A major satellite manufacturer is about a week from becoming the first private company to catapult a communications satellite around the moon.
Hughes Global Services told Wired News Tuesday that the satellite, AsiaSat 3, launched last December by Chinese telecommunications company AsiaSat, is already on its way to the moon. By next week, the craft is expected to complete its lunar orbit and head back toward what Hughes hopes will be a useful Earth orbit for communications applications.
The fact that the satellite is anywhere near the moon is a tribute to the persistence of a few Hughes engineers. That's because the bird, originally in the stable of a budding communications constellation operated by AsiaSat, was until recently given up for lost.
A Hughes spokeswoman said AsiaSat launched the communications satellite from Kazakhstan on 25 December, but the launch vehicle, a Proton rocket, failed in its fourth stage. AsiaSat decided to abandon the satellite, leaving it floating as space junk in its useless orbit.
But the idea that a perfectly good spacecraft built for 15 years of service would be discarded didn't sit well with Hughes engineers.
Ordinarily, a satellite falls out of service after it runs out of fuel even though the communications payload may still have some life left in it. In the case of this Hughes satellite, the craft has 15 years of fuel on board that would go unused.
This situation led to the formulation of an experiment of sorts. If engineers could direct the satellite's thrusters to kick the craft close enough to the moon, perhaps lunar gravity could help reposition it and put it into a useful orbit. Ultimately, the project has become a challenge to determine if stranded satellites can be moved. So far, the plan appears to be working.
But the engineers still need to pull off two more controlled bursts of the satellite's small thrusters –- out of the 12 estimated necessary –- to get the satellite around the moon and back again.
Once the communications satellite returns from its lunar mission, Hughes hopes to see the craft –- originally designed for geostationary orbit –- wind up as part of a communications network.
Hughes will hold a press conference today to discuss the mission, which it estimated cost US$1 million to complete.
