Russian Space Controllers Lose Contact With Mir (UPDATED)

Ben De Luca pointed out that CNN has a headline story about losing contact with the unmanned Mir space station. Hmmmm. So much for a "controlled descent." Update: 12/26 06:37 PM by T : Contact has been regained (thanks, Nennon) -- so, no Skylabs worries, yet.

Comments

Re:What about blowing it up?

[Wyatt Earp]

Against the law.

The American ASAT and the Russian 51T6 Gorgon - which is the ABM system that defend Moscow...while they could hit Mir...it is against International Agreements to do so. That's why the American ASAT, which was launched from an F-15 was abandoned in the late 80s. The Russian ABMs are still operational...I think. But they are nuclear armed.

Weird faces on Mir - Corposarchrophy?

[KlomDark]

On the picture, there are some really out of place images splashed in. Especially the the Baseball Pitcher - Not "this looks like a baseball pitcher" - it looks like a digitally-perfect baseball pitcher walking on the baseball field. Very weird.

There are weird bald heads and Alien embryos. I am not kidding. It's way strange. Check it out at http://ooze.bloomnet.com/scarecrow/faces/

Re:Weird faces on Mir - Corposarchrophy?

[KlomDark]

And Beethoven's head floating ghost-like over the whole thing. Almost scary!

Re:Weird faces on Mir - Corposarchrophy?

[tesserae]

The human eye/brain combination is great at picking up things that look familiar -- especially faces. Even when they're not there... like the Cydonia "face" on Mars.

Problem is, once someone sees something like that, it's almost impossible to convince them it's just an illusion, a coincidence of light and shadow. Check out the pic that Yahoo has up now -- almost nothing from the original "faces" is there. It's just the original angle that did it.

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Re:Fuckin Bizaare!

[KlomDark]

Weird, Yahoonews has changed the image to a different shot, I wonder if they are trying to cover something up? ;)

Space glitches

[Ektanoor]

Well it seems that it is not the first time for this thing to happen. But it seems that this one was the longest. As far as I know such things happen very frequently in Space due to a whole series of events. Not long ago it seems we had a problem on linking to ISS during one of the major events there.

Anyway /. should be careful on stating these "so much for "controlled descent"". First note that Russia has two emergency crews ready for any case. And a ship to jump ASAP to Mir if anything serious happens. Besides Russians had already to deal with a major glitch. Salyut 7 once broke all communications. Cosmonauts met the station spinning in a weird way and with absolutely no power at all. What happened next was enough for a blockbuster. The guys started to spin their own ship to get in. They had to hammer the door as everything was covered with ice (think about kicking something without gravity). And they had to enter the station fully equipped as even air froze inside. They managed to put things back working and the station lived a few monthes more.

So better to hold your breath... If something real wrong happens, you may see something costing 100 Holywood cheap SF films...

Re:Eclipse?

[SEWilco]

6:40 p.m. Moscow time was 10:40 A.M. Eastern time. That's about the same time as the lunar eclipse started. I wonder how long Mir spent in Luna's shadow that day, as that reduced the power from its solar panels.

(As for not noticing the eclipse without looking at it, that's because the effect of this partial eclipse was similar to an ordinary cloudy day -- at about 90% totality you start noticing odd things such as a silvery sheen on the landscape.)

Here's the story elsewhere

[ajs]

I found this on Yahoo! before seeing the CNN reference here.

Interesting that there's no update...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It Seems some parts,could be salvaged

[RocketJeff]

As far as I understand it, NASA refused because they did not want the possibility that anybody might see the ISS as a Russian station with American modules rather than a joint project or maybe the reverse.

Sort of right. Originally the Russians didn't want the stations to be near each other because of communication problems - it takes 2+ hours for them to configure their communications facilities for each station, hence the stations need to be at least that far apart with more being better...

Less then a month before the launch of the first element, 'Russia' asked if it could put it closer to MIR (probably to bring over some modules - it would be cheaper for them and they don't have much money). Of course, the Russians that asked for this were ignoring the communication problem (it hadn't gone away) and weren't from the group who knew what it really took to run both MIR and IIS. The Russian space program is really a whole bunch of minor agencies and commerical entities all trying to get a bigger slice of a shrinking pie.

