Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Russia Loses Control of Only Space Telescope

posted by chromas on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-are-you-looking-at? dept.
Science

martyb writes:

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?

Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Russia Loses Control of Only Space Telescope | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 8 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:49AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:49AM (#786804)

    Really?

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:04AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:04AM (#786811) Journal

      Yes, really.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:22AM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:22AM (#786815) Journal

      It's an accurate descriptor. They have been restructured repeatedly, some of their recent science missions have failed (Fobos-Grunt), they have lost launch business to SpaceX, India, etc., and they will lose more money once NASA switches to SpaceX and Boeing for manned launches to the ISS. Then you have the recent incident with a hole being drilled into a Soyuz. They face a future of competing with the likes of SpaceX's BFR/Starship while not having anywhere near the budget they need to do anything. NASA has its own problems with its manned spaceflight program, but Russia will have to spend some serious money if they want to realize ambitions at the Moon, Mars, or even in orbit following a 2028 ISS disengagement.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos [wikipedia.org]

      As a result of a series of reliability problems, and proximate to the failure of a July 2013 Proton M launch, a major reorganization of the Russian space industry was undertaken. The United Rocket and Space Corporation was formed as a joint-stock corporation by the government in August 2013 to consolidate the Russian space sector. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said "the failure-prone space sector is so troubled that it needs state supervision to overcome its problems." Three days following the Proton M launch failure, the Russian government had announced that "extremely harsh measures" would be taken "and spell the end of the [Russian] space industry as we know it." Information indicated then that the government intended to reorganize in such a way as to "preserve and enhance the Roscosmos space agency."

      More detailed plans released in October 2013 called for a re-nationalization of the "troubled space industry," with sweeping reforms including a new "unified command structure and reducing redundant capabilities, acts that could lead to tens of thousands of layoffs." According to Rogozin, the Russian space sector employs about 250,000 people, while the United States needs only 70,000 to achieve similar results. He said: "Russian space productivity is eight times lower than America’s, with companies duplicating one another's work and operating at about 40 percent efficiency."

      Under the 2013 plan, Roscosmos was to "act as a federal executive body and contracting authority for programs to be implemented by the industry."

      In 2016, the state agency was dissolved and the Roscosmos brand moved to the state corporation, which had been created in 2013 as the United Rocket and Space Corporation, with the specific mission to renationalize the Russian space sector.

      In 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin said "it 'is necessary to drastically improve the quality and reliability of space and launch vehicles' ... to preserve Russia’s increasingly threatened leadership in space." In November 2018 Alexei Kudrin, head of Russian financial audit agency, named Roscosmos as the public enterprise with "the highest losses" due to "irrational spending" and outright theft and corruption.

      The U.S. may be a lot less willing to prop up Russia's space program as they have done since the end of the Cold War. I expect Russia to turn towards China instead.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:52AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:52AM (#786806)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:54AM (#786808)

      The orbit of this telescope passes through radiation belts.

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:23AM (#786816)
        Entirely unrelated. It was launched into this orbit by request of astronomers, to have a large baseline.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:28AM

          by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:28AM (#786847)

          Not necessarily unrelated. A lot of orbiting spacecraft use the Earth's magnetic field to offload torque from their attitude control system.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:43PM (#786932)

    i thought they only point that thing at people they don't like?

(1)