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Russian Official Implies Foul Play In Mars Probe Failure
Back in November, Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt probe on a mission to return a soil sample from Mars' largest moon. Sadly, the probe malfunctioned, and never left orbit. It's due to crash into the Indian Ocean this weekend. An anonymous reader points out some interesting comments from a Russian official, Vladimir Popovkin, who obliquely suggested that interference from other countries was a possible cause of the failure. Quoting:
"Mr. Popovkin’s remarks to the newspaper Izvestia were the first high-level suggestion of nefarious interference. A retired commander of Russia’s missile warning system had speculated in November that strong radar signals from installations in Alaska might have damaged the spacecraft. 'We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now,' Mr. Popovkin said in the interview. 'The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.' ... Mr. Popovkin did not directly implicate the United States in the interview. But he said 'the frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us,' an apparent reference to the Americas."
One of my co-workers is Russian, and he still keeps in touch with friends and family back home. We've been discussing the recent anti-government protests in Moscow, and he says that the government-controlled media (which includes all of TV and radio, and many of the newspapers) has gone into overdrive accusing the U.S. for being behind almost everything that's currently going wrong in Russia. In his words, "Blaming America is all they have left."
Implying that the U.S. is responsible for their spacecraft failure is just part of that game. Russia has been launching spacecraft for decades, and it is silly to think that they didn't learn how to deal with contingencies such as deliberate jamming long ago.
Russian President Medvedev threatened to prosecute those responsible for the space failures. No surprise that the individuals in question are now looking to blame someone else.
point it's solar panels away from the sun?
Well, theoretically, a very strong radar pulse could cause ionization around the star sensors, which would make the spacecraft unable to tell which way was up and which was down. That would screw up the solar cell deployment pretty badly.
That's a crazy scenario, about on par with believing that reptiloids control Switzerland, but like all crazy theories there's a tenuous path of logic behind it.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The problem with your arguments is that you give the US too much credit. Yes, the US secret services have had lots of involvement in orchestrating stuff in the past, but it seems you are taking it to a "no revolution happens without the US behind it". That's very irrational IMHO. I'm from a country in which the US has meddled in the past and pressed for regime changes, sometimes succesfully. But here people make the same mistake. They think that just because the US has tried and succeeded at *some* regime changes, then it has to be behind *every* regime change/revolution. I think its very counterproductive to think like that, as its a way to perpetuate the myth of North American invencibility.