It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
The only thing that sounds wild in the article is that the manufacturer supposedly didn’t test the antennae’s unfolding mechanism on the ground. Did they think they could just send a technician if something won’t work lmao
Systems like that can easily be difficult or impossible to test on the ground, because they aren’t strong enough to work under gravity. They might need to be in free-fall to survive being deployed
TBF the cost justification of added machinery weight to operate under many conditions is still better than needing to restart completely when it failed.
It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
So it doesn’t sound that bad.
The only thing that sounds wild in the article is that the manufacturer supposedly didn’t test the antennae’s unfolding mechanism on the ground. Did they think they could just send a technician if something won’t work lmao
Systems like that can easily be difficult or impossible to test on the ground, because they aren’t strong enough to work under gravity. They might need to be in free-fall to survive being deployed
TBF the cost justification of added machinery weight to operate under many conditions is still better than needing to restart completely when it failed.