"The satellite is still not operating," Richard Dore, a spokesman for Hughes Electronics, said Tuesday. How long efforts to rescue the satellite will continue is a decision that will be left up to Satmex, the Mexican company that operates the spacecraft, he said. Satmex officials said late Tuesday that they had given up efforts to revive the satellite and were shutting it down.
The cause of the problem is still under investigation, but Dore said engineers are looking into the possibility that the problem may be related to the failure of Galaxy 4, another Hughes satellite that failed on orbit in May 1998, disrupting pager service and interrupting broadcast feeds.
Investigators believe that Galaxy 4 failed because of a phenomenon known as "tin whiskers": crystalline filaments that grow on the edges of tin-plated relays within the satellite's electronics. If one of those whiskers touches another part of the system, it can create a short circuit that damages electronic components.
Dore said that while it took several months to determine that the tin whisker phenomenon was the likely cause of the Galaxy 4 failure, it should take far less time to determine whether or not they played a role with Solidaridad 1. "Now that we know what to look for, we should be able to determine it much more quickly," he said.
The tin-whiskers problem was first noticed in the HS 601 series of satellites, which includes both Galaxy 4 and Solidaridad 1, in late 1997. Since then, the tin-plated relays have been replaced with nickel-plated ones, which are immune from the whiskers problem, on newer satellites.
Sunday's failure is not the first for Solidaridad 1. In April 1999 the primary spacecraft control processor failed, but control of the spacecraft was restored with a backup processor, which then failed on Sunday.
Satmex said it was transferring users of Solidaridad 1 to three other satellites operated by Satmex, as well as to other satellite operators.
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