Galileo satellite knocked offline

Source: BBC News

Page last updated at 14:10 GMT, Wednesday, 1 October 2008 15:10 UK

Galileo satellite knocked offline
By Jonathan Amos and Paul Rincon
Science reporters, BBC News

A test spacecraft for Europe's future satellite-navigation
system has been rocked by a surge of space radiation.

The incident forced the Giove-B satellite to adopt a "safe
mode" for two weeks in which only essential power systems
were kept running.

-snip-

Harsh region

Giove-B, and its sister demonstrator Giove-A, are the first
European missions to fly in the high-radiation environment
of a medium-Earth orbit (MEO), at an altitude of 24,000km.

This region of space is known to have a high intensity of
fast moving particles that can disrupt spacecraft electronics.
One of the objectives of the test satellites is to get a
better understanding of the space environment in MEO, and
they were launched with radiation monitoring equipment.

But engineers would not have expected Giove-B to suffer
such a glitch, ...

-snip-

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7646789.stm

:silly: