Satellite may have experienced software glitch: Telesat

The Anik F2 satellite is pictured here prior to its 2004 launch. The satellite stopped operating early Oct. 6, causing a major disruption to communications across Canada’s North. (PHOTO COURTESY OF TELESAT)

The Anik F2 satellite may have gone off line due to a software glitch, says the satellite’s operator, Telesat.

Communities throughout Canada’s North and across North America lost phone, internet, cell phone, banking and cable services early Oct. 6 when the satellite stopped operating.

The glitch would have caused the satellite to go into “safe mode” which pointed it away from the Earth and towards the sun, said Telesat spokesman John Flaherty.

“Then it waits for contact from Telesat, which we achieved,” he said. “[Work to repair the satellite] is now progressing as we hoped it would. The expectation is that service will be restored by midnight [ET].”

To do that, Telesat’s Ottawa-based crew must reload the satellite’s software and redirect it to the Earth.

Flaherty said the cause of the malfunction will be investigated then.

“It’s very rare for satellite anomalies like this to occur,” he said.

The last major repairs Telesat worked on were in the early 1990s, when two of its satellites were affected by solar flares.

But the anomaly experienced by the Anik F2 is unique to that satellite alone, Flaherty said, adding the malfunction is “not systemic across the board.”

The Anik F2 satellite supports a variety of services in Canada and the United States, such as Shaw Direct TV and the Canadian Press news agency, all of whom were affected by the outage.

But the impact of the communication breakdown was felt most across Nunavut, Nunavik and other northern regions, where most communities are only serviced by satellite.

Telesat currently operates 12 satellites, while three more are under construction.

Anik F2 was launched in 2004 and at the time was the largest satellite not operated by the military that was put into orbit.

The Boeing-built platform weighs over six metric tonnes and cost over $400 million to produce and launch.

There have been 15 Anik — an Inuktitut word meaning “older brother” — line satellites put skyward since 1972.

Four of those — including the malfunctioning F2 — are still in use today.

–with files from Postmedia News