Safe for a while here

[anticypher]

At least here in the most populated parts of europe, the orbital tracks dont go directly over any major cities until, well, tomorrow. Plenty of time to get drunk enough to forget about this :-)

I don't find this news to be particularly newsworthy, except it is a slow news day. The timing sounds like a ploy to grab a little extra publicity, and possibly gain some more funding to keep the station going for another six months or more. Mir will stay up for at least another couple of years given its current orbital decay. The problem is what happens when the gyros stop. Once the gyros stop, the station will start a slow tumble, which will make it that much harder to predict when and where it might fall.

Fully expect this to become a non-event once they try all the alternative frequencies and command procedures and get some kind of response. Maybe this little incident will spur them onto bringing the station down in February as planned, while they still have some control, and not sell out to greedy television shows and ego-centric millionaires.

the AC

The year Xmas kill Slashdot

[QuantumG]

Oh now that's totally boring. I know it's christmas guys and you're busy drinking nog and watching reruns of It's a Wonderful Life, but just grabbing the headline off CNN and posting it on Slashdot is sad! Surely somewhere there is a fair use right being trampled or maybe you can do a summary of all the evil that corporations have pulled off over the holidays.

Moscow we have a problem.....

[ndfa]

well according to a BBC report it seems that things are not completely horrible. According
to the report the options include waiting for
contact to be made (they say that its not the first time that contact was lost) OR send a shuttle up to bring the space station down in a more controlled manner. One thing that was not mentioned was WHO would be sending up the shuttle ? US or Russia.... well if it is the US i am sure the movie to follow will be pretty damn cool... heck even if russians bring it down well the movie will still be pretty cool (one more chance for Tom Hanks to show us his skill :)

They seem to have regained contact

[lythari]

Or at least that's what they say. Anybody remember the Kursk?

Re:They seem to have regained contact

[gallir]

Yes..., just heard in the radio too.

--ricardo

Too bad.

[Amigori]

Too bad it has to burn up. This would make a great museum piece(s). It symbolizes much of the space programs for the 1990s. No one sent a man to the moon. The US put Hubble into orbit, only to fix/upgrade it 3 times now, to capture some of the most stunning photographs ever. The US had 2 failed missions to Mars. China started its own space program. And the international community has come together to build a new International Space Station. ISS sounds better than Alpha, Enterprise, or whatever else they call it, IMO.

But for many years, Mir has stayed together, stayed serviceable, and provided a wealth of information to the scientific community. US astronauts shaking hands with Russian cosmonauts in a Russian craft 20 years ago would've been unheard of. Its nice to see that people have come together with a common goal and worked together to achieve it. Hopefully this progress will continue into this century. But I could write a long essay about peace and greed, so I'll save that for another day.

Mir, I salute you.

Amigori

------------
Why are politics so corrupt?

Re:Too bad.

[Julius X]

US astronauts shaking hands with Russian cosmonauts in a Russian craft 20 years ago would've been unheard of. Its nice to see that people have come together with a common goal and worked together to achieve it.

Uhm..... Russians and Americans did shake hands in space roughly 25 years ago, long before Mir, on the Apollo-Soyuz mission back in the mid-1970s.

-Julius X

good

[Christ-0-Geek]

It's a good thing they lost control of it. I hope it crashes into someone, just to teach those godless heathens a lesson pertaining to the realms they should be mucking with.

What next, robots that build themselves???


-CoG

"And with HIS stripes we are healed"

controlled descent plans?

[Proud Geek]

I wonder how this will affect the plans for a controlled descent? According to The Age, there are already concerns that large pieces of it could hit Australia.

They say that the largest pieces are expected to weigh more than half a metric tonne. That would hurt!

Wonder if the ham radio digirepeater is still up?

[mwillems]

I think I'll try to contact it with my ham radio equipment - I haven't worked MIR for over a year, but for all I know the packet digipeater might still be up.

If so, you can hear it with a simple Radio Shack scanner: MIR passes overhead just less than once an hour for about a 10 minute period. Tune your radio to 145.985 MHz (FM) and listen for packet radio beeps.

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But they're back in contact now

[hey]

Now the story at CNN says they are back in contact.