

Russians Desperately Try to Save Mars Moon Probe - sew
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/11/09/world/europe/AP-EU-Russia-Mars-Moon-Mission.html?hp&pagewanted=all

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eps
Gotta love the reporting angle - it's not that Russians launched a Mars moon
lander for crissake, the first major space exploration project for them in
ages, but it's that they screwed up. Yay.

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FrojoS
From the article: _It is arguably the most challenging unmanned interplanetary
mission ever._

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Eurofooty
Risk v Reward

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xentronium
Russian sources [1][2] don't tell us much more besides that the error is
probably in software, the people responsible are preparing for the worst-case
scenario and that the damage to the budget is in ballpark of $160MM (of which
~$40MM are insured).

[1] <http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1812141>

[2]
[http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fo...](http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fobosomgrunt_mogla_proizojti_izza_programmnogo)

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zrgiu_
A few years ago a satellite was falling to earth[1], and although it
supposedly had much less dangerous materials onboard than this thing, every
nation was hurrying to blow it out of the sky. And eventually they did. Why
can't they do that with this one when it falls ?

[1]
[http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_...](http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_1_uss-
lake-erie-spy-satellite-sea-based-missile-defense?_s=PM:TECH)

[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_101211...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_10121179.htm)

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sbierwagen
You have confused "what a national defense agency has said their reason for
doing something is" with "why they are _actually_ doing something".

The _stated_ reason is not terribly compelling. Deorbiting satellites are very
small, the Earth is very large. As the article correct points out, nobody has
_ever_ been injured by space debris, or even killed. Dozens of people are
killed by cars every day, yet each automobile fatality does not make it into
the New York Times.

Note the timeline of the two ASAT tests. China shoots down a satellite in
January. One month later, the United States does the same thing, presumably in
response. Why are the Chinese shooting down satellites?

A critically important piece of context is that China really, really hates
satellite-guided bombs, such as the American JDAM. This is because the Chinese
embassy in Belgrade was hit by five JDAMs during the 1999 NATO operation in
Yugoslavia, killing three people, and injuring twenty others.[1]

The American position is that this was a simple mistake in targeting, as they
were attempting to strike a Yugoslavian arms warehouse 180 metres away. The
Chinese maintain the Bill Clinton personally ordered the attack, possibly
while drinking the blood of Chinese infants, as a part of his mad genocidal
urge to destroy the entire Chinese race. (The reaction of the Chinese media to
the bombing was remarkably hysterical; it's essentially their 9/11, only they
didn't have the option of invading the US)

Various cynical independents have pointed out that, five weeks earlier, the
Yugoslavians had actually managed to shoot down a F-117, the only combat loss
ever sustained by a stealth aircraft, and that the Chinese had been seen
buying recovered debris from locals. You could make an amazing jump in
deduction here, and conclude that they had been storing debris in their
embassy, in the hopes that the Americans wouldn't bomb it in retaliation.

The JDAM depends on GPS satellites, which have to be in a fairly low orbit,
for accuracy, and so that the receivers can use small antennas; where they are
fairly vulnerable to ASAT missiles. (I don't believe any current ground-based
ASAT missiles can hit targets in geosynchronous orbit, which is 15,000
kilometres higher than MEO. This is an educated guess, not a certainty:
governments are chary about giving out details on the performance envelope of
missiles.)

An ASAT weapon isn't something you want to use at the drop of a hat. Blowing
something up in orbit produces a _lot_ of debris, most of which hangs out in
space for years. There's various doomsday scenarios, of varying plausibility,
where blowing up a satellite produces high-velocity shrapnel which destroys
other satellites, which in turn fragment, producing a cascade of destruction,
throwing us back into the stone age.

In conclusion, you _can_ blow it up, but you probably don't _want_ to.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_emb...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade)

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xentronium
I am not sure, what point you are trying to prove, but there is a Chinese
satellite YH-1 [1] onboard of Fobos-Grunt.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinghuo-1>

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king_magic
This is really sad, and I hope that they ultimately regain control of it.

However... in my mind, it raises some serious questions about Russia's ability
to safely ferry US astronauts into space over the next few years.

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burgerbrain
I don't think that it should. This was a completely different stack than what
the Russians use for launching people, the Russian manned mission success rate
is _damned_ impressive, and the US has had a fair number of their own failed
probes.

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rcthompson
It's oddly satisfying to see the word "stack" used so literally on a website
where most news is software-related.

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Natsu
I sure hope it doesn't crash. Hydrazine is not nice stuff.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hydrazine>

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noonespecial
Even if it never heads off to Mars, if they can just get it into a stable
orbit, having all of that fuel up there could come in handy later.

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Udo
Without power to fire the maneuvering thrusters its orbit will probably
degrade fairly rapidly. Also, it's probably more expensive to get the fuel out
during a complicated docking operation than it is to just get up new fuel for
new missions as needed.

This sucks. It would have been a very cool mission.

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adolph
It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's
moon. Thoughts like "I thought its name was Lunkhod or something, not Mars"
filled my head until reading this was a mission to Phobos.

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Natsu
> It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for
> Earth's moon.

What about Luna?

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hugh3
That's just "moon" in another language. If you rename Earth's moon you're just
shifting the problem into the Romance languages.

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Natsu
The only problem is one of ambiguity. So long as each language has their own
convention to resolve that ambiguity, there's no problem.

Not all languages use the same names for stuff, after all. Abroad, the USA may
be called les États-Unis d'Amérique, アメリカ, or a great many other things. And
we use our own names for other countries that they don't use for themselves.

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Encryptor
Why the hell is "falling stuff from the sky" the new "terror"? Can we please
not launch shit into space without knowing where it'll fall? I know it's hard,
but it's not impossibru!

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burgerbrain
To say that calculating the trajectories of decaying orbits around earth is
hard is kind of an understatement. There are too many factors, you have to
remember we're basically talking the air resistance of a possibly tumbling
abstract shape that will soon be tumbling rather chaotically once any
appreciable atmospheric effects take place. And that's just the start.

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Encryptor
Picture this: an 11 ton tank of gas falls into your house and burns it to the
ground, and all you're told is: "There are too many factors, you have to
remember we're basically talking [about] the air resistance of a possibly
tumbling abstract shape that [was] tumbling rather chaotically [when] any
appreciable atmospheric effects [were taking] place. And that's just the
start".

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maaku
I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact. Predicting orbital decay to such
accuracy is simply impossible.

