Satellite hit by meteor

A Ukrainian-Russian satellite has stopped working, probably after being hit by a meteor.

The deputy general director of the National Space Agency of Ukraine, Eduard Kuznetsov, named the satellite as Okean-O and gave an impact as the reason for its failure.

According to the Ukrainian news agency Unian, Mr Kuznetsov said that measures were being taken in order to rescue the satellite and he believed that it would continue to work. However, he added that there were some problems with controlling the movement of the satellite.

The remote-sensing satellite was made by the state design bureau and weighs about six tonnes. Mr Kuznetsov said that its collection of information for Russian and Ukrainian scientific programmes had almost been complete before the impact

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_562000/562809.stm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 19, 2000

Answers

good martin. ok, satellite experts.....this sounds like the second potential gyro problem in days. any link you think?

-- tt (cuddluppy@aol.com), January 19, 2000.

GAO has conducted a number of reports on the enormous amount of space junk that, given the larger and larger amounts of satellites up there, is very likely to hit some satellites. Having said that, this would be a perfect cover for y2k problems. However, my pure guess would be that it is not y2k-related. I stated early on (I think 1997) that it was far more likely for there to be ground systems failures than problems with the "birds". As it turns out, given DOD's problems, it appears I was at least partially correct.

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), January 20, 2000.