Russians Can't Make Contact With Busted Space Probe 117
New submitter benfrog writes "Despite repeated attempts over the past few days, Russia is unable to make contact with Phobos-Grunt, the probe that was supposed to make it to Mars and never left Earth's atmosphere. Estimates now vary widely on the time left to contact the probe, but it is descending toward Earth and will likely turn into scrap before it can be reached."
Official information is still hard to come by, but the Planetary Society Weblog has been keeping up with the story.
In Soviet Russia, probes call you (Score:1, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Russia, probes call you (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Russia, probes call you (Score:5, Funny)
In Rural USA, aliens probe you!
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In Soviet Russia, Mars probes you
In Soviet Russia, Soviet Russian KGB/FSB agents probe you.
Russian Space Pencils? (Score:1)
Is it possible that one of Russia's fame space pencils broke, sending shards of graphite and wood into the instruments?
This seems like another example of the shoddy workmanship that brought down the IIS resupply ship, and turned the Mir space station into a zero gravity death trap.
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It lasted longer than Skylab and Russians did not get bill for littering.
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a zero gravity death trap.
No, you're thinking of the broken toilet on the IIS. Trapped in close quarters with a bunch of other folks, orbiting the Earth in a tin can . . . and the toilet doesn't work.
That, my friends, is a zero gravity fate worse then death. I wonder if they have NASA air freshener spray up there?
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Only if the hanger is on the ceiling of a hangar in Kazakhstan.
Re:"Busted", really? (Score:5, Funny)
Dear pedant,
STFU.
Yours truly,
Everyone Else
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Man. Is it even possible to get a +5 Troll anymore? It's like the holy grail of Slashdot: perpetually just out of reach. Oh well, I'll settle for a +5 Funny.
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The American Heritage Dictionary disagrees. It's a valid, albeit informal, definition.
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Dear AC,
The comma goes inside the quotes.
Sincerely hoping you don't breed,
The Rest of the English-Speaking World
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Apparently it's been "not a real word" since at least 1806 [etymonline.com].
More of the same (Score:5, Interesting)
And Mars continues to give Russia a big, fat middle finger. No Russian/Soviet probe has successfully completed a mission to the Red Planet...
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Maybe better....they should put conditions on it.... we pay you to do it.... after the probe makes it past the moon at least?
Or require some more QA testing and auditing of procedures to make sure things are working properly? I dunno, its hard to say what they need before a full investigation is done (if one is), but, they have a program and are a damned site closer to being able to do it than most others.
I mean, who else could the PS go to?
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I would think the PS would use NASA first if NASA would work with them on the project. There must be some reason they are not working with NASA on this.
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Re:More of the same (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on guys, give the Ruskis a break. At least they're trying. What you have is really a small group of people on a shoe string budget with a truly horrendous administration / supervision problem (hint - the 'old' CCCP still lives in little pockets in Russia, nowhere more so than the space program). If you read some of the newsgroups you can get a feel for the frustration that is rampant.
There are a half dozen separate groups involved in Phobos / Grunt and they don't have the same level of expertise, funding or supervision. There is little (comparatively) money for integration. There are lots of politics. Looking at the problem from afar, it's clear that they have a few systematic issues of late and it's also becoming apparent they haven't fixed them.
And on top of it all, spaceflight is hard. Very hard. Unforgiving and expensive. Let this be a lesson to everyone else. Pay up, work hard or boom.
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Oh, I am with you. I have no problem with the Russians getting the money, as long as the job gets done. Yes its hard, yes shit happens, and thats ok. However, there is a difference between shit happens and, shit happens and we don't do shit about it. As you said, its been clear that there are problems and they haven't been fixed. Thats too bad.
If they can fix them, then, more power to them. I hope they do. However, the Planetary Society does work off donations and seeing all those donations go up in smoke,
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I've dumped quite a bit of money on AMSAT [amsat.org]. Most of it has gone up in smoke (literally) but it's a nice idea. I'd be much more active if I lived anywhere I could actually help build the things, so it's sort of a vicarious ? pleasure kind of thing.
