The first satellite for Arianespace's mid-August dual-payload mission with Ariane 5 is now at the Spaceport after landing at Cayenne's Rochambeau International Airport aboard a chartered cargo aircraft. Hughes Network Systems's SPACEWAY 3 satellite was delivered yesterday (July 10) on a Ukrainian-built Antonov An-124 freighter operated by the cargo specialist Volga-Dnepr.
SPACEWAY 3 will be one of the world's first satellites to handle switching and broadband traffic routing on board, enabling single-hop communications between satellite terminals. This eliminates the requirement for traffic to be routed through a central hub Earth station.
Its advanced antenna technology allows the dynamic formation and shaping of spot beams, allowing the flexible management of capacity and delivery of true bandwidth-on-demand services.
Operating in the globally-assigned Ka-band spectrum, SPACEWAY 3 will deliver a wide range of new high-speed communications services for IP data and multimedia applications to North American enterprise, consumer, and government customers. SPACEWAY 3 was built Boeing Satellite Systems, and is based on the company's Boeing 702 spacecraft platform.
For the mid-August launch, SPACEWAY 3 will be orbited along with the BSAT-3a direct-to-home TV satellite for Japan's B-SAT Corporation. This is one of six Ariane 5 missions targeted in 2007 by Arianespace, of which two flights already have been performed.
