Now Russians can't even contact their busted Mars probe Attempts to contact the lost Russian spaceship Phobos-Grunt have so far been unsuccessful, a source in the space industry said. The unmanned craft has been lost in space since it managed to get into orbit around Earth on 9 November, but then failed to produce the two engine bursts that would have sent it on its mission to Mars …
..that they can't communicate because they reckon the antennas are facing the wrong way. ISS as as a repeater, or moonbounce comms. to turn it around?
IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist) but...I reckon they're smart enough to figure it out before the pack of aaa batteries run out.
Pedant score: 0.25
I suppose if you say "altitude" you could assume an implication of "from Earth" which, in turn, implies speed is in relation to the Earth as well; so you could say the sentence is wrong.
On the other hand, the sentence is explicitly talking about an object's orbit at which point it seems fair to assume that both are from the perspective of the object. In which case, as it loses speed, the Earth moves closer to it. The sentence is correct.
Two words Christoph:
Orbital Decay.
It's clearly not in a stable orbit (it was never intended to be in earth orbit for very long, why would it be?), it's being slowed by atmospheric drag which causes it to slow down and lose altitude. Just like those other two large objects which fell from orbit in recent months.
The battery life of a few days might have been extended to a couple of weeks if the solar panels have been deployed.
The difficulty in contacting the spacecraft is increased by the fact that the transponder is only turned on at certain intervals, presumably to conserve power. Also, in a relatively low orbit, passes are of short duration and tracking antennae must be fast enough to track it.
In 50 years of trying, the Russians have NEVER had a successful Mars mission. Several never left Earth orbit, other lost communication in transit, several crashed, three or four actually landed, and 1 even sent signals for 20 seconds before going kerchunk.
At some point, you gotta stop and stick with what you know you can do.
Mars has been a difficult mission for both Russians and Americans.
The fist to land on Mars was Russian, though, but that was in the days of unlimited resources.
To day both Americans and Russians have limited resources. Also the political value is not as before.
So China is to day the country with more unlimited resources and especially that political interest.
But your sentence "you gotta stop and stick with what you know" is funny. If that was true then we would have stopped thousand of years ago.
You can INSURE something that you send to Mars and will never come back? Insure against what?
If I was the insurance company, I would be crying foul on this one. "Oh, sorry, all the expensive insured equipment on the probe is going to burn in the atmosphere now. Why yes, of course it was really in the probe. No, sorry, you can't go there and check."
The thing about a launch loop is how do you go about building it?
You can't power it up until the whole thing is built, and it can't hold together until it's powered.
The space fountain and space elevator are the ones that seem to have methods of construction that are plausible - although neither appear to be currently feasible.
That said, I'm not a civil engineer or materials scientist, and neither do I play one on TV.
Don't forget -- the environment is quite hostile to modern IC's -- what with much smaller paths. A stray electron here or there may not have done for your 486, but modern CPU's are much more sensitive, take a *LOT* more shielding, and that weight is not a good tradeoff.
They should have had something better than a system with a few days of battery power, and a backup way of communicating consisting of 2x a day, unworkable if it is pointed the wrong way.
I call it a matter of letting it pass out of control FAR too soon. Possibly having/using satellites already deployed to communicate while still in orbit would have saved this one, or a better antenna. They forgot one key rule in sending up expensive stuff. Murphyski was an optomist.
Мерфи был оптимистом.
Still, they deserve kudos for doing it -- us yanks have nothing realistic that could do the equivalent -- to our everlasting shame.
I'm not convinced that satellites need modern CPU technology to do their job. After all, a 486 is still quite capable of receiving and sending radio messages, no need for a quad-core 3Ghz monster.
And, in space more than anywhere else, the need for proven technology is paramount. They don't need to run Crysis, so if a 486 is good enough, slap it in, shield it and sent it up.
"Every time the craft completes an orbit, it loses both altitude and speed"
As the craft orbits the earth, friction from the upper atmosphere reduces the speed of the satellite. As the speed decreases, the centripetal force acting upwards on the craft decreases, so gravity takes over and pulls the craft downwards, reducing its altitude....
The Martian Defence System, that is.
Nice to see that the recent upgrades, following several notable failures, have not only improved the accuracy, but have also resulted in unprecedented range.
In time we look forward to being able to deploy the MDS directly against the hostile blue planetarians, rather than simply stopping their invasion craft.
Sincerely
Flurztgrab 23rd, Technology Development Sub-Emperor (inner systems).
There's probably a cracking Dr.Who story about why single probes sent to Mars have a nasty habit of vanishing, blowing up, failing to get there, being programmed incorrectly...
I thought we had learned this already - you have to send TWO probes to Mars for success, never ONE.
Hmmm, I really think the IS a good Dr.Who plot lurking in here.
Sad, because of the effort that went into it.
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