Re:More of the same (Score:5, Informative)
What you have is really a small group of people on a shoe string budget with a truly horrendous administration / supervision problem (hint - the 'old' CCCP still lives in little pockets in Russia, nowhere more so than the space program).
The old USSR, however, could get space shit done, for the most part. Sure, there were problems - like with previous Mars probes - but heck, at least they've got those probes to Mars! This thing failed from the get go - not because of "pockets of USSR", but because there are fewer and fewer things left over from USSR that still work, and things developed in post-Soviet Russia tend to be fail more often than not.
Specifically in case of Phobos-Grunt. One major fail is that there was no constant communication with the satellite once its orbit deviated from what was predicted, so they spend a lot of time just trying to figure out what's going on in the very limited communication windows that were available. Why is that? Well, in USSR they had these [dachavodka.com] kinds of ships, that could be positioned in anticipation of the launch in such a way as to give pretty much complete coverage of the sky regardless of where on orbit the thing goes. After USSR collapsed, all those ships were sold for scrap metal [google.com] - they only have ground stations for tracking now.
As for bureaucracy, it's a problem for sure, it's far worse in Russia today than it ever was in USSR. Going by the simple measure of number of government employees per capita, it's 2.5 as large in Russia today as it was at USSR's heyday. Worse yet, at least in USSR only the connections mattered - now it's connections and money (bribes).
Anyway, this open letter [google.com] was written by a disgruntled employee of the state company that developed the probe, and it was written two months before the failed launch. It explains a lot - my favorite quote there, regarding reliability measurements, purportedly coming from the manager of the person who wrote the letter: "If it's needed, I (personally!) will pay to the director of Reliability Centre [the department that's responsible for measuring], and he'll give us the number that we need to pass".
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Interesting letter. If I get off my butt, I'll look for the original and stare at it awhile to see if it's any different.
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different from the Google translation, that is. Sadly, it's not a whole lot different from tales told in many bureaucracies.
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Being somewhat close to one of the Russian space projects, I can say it's not the funding that is the problem. It's that everyone care only about sucking as much money as possible from different sources and getting away with it. Burying several billion $ project in space is a perfect example of this attitude. You'll see, no one will be held responsible for this, it's just *puff*, and all the money has sadly disappeared with no result because of some unfortunate event.
Whenever you hear about another ambitiou
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The few people I know are always complaining about funding. Of course, that statement and yours aren't necessarily incompatible - it's just that the money isn't going to the right place.
On second thought, I'm shocked, thoroughly shocked, that this could be the case...
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(hint - the 'old' CCCP still lives in little pockets in Russia, nowhere more so than the space program)
It was instructive to hear Boris Yeltsin pronounce it as SSSR
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Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
Nice.
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not just russia, mars seems to be a black hole for a lot of other missions as well.
remember even sending things to another planet in our solar system is not easy..
FLAWLESS VICTORY! (Score:5, Funny)
What are these "fingers" of which you speak, denizen of the Blue World?
Planetary celebrations [slashdot.org] have been extended for a third day in the light of the latest victory of our special forces team.
K'breel, speaker for the Council, declared:
When a junior blogger for the Red Planetary Society suggested that the only ichor present on the stranded invader consisted of biological samples from the Blue World itself (as part of an experiment in xenobiology), K'Breel had the blogger's gelsacs sealed up in tiny canisters and fired into orbit for three days, and incinerated upon re-entry.
Further rumors that despite the successful defense of Z'treem, the Blue World was prepared to launch a second invader - more mobile, powered by Pew-238, and armed with a glarbin' photonic ampradstim unit on its head, and that the Blue World was prepared to launch this invader within fifteen days - were not raised, and therefore did not need to be addressed by the Council at this time.
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I see what you did there
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You'd have a point if the probe failed on Mars or en route, as older Soviet orbiters and landers did. But it failed on Earth orbit. Sending probes to Earth orbit is not all that hard, we've been regularly doing that for decades.
