The Sentinel-1B radar satellite, data from which has ceased to arrive since the end of 2021, has been officially declared inoperable. According to a statement released by the European Space Agency (ESA), there will be no more attempts to return this spacecraft to work.
The cause of the Sentinel-1B problems is the failure of the equipment responsible for regulating the voltage supplied to the satellite platform. In turn, this was due to a capacitor current leak detected during pre-commissioning. ESA admits that a part that was improperly soldered during repair could lead to a leak.
Nevertheless, the satellite platform itself, the payload of which does not work, will be under the control of ESA until the Sentinel-1C spacecraft of the Copernicus program is launched, which, in particular, is used to monitor the territory of Russia. After that, Sentinel-1B is planned to be taken out of orbit.
In March, the publication SpaceNews confirmed that the radar satellite Sentinel-1B of the Copernicus system has not yet been restored. Data from Sentinel-1B has not been received on Earth since December 23, 2021.
In July 2021, Defense Blog wrote that Russian radars located in the Rostov region near the border with Ukraine "distorted" the images taken by the European Sentinel-1 satellite.
In November 2020, the Covert Shores blog published "distorted" Sentinel-1 images of Russian warships in the Barents Sea, noting that publicly available Sentinel-1 images can be used to determine the location of ground or surface radars.
