Slashdot Mirror
Russia Lost a $45 Million Satellite Because 'They Didn't Get the Coordinates Right' (gizmodo.com)
Last month, Russia lost contact with a 6,062-pound, $45 million satellite. Turns out, that happened because the Meteor-M weather satellite was programmed with the wrong coordinates. Gizmodo reports: On Wednesday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told the Rossiya 24 state TV channel that a human error was responsible for the screw-up, according to Reuters. While the Meteor-M launched last month from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East, it was reportedly programmed with take-off coordinates for the Baikonur cosmodrome, which is located in southern Kazakhstan. "The rocket was really programmed as if it was taking off from Baikonur," Rogozin said. "They didn't get the coordinates right." And the rocket had some precious cargo on board: "18 smaller satellites belonging to scientific, research and commercial companies from Russia, Norway, Sweden, the U.S., Japan, Canada and Germany," Reuters reported.
I'm wondering, if you pay Russia to launch a satellite for you and they fuck it up, do you get a refund? I hope those countries kept their receipts.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Shouldn't you be golfing, Mr. President?
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
From what I can find the GPS system doesn't work nearly as well in space - especially if you're above the GPS orbits. Might be serviceable in low orbit, but why bother with all the potential failure modes when you already know exactly where it starts from. You did double-check that before the launch, right?
Problem one is that the GPS satellites tight-beam their signals at the Earth to avoid wasting energy - picture a cone roughly twice as tall as it is wide, with the Earth's cross-section filling it's base, and a GPS satellite at it's tip. That's the space containing the signal, and there's going to be an awful lot of space between those cones as you gain altitude. Though there is typically a bit of "overshoot" around the edges as well, so things aren't as bad as they might be.
Problem two is that the faster you're moving the harder it is to lock on to the signal - think of how much longer it takes for a recently powered-off GPS device to establish its location while driving down the highway versus when you're parked. And then figure LEO orbital speed is about 17,450mph. No doubt it could still be done - but might be expensive and/or unreliable.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Civilian GPS equipment is actually designed to cut out above a certain velocity and altitude. Generally the velocities and altitudes involved in weapons delivery applications. This is, of course, designed to prevent somebody building an ultra cheap Balistic Missile guided by GPS OR an ultra fast rocket propelled missile guided by GPS. Go too fast OR too high and your guidance goes from accurate to estimate to guesstimate to "ooh, look at the flowers"
These kinds of errors are not just related to Russia.
Mars Climate Orbiter probe lost due to Math error:
English to Metric math conversion error
https://edition.cnn.com/TECH/s...
https://mars.nasa.gov/msp98/ne...
http://articles.latimes.com/19...
ExoMars Schiaparelli lander crashed due to failure to recognize the proper height.
http://spaceflight101.com/exom...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b...
Have a read of the story, that is WRONG AS WRITTEN.
> While the Meteor-M launched last month from the Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East, it was reportedly programmed with take-off coordinates for the Baikonur cosmodrome, which is located in southern Kazakhstan.
No, no, no... NO! The word "it" refers to the Meteor-M satellite. The satellite was NOT programmed incorrectly; it was the launcher that was mis-programmed, as the following sentence clarifies.
> "The rocket was really programmed as if it was taking off from Baikonur," ....
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
US Trident II missiles do all their targeting in coordinates of new groats per old hogshead per mile per fortnight squared. This ensures that only US personnel can program them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In the Soyuz/Fregat launch vehicle, the first three booster stages of the rocket and the Fregat upper stage have their two separate guidance systems controlled by their own gyroscopic platforms. The guidance reference axis used by the gyroscopes on the Soyuz and on the Fregat had a 10-degree difference. The angle of a roll maneuver for rockets lifting off from Baikonur, Plesetsk and Kourou, which was required to guide them into a correct azimuth of ascent, normally laid within a range from positive 140 to negative 140 degrees. To bring the gyroscopic guidance system into a position matching the azimuth of the launch, its main platform has to be rotated into a zero-degree position via a shortest possible route. The ill-fated launch from Vostochny required a roll maneuver of around 174 degrees (which was apparently conducted from the 5th to 22nd second of the flight), and with an additional 10 degrees for the Fregat's reference axis, it meant that its gyro platform had to turn around 184 degrees in order to reach the required "zero" position.
