NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, believe that a Solar storm on 6 January created enough geomagnetic activity to knock out the AT&T's Telstar 401 communications satellite in geostationary orbit (GEO) on 11 January. The satellite is a total loss (Flight International, 22-28 January).
The Telstar 401 suffered a catastrophic failure during routine station-keeping manoeuvres using the craft's hydrazine arcjet thrusters. The satellite had been in service since 1993 and was scheduled to have remained operative until 2006. The Telstar 402 was lost in 1994 just after separation, when the firing of a pyrovalve to open a propellant line ignited some hydrazine fuel, destroying the satellite.
Another satellite, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES 8 meteorological satellite in GEO, suffered a malfunction on 8 January which affected its attitude-control system and the spacecraft went into automatic shutdown mode. Control of the satellite was restored after 37h.
Malfunctions, mainly to attitude-control systems on several satellites, caused by electrostatic discharges resulting from Solar activity are more common than satellite manufacturers care to admit (Flight International, 2-8 October, 1996).
On 20 January, 1994, three satellites, the Aniks E1 and 2 and the Intelsat K, suffered electrostatic discharges which caused malfunctions in their gyro-guidance systems, seven days after a geomagnetic storm left the Sun.
Source: Flight International