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...and they're bringing down the score. We were tied [anl.gov], but it looks like this puts Mars up by one.
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The first stage only took it to a low Earth parking orbit, where it is now.
The next stage was supposed to lift it to a higher Earth orbit, and the third stage would send it on its way to Mars.
The problem happened after the first stage burnout and prior to the second stage ignition.
Everything in low Earth orbit (like the ISS) encounters the uppermost parts of our atmosphere which induces drag and degrades the orbit.
We get around that on the ISS by having resupply ships give it a periodic boost up to a higher
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Or did it actually get out of our atmosphere
It depends on how you define "out of our atmosphere". The atmosphere doesn't really have a hard edge.
There is a range of altitudes where the atmosphere is thin enough to make orbiting possible but thick enough that those orbits have a relatively short lifetime unless reboosted periodically. As the altitude increases the required reboost frequency decreases.
It seems debugging spacecraft is too hard... (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of good spacecraft suffer software malfunctions and fail as a result, and most failures end up with the craft not returning any data about what went wrong. Future crafts end up sent with exactly the same problems because we never find out about them.
There already exist plans for tiny satellites which can transmit a radio signal back to earth - eg. the Kicksat :http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/251588730/kicksat-your-personal-spacecraft-in-space
Why not glue lots of these Kicksats, self powered, to the outside of any spacecraft - maybe connect a few to internal data systems to collect more data. Now if the spacecraft blows up, if even a few survive the explosion, their radio signals can be tracked precisely by a reverse-gps scheme (where you triangulate exact position from many ground stations) allowing a realtime 3D model of the parts of the spacecraft which have kicksats on to be produced. Since some have connections to the internal monitoring systems, if only a few survive they can transmit data back to the ground very slowly over the next few days (very slowly since they have very limited transmission power)
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Just what we want - more space junk. You'd do better by having a small 'flight data recorder' store bus signals, compress it, and dump it out to some other satellite or ground station.
One of the big issues we're seeing (other than the actual failure, of course) is that Russia has limited ability to track the satellite from the ground. It's in a low orbit so each earth station has a very limited time to aquire the radio signals. I think the article quotes times on the order of 5 minutes. You don't know e
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If you read the story or even the summery, it's not "space junk" its coming down very quickly.
"Varying reports in the Russian media suggest the probe could fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere in the next few days – reports vary between 26 November and 3 December."
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Because it's an expensive, heavy, and complex way to impose a huge performance penalty on the spacecraft with very low odds of actually gaining any useful data.
Tough Break (Score:1)
This mission was supposed to launch during the previous Earth-Mars window, 26 months ago, and they missed it due to technical issues. So they even had an extra 2 years to make sure this would work and they still couldn't pull it off. Gotta be a lot of Vodka being consumed in Baikonur right now...
BTW - when I read the headline, I thought someone had arrested the craft....
CmdrTaco - we still need you!!!
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His career as a Tea Party commentator seems well under way.
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Obama: "Vlad, man, what the fuck is up wit' yo' spaceship, man?"
Ah, because Obama is black he speaks like ghetto trash, I see. Very witty. An incisive commentary on his Harvard education. It must have taken you quite a long time to come up with it.
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You know who else had a Harvard education and caught tons of flak for they way they spoke?
Our last President.
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That's because we misunderestimated him.
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Really it's because he didn't liberate Auschwitz or drop The Bomb on Pearl Harbor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxXh6ZWfbDg [youtube.com]
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In SOVIET Russia (Score:1)
Space probe bust YOU!
Mars isn't a given no matter the technology (Score:1)
The U.S. had to work hard to manage that feat. I figured at
one time maybe there is life on Mars and it didn't want
us there.
"One explorer wanted a mm we gave it an inch, another just
kept right on going spewing Hydrazine as it passed, others
never left the launch pad.
A better source than I:
"The exploration of Mars has come at a considerable financial
cost with roughly two-thirds of all spacecraft destined for Mars
failing before completing their missions, with some failing before
they even begin." http://en.wikip [wikipedia.org]
good post (Score:2)
That is also why we need to get away from 100% newly developed systems esp. for things like pushing there.
