
Avanti Communications of London, was launched just last month.
Ka-Sat,
however, is considerably bigger, and has a notional capacity to serve up to two
million households compared with Hylas's 300,000.
Nevertheless,
such is the scale of the under-served market in Europe that both platforms
should be very profitable ventures, the two companies believe.
"As
many as 30 million households in Europe are not served at all or get high
mediocrity of service," said Eutelsat CEO Michel de Rosen.
"These
could be people in the countryside or in the mountains, sometimes not very far
from large cities. Ka-Sat is an answer to that problem," he told BBC News.
Paris-based
Eutelsat is one of the world's big three Fixed Satellite Services (FSS)
companies, and transmits thousands of TV channels across its fleet of
spacecraft.
It already
provides some internet capability on its existing platforms, but Ka-Sat is its
first broadband-dedicated endeavour.
High
throughput
Ka-Sat will
sit about 36,000km above the equator at nine degrees East.
 |
| Ka-Sat was prepared in the UK |
Its
communications payload, structure and propulsion system were prepared by EADS
Astrium at its UK facilities in Stevenage and Portsmouth.
Final
testing of the spacecraft took place at Astrium's factory in Toulouse, France,
before shipment to Baikonur.
Ka-Sat has
a total throughput of some 70Gbps.
This will
be channelled via 82 spot beams on to different market areas stretching from
North Africa to southern Scandinavia. A very small segment of the Middle East
will also be reached.
Eutelsat
has signed about 70 deals with distributors across the satellite's
"footprint", and more would be signed over the next year, said Mr de
Rosen.
"It
takes normally a few weeks for a satellite to become operational after
launch," he explained.
"In
this case, it is more likely to be a few months. Expect Ka-Sat to be
operational in the second half of the second quarter of 2011."
The
satellite will need to undertake some firings of its own propulsion system to
circularise its final orbit. Ground controllers will also need a period of time
to check out and commission all onboard systems.
Previous
failure
Ka-Sat's
Proton rocket was under the spotlight for this flight.
The Russian
vehicle had failed on its previous outing, dumping three Glonass
satellite-navigation spacecraft in the Pacific Ocean.
An inquiry
found the Proton's new Block DM-03 upper-stage had been over-fuelled, making it
too heavy to achieve its required performance.
International
Launch Services (ILS), which runs the commercial operations of the Proton
vehicle, used a different upper-stage for the Ka-Sat mission.
This Breeze
M stage has a good recent record.
It was the
eighth and last ILS-organised Proton mission of 2010.
