Russia’s Failed Mars Probe Crashes Into Pacific | Hacker News Reader

Russia’s Failed Mars Probe Crashes Into Pacific

nytimes.com

19 pointsdiwank16 comments

That "powerful radar antenna in Alaska" is the infamous H.A.A.R.P.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haarp

I watched for it but alas I did not see it :-(

I find the allegation of nefarious action in the Western Hemisphere kind of strange. And I find it even more strange that we don't let the Russians build a telemetry station somewhere useful over in the western half of the world. Surely an installation in Cuba could cover most 50 degrees north to 50 degrees south.

Who is this mysterious "we"?

You don't really need all that much permission to build a receiving station in the US. I bet they just don't want to pay for it.

To get data from LEO orbit all you need is a small satellite dish.

Good question, when I wrote that I was thinking "the United States government" which, post Cuban Missile crisis, might seem to be the people who don't necessarily need to approve but must not disapprove of such assets appearing in the western hemisphere. Sort of like the Russians objecting to radar systems in eastern Europe.

Generally when I look at the sort of receiving stations [1] that NASA runs they have a number of large steerable dish antennas, presumably a big data pipe from there to the rest of the NASA network.

Clearly something that is in the 'footprint' of satellites downlinking to the US includes sensitive military satellites, so one might want to mitigate interception of those signals.

So for Phobos-Grunt and others it is more than just 'getting data from LEO' its also being able to "look into" LEO with RADAR perhaps to find out where that dead hunk of metal is that should be sending data, or more likely its pointing its transmitter at an odd angle and you can only get its transmissions when its uncontrolled slow spin points is somewhat 'down'.

[1] http://www.gb.nrao.edu/ovlbi/OVLBI.html

Those huge steerable dishes are for talking to deep space - like the Voyager probes.

For LEO satellites like the one we are talking about you don't need anything like that. Think about the dishes you see for satellite TV - they are tiny. That's all you need - and those talk to GEO, which is much farther.

You don't need radar either - the orbit is well known from when it flies over your main base. Radar doesn't have the ability to detect spin and orientation anyway, for that you use a large optical telescope - which again, you don't need permission to use.

As for the military satellites, those are routinely cataloged and tracked by amateurs (with optical telescopes), the US doesn't do anything to stop them. It wishes it could, but it can't, so doesn't try.

Ok, fair points all, so do you have a theory why the Russian's tolerate a 'radio shadow' when their orbital gear is over the western hemisphere?

Just out of curiosity, as english is not my 1st language: does "Russia’s Failed Mars Probe" sounds a bit weird to anyone else? I mean I think these things are usually worded more neutral - like "Russian Mars probe crashes into Pacific".

"England's failed passenger steamship crashes into Iceberg" would give me the same feeling - schadenfreude ?

It doesn't sound weird to me.

It's saying that the probe was a failure, not the people who built it, so it just doesn't sound that bad. Here, it just means "broken," and you can't really argue that it wasn't broken when it crashed into the ocean instead of going to Mars.

It had already failed when it was still in orbit. The point of failure happened well before it crashed into the ocean.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is part of a headline. In a headline, the goal is to convey as much important information as possible in a very constrained amount of space. Headlines have a different style from normal sentences.

In this case, "failed" is really the history of the probe: well before crashing into the ocean, it had already failed; for a while it had just been slowly spiraling to its death.

Anyone felt $170m for the Russian spacecraft is super inexpensive relative to what NASA spends on theirs?

eg. $850mil for this Mars Exploration Rover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover

$170mil sounds pretty expensive for something that doesn't work. And it was predicted not to work even before it launched, since they didn't spend enough money to build it properly.

One must account for the relative sophistication packed into the Mars Exploration Rover too. Moreover, there cannot be a fair comparison between a probe and a long term rover.

Hundreds of engineers had worked on it. A community's confidence was shattered with this failure. Trying to measure the extent of this failure in terms of money does not do it justice.

Such a failure is a loss to the entire world. Science has no boundaries.

No images of the re-entry in the article :( Anyone seen any article with photography of the event?

Space probes sometimes have tiny nuclear reactors, so that a tiny amount of mass can generate electricity for decades.

Any chance this one did? (Or just some nasty rocket fuel?)

HuffPo says that it does not contain an RTG[1], so I doubt it has any nuclear material on board. RTGs are built with scenarios like this in mind, though.

Concerning the rocket fuel, Wikipedia[2] says that it contains hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, but has a source claiming that it will almost certainly get destroyed during reentry.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/10/phobos-grunt-russia...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt#Risk

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