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: 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.