Problems with Russia’s research satellite Kompas-2 are persisting

Friday, May 20, 2022

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Problems with Russia’s research satellite Kompas-2 are persisting. The satellite was launched from the nuclear-powered submarine Yekaterinburg in the night to Saturday. Conflicting information about the condition of the satellite is coming from the space rocket sector. According to some reports, “commands from the earth are not coming” to Kompas-2, and designers are at work adjusting its reception and transmission systems. Other sources said that “telemetry has begun to come from the satellite, but only frames without meaningful information are going”. A specialist in the space rocket sector told ITAR-TASS that the satellite “is rotating, but illumination of solar panels is normal”. In most similar incidents with Russian and foreign satellites, the loss of orientation with misalignment with the sun caused a failure of solar panels that draw energy from it, and as a result onboard storage batteries went dead. The director of Moscow’s Institute of Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation, Vladimir Kuznetsov, said that research equipment could be turned on only after the satellite’s reception and transmission systems were in order. The institute is one of designers of the satellite. Kuznetsov earlier said that Kompas-2 had “problems with orientation and illumination by the sun”, with solar panels failing to normally feed the storage battery. Kompas-2 is intended for experiments examining possibilities for detecting precursors of earthquakes and areas of radioactive contamination in the interest of creating a Vulkan system of monitoring natural and technical disasters. The satellite was launched on a Shtil carrier rocket, a conversion of an RSM-54 missile. The rocket can deliver into orbit payloads weighing up to 350 kilogrammes.

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