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The Russian Mozhayets-5 satellite – launched on a Kosmos-3M booster rocket from the Plesetsk cosmodrome – has failed to make its correct orbit, due to a problem when attempting to seperate from its booster rocket.
Also launched from a Russian Kosmos-3M Rocket, the SSETI (Student Space Exploration and Technology Initiative) satellite – built by European university students under the supervision of ESA’s Education Department – has stopped communicating after just a day in orbit.
The failure of the Mozhayets-5 comes just a few weeks after the European Space Agency’s (ESA) CryoSat satellite was lost on October 8, due to the failure of a Russian Rokot booster.
The optical military hardware spacecraft was launched with several smaller satellites which did manage to succesfully find their way to Orbit.
The Iranian Sina-1, China’s DMC, Norway’s NCube-2, the European Space Agency’s SSYTI Express, the United Kingdom’s TopSat, Germany’s UWE-1, and Japan’s XI-V satellites are orbiting successfully.
Speaking of the problems with SSETI, Graham Shirville, said on the AMSAT BB: “We have not heard anything from Express on UHF since last night [October 27] when the telemetry seemed to indicate a very negative power budget.
“If it does not recover then it will be a sad end to a wonderful mission.”
Ground controllers were trying to send “blind” signals to the satellite in the hope of restoring communications.