The EchoStar® XVII satellite with JUPITER High-Throughput Technology, built by Space Systems/Loral, was successfully launched on July 5, 2012 by Arianespace and is now placed in its permanent geosynchronous orbital slot of 107.1° West longitude, setting the stage for the new HughesNet® Gen4 satellite Internet services offering, with dramatically increased performance and capacity.
The Ariane 5 rocket lifted off at 5:36 p.m. eastern time from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 ECA launcher. The rocket left the spacecraft in a geosynchronous transfer orbit at approximately 6:03 p.m. eastern time. Space Systems/Loral’s Mission Control Center in Palo Alto, California reported spacecraft acquisition at 6:20 p.m. eastern time when signals were received at the ground station in Hassan, Karnataka in India.
Employing a multi-spot beam, bent-pipe architecture, this next-generation, Ka-band, high-throughput satellite will provide significant additional capacity—over 100 Gbps—to further fuel the rapidly growing HughesNet® service business in North America. It will build on the success of the award-winning SPACEWAY 3 satellite system, which serves over 500,000 HughesNet consumer and small business subscribers in North America, delivering high-speed satellite Internet offerings in the market, from 1 to 5 Mbps downloads.
The new ECHOSTAR XVII satellite employs an enhanced version of the IPoS/DVB-S2 standard, the world’s leading broadband satellite standard approved by ETSI, TIA, and ITU. Space Systems/Loral was selected to manufacture the satellite based on its SSL 1300 platform, which has the proven flexibility for a broad range of applications and is expected to provide service for 15 years or more.
The unique mix of the world’s first switch-in-the-sky, SPACEWAY 3, which enables single-hop, site-to-site connectivity, and ECHOSTAR XVII’s enormous capacity—100 times that of conventional Ku-band satellites—will ensure continued leadership by Hughes as the world’s #1 provider of satellite broadband services and solutions.