SES WORLD SKIES has announced that its SES-1 satellite has entered commercial service at the orbital location of 101 degrees West.

Built by Orbital Sciences, SES-1 was successfully launched onboard an ILS-Proton Breeze M rocket on April 24, 2010. The spacecraft replaces AMC-2 and AMC-4 at the key orbital location of 101 degrees West over North America, and is used to feed TV programming into virtually every cable network in the U.S.

Rob Bednarek, President and CEO of SES WORLD SKIES, stated: "The successful bringing into use of SES-1 is the stepping stone of our fleet renewal programme over North America. The smooth transition of our customers' traffic to the brand-new SES-1 satellite frees up the AMC-2 and AMC-4 spacecraft for new missions at new orbital slots."

SES-1 is a hybrid C- and Ku-band spacecraft that provides coverage of the 50 U.S. states from the orbital location of 101 degrees West. SES-1 is part of an SES contract with Orbital Sciences for the provision of up to five virtually identical satellites in order to replenish SES' North American satellite fleet.

The SES satellites are based on Orbital's enhanced STARTM 2.4 bus, the largest and most powerful communications satellite the company builds.

SES-1 carries 24 active C-band and 24 Ku-band transponders of 36 MHz capacity each. Six of the channels in each band can be cross-strapped to the opposite band, enabling new service capability. The spacecraft generates approximately five kilowatts of payload power and has two 2.3 meter deployable reflectors.