ESA boss gives update on stricken Sentinel-1B imaging satellite: All is not lost yet

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher has addressed the issue of the space agency's borked Copernicus Sentinel-1B spacecraft in his first annual press conference. The last useful bit of data from the Earth observation satellite came last year, and as of yesterday attempts to revive the equipment to normal working order have …

[Chris G]

Censorship

Only image data transmission is blocked. That tells me the Sentinel saw something it shouldn't have and that someone/thing is blocking transmission.

[Andy The Hat]

Re: Censorship

Knock out the sensor first - that's what happened to SID on UFO when the alien invasion was planned ... Just look out for women in silver costumes with bright purple hair and green people wandering the streets ...

[stewwy]

Or someone needed a window to do something nefarious

[Anonymous Custard]

Nature is a mother

Aside from wishing the best for 1B and several pints for the boffins trying to wrangle it back to life, those images in the tweet are just astounding for the sheer raw power of nature when it throws up something like that quake and tsunami and how it can completely redraw the whole local environment.

Really got to feel for the Tongans and their plight.

[ThatOne]

Re: Nature is a mother

Indeed, we humans usually think we're the powerful ones, but that's just because nature is mostly very slow: Amazing and huge things happen all the time, but they usually take millions of years so we don't really notice them: Watch huge mountain ranges grow up to the stratosphere and then be eroded beyond recognition, watch continents chase each other around the globe... Our planet isn't really the quiet, static and solid ground we tend to believe it is, that's just our survival bias...