In the Soyuz rocket, the gyro platform normally rotated from 174 degrees back to a zero position, providing the correct guidance. However on the Fregat, the shortest path for its platform to a zero-degree position was to increase its angle from 184 to 360 degrees. Essentially, the platform came to the same position, but this is not how the software in the main flight control computer on the Fregat interpreted the situation. Instead, the computer decided that the spacecraft had been 360 degrees off target and dutifully commanded its thrusters to fire to turn it around to the required zero-degree position. After the nearly 60-degree turn at a rate of around one degree per second, the Fregat began a preprogrammed trajectory correction maneuver with its main engine. Unfortunately, the spacecraft was in a wrong attitude and, as a result, the engine was fired in a wrong direction.
Nothing about the vehicle or the satellite being "programmed with the wrong coordinates", just an edge case for the control system (a little bit like with the Ariane 5 incident).
Ezekiel 23:20
My old tomtom worked fine when I stuck it to a passenger window of a 737 and showed me we were going around 900km/h. It didn't take much longer to find the satelites. (but I had to delete any routes and turn off the speed camera warnings, cause it couldn't keep up with that)
However they launched from a far east site, with 184 reference angle, the software was not programmed to work for that reference angle and so it flipped all the way over. 190,200,210...
Also, it's not "a reference angle", it's the launch azimuth (plus the Fregat correction) and thus it's independent on the longitude (it doesn't matter that it's "far east" because the Earth is round, it's only a function of the orbital plane inclination and the cosine of the latitude), and it's not that it "was not programmed to work for that reference angle ", it simply had a bug. And the bug was not that it continued rotating the platform, that was the correct thing to do. The problem was manifested after the platform was in the correct position and how the flight computer interpreted the angle (apparently differently from the platform's electronics).
Ezekiel 23:20
This is probably the reason the UK is the only export customer for Trident II, despite valiant attempts by Lockheed Martin to find more.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
We don't hate Russia or the Russian People. However Putin's Russian authoritarian government we have problems with. Being that he used his power to spam social media to Polarize Americans, by taking our political differences and putting a wedge between them. Creating protests and counter protests not to push an agenda of the protest, but to push Americans into instability.
If you find yourself hating Liberals, or Hating Conservatives much more today then you did last year, then chances are you were influenced by Putin's Media Blitz.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There's nothing weird about Russia wanting warm water ports , of course, you wrote that. But there's nothing weird about Russia wanting a buffer of client states to blunt land assaults. Ballistic missiles being used would likely mean nuclear war, and that's a losing proposition for all sides. Land assaults can be done today, since they always relied upon political preparation and semi-surprise. So reestablishing the Warsaw Pact 'alliances' is very useful for Russia, and clearly NATO establishing relations and membership with those states moves the political/military line of defense further east, which is not good for Russia.
It makes sense. Russia under Putin is behaving both predictably and rationally. Their limited attempts to influence politics in other nations is also rational, and is unexceptional. Not that it shouldn't be exposed, denounced as diplomats do, and even perhaps countered, but it's predictable. Most nations do this, and a surprising number of nations that would not seem to have a stake in the outcomes of other nations' affairs do so just to establish their cyberwarfare capabilities. Imagine this - if you could, with a minimal investment in armament, such as a crate of AK-47s and a few dozen land mines, develop a military capability that would bring American to its knees, would you? That's the equivalence of cyberwarfare. It take surprisingly little in resources to wage cyberwar at the same level, and with equal results, against any nation, large or small. If for no other reason, some tinpot/crackpot dictators do this just to pump themselves up, distract the opposition foreign and domestic, and extract concessions or aid from other nations. Win-win. All you have to do is know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
Of course Russia messes with us. Duh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.