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Russia Loses Control of Only Space Telescope:
Russia has lost control of its only space radio telescope but officials are working to re-establish communication, the country's beleaguered space agency said Monday.
The incident is the latest setback for Russia's debt-laden space industry, which in recent years has suffered the loss of spacecraft, satellites, and a failed manned launch.
Roscosmos said a US observatory detected signals from Russia's gigantic Spektr-R, or RadioAstron, telescope, which stopped responding to commands from Earth last Thursday.
Roscosmos said that meant the onboard systems were working independently.
The Spektr-R telescope was launched into orbit in 2011 to study black holes, neutron stars and Earth's magnetic field, among other subjects.
Complete with ground-based observatories and a 10-metre-long antenna, RadioAstron is one of the largest telescopes ever made.
A new failed attempt to regain control of the telescope ended at 2130 Moscow time (1830 GMT) on Monday, Russian news agencies quoted a Roscosmos official as saying.
Wikipedia's entry on Spektr-R notes:
Spektr-R[6] (or RadioAstron) is a Russian scientific satellite with a 10 m (33 ft) radio telescope on board. It was launched on 18 July 2011,[7] by Zenit-3F launcher, from Baikonur Cosmodrome to perform research on the structure and dynamics of radio sources within and beyond our galaxy. Together with some of the largest ground-based radio telescopes, this telescope forms interferometric baselines extending up to 350,000 km (220,000 mi).
[...] The main scientific goal of the mission is the study of astronomical objects with an angular resolution up to a few millionths of an arcsecond. This is accomplished by using the satellite in conjunction with ground-based observatories and interferometry techniques.
How large of an item on the Moon is required to subtend one millionth of an arc second as viewed from Earth?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:52AM (3 children)
The orbit of this telescope passes through radiation belts. As electronic devices don't last long there, the telescope had three sets of transceivers. This time the last one is dead or dying.
The replacement telescope is still on Earth, undergoing testing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:54AM (2 children)
Is this malfunction related to the South Atlantic Anomaly? https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/01/14/1747214 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:23AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:28AM
Not necessarily unrelated. A lot of orbiting spacecraft use the Earth's magnetic field to offload torque from their attitude control system.