Shortly after the successful November 14 launch of their sixth Meridian dual use communication satellite, Moscow Mission Control lost contact. With everything. Construction workers had severed a communications cable outside the building, resulting in a Mission Control unable to send commands to any of its satellites or the Russian segment of the International Space Station. State news agency RIA Novosti originally [...]
Post Tagged with: “Meridian”
Defunct Satellite Falls in Pacific Ocean
Defunct Russian communication satellite Molniya-1-98 reentered Earth’s atmosphere and fell into the Pacific Ocean on April 7. The reentry appears to have been uncontrolled but well predicted. “According to preliminary data, fragments of the Molniya satellite that did not burn up in the upper atmosphere reached the earth’s surface on Saturday, April 7 at 3.17 am Moscow time [00:17 GMT] [...]
Soyuz Capsule Adds to Year of Russian Mishaps
With the announcement that problems with a Soyuz-TMA capsule will be delaying a scheduled March 30 launch of 3 crew members to ISS in the same week as a major report identifying programming and componentry errors as at fault in the well publicized failure of the Russian’s Phobos-Grunt Mars probe, Russian space failures are once again front and center. The [...]