A space tug that provides motion, electricity, even communication, would be a useful item to sell.
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Well there's the problem (Score:1)
The thing was probably built by Russian nerds. Everybody knows that nerds can't make contact with anything "busted". They should have built one with no bust, or a really fat one. Maybe then they might have had a chance.
Phobos-Grunt? (Score:5, Funny)
Someone in the Russian space program is a big Doom fan it seems.
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Anonymous (Score:5, Funny)
Ok Anonymous lets see what you script kiddies really have, take control and fire the cruise stage.
Busted?? (Score:3)
I guess the editors really have dropped all pretense and have given up on the English language.
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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/busted [thefreedictionary.com]
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I mean, you use the wore "keybinding" in your sig to refer to "computer key macros", so I would think that you have come to terms with the idea that language is in a constant state of flux. Stop being such a snooty prick and try making an argument that has actual import. Thanks.
Wait till it crashes... (Score:3)
That sucker is larger than UARS and fully fueled... Some say the fuel will freeze during re-entry, but I'm hoping Roland Emmerich will be on hand to film it.
I hope they're able to save the mission... a huge blow to Russian space exploration.
Bummer (Score:1)
Maybe they should have outsourced their space program to China
target toronto (Score:1)
Re:target toronto (Score:4, Funny)
If it lands on Toronto it'll get rid of half the worlds communists.
If it lands on Washington we can give it the Nobel peace prize.
Sad, but also an opportunity (Score:3)
SpaceX has perhaps one of the more interesting set-up. They have R&D, engineering, manufacturing lines, etc. With their varied engines, they could come up with multiple tugs that could hook to cargos. What is lacking is NOT fuel depots, but an automated docking system that will lock in 2 units securely and allow them to operate as one.
Re:Sad, but also an opportunity (Score:4)
It won't be America that steps forward - it'll be Private Sector. State-funded manned space exploration, as far as the United States is concerned, is a nonevent. With the end of the Shuttle Program, there is no further incentive for putting astronauts up there, even to the ISS. We're going to start seeing sponsor badges on spacesuits before long if the US is to have any further serious involvement in the ISS or any other manned space project, not to mention a return to the Moon.
Wikipedia!! (Score:2)
The problem (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere on the probe, there is a cursor blinking on an small LCD screen ( or CRT, FFS), next to the letters:
STAGE 1 COMPLETE. HIT RETURN TO CONTINUE _
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Keyboard Failure
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility
Turn the number over to a scumbag debt collector (Score:2)
They'll get through in no time.
Keep your fingers crossed... (Score:4, Interesting)
... our turn is next with the very expensive (most expensive since Viking?) extremely ambitious (nuclear powered, "sky crane" lowered) giant (size of a mini-cooper) rover with no-backup! (no second rover)? Complete with rock vaporizing laser and 3D stereo cams!
Seriously, there's gonna be a lot of fingernail biting about 6 months after the (hopefully successful) liftoff on Nov. 25. If you want to see how how crazy the whole landing scheme is try googling the video for "Curiosity". Not being an engineer I'm not qualified to comment on how good an approach this is but it sure looks scary. Forget airbags or soft landers, instead think maybe Tarzan or special forces insertion (a la killing Osama Bin Laden).
Anyway, if you're in Southern California then, call in sick and head over to Pasadena. They usually have a live feed at the convention center for things like this.
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Interesting. First I've heard of this, it's called the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover). Here's the official site [nasa.gov] and a nice animation [youtube.com].
I agree, the landing sequence looks complex, but maybe the thin atmosphere of Mars makes rockets more reliable than parachutes. Also, it carries a radioisotope power source, so hopefully the dust problem will be avoided this time.
Not Again (Score:1)
Actually the few words the probe did transmit were (Score:2)
SCNR ;-)
Next episode: "Knee-deep in the dead"
The Planetery Society gets burned again (Score:1)