The European Space Agency is ending efforts to restore operations of the Sentinel-1B radar imaging satellite that malfunctioned more than half a year ago and will instead move up the launch of a replacement.
ESA said that the agency and the European Commission, partners on the Copernicus series of Earth observation satellites, had given up trying to restore the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload on Sentinel-1B and was ending the spacecraft’s mission more than six years after its launch.
That payload malfunctioned in December 2021 and ESA has been working since then to try to recover it.
A summary of the investigation into the SAR payload failure concluded that two 28-volt power regulators for the SAR payload malfunctioned. One is needed to operate the payload.
Efforts to restore them failed other than one case in April when the main regulator turned on for 4.4 seconds before turning off again.
That provided “valuable observations to identify possible failure modes,” the summary stated.
The report concluded the most likely reason the power regulators failed was “a potential leakage of a ceramic capacitor” found in both regulators that had to be replaced during manufacturing and testing of the payload.
The replacement was soldered in a way that may have damaged it.
