Yuzhnoye Design Bureau: communication with the Sich-2-30 satellite is periodic due to a shortage of energy
The Ukrainian satellite of remote sensing of the Earth "Sich-2-30", launched in January on a Falcon 9 rocket, got in touch, reports TASS the message of the head of the Design Bureau (KB) "Yuzhnoye" Konstantin Belousov. As the head of the country's State Space Agency (SCAU), Vladimir Taftai, stated in October 2021, the spacecraft can be used to track the movements of military equipment in the Donbass and ships on the Black Sea.
"There is a connection, but it is periodic due to a shortage of energy. At the same time, there are no failures of on-board equipment. Under the current conditions, it functions normally," said the chief designer of the Design Bureau.
Yuzhny clarified that the satellite "turned to the Sun so that only the reflection of light from the Earth falls on its working surfaces." "At the same time, direct solar radiation either does not fall at all, or falls at too small an angle, which is why the satellite had to reboot offline," the KB said.
In January, a former freelance adviser to the head of the State Agrarian University of Ukraine, Andriy Kolesnik, admitted that "Sich-2-30", who did not get in touch, was lost.
The 180-kilogram spacecraft "Sich-2-30" is designed to take images of the Earth's surface in the optical and infrared ranges. The satellite should be located in a sun-synchronous orbit (altitude 663-682 kilometers). The developer of the satellite was Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, the manufacturer was Yuzhmash. The active lifetime of the satellite is five years. The cost of launching "Sich-2-30" by the American Falcon 9 rocket is $ 1.9 million. The spacecraft should become the first national satellite of Ukraine.
Previously, the first Ukrainian satellite was considered to be the geostationary telecommunications spacecraft "Libid", produced by the Canadian company MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates under an agreement concluded in 2009. The contract value was $254 million. It was assumed that the satellite would be launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome from the Ground Launch platform, the production of the rocket for which has already been discontinued. Currently, the satellite is located in the city of Zheleznogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the territory of the Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems enterprise. Moscow is waiting for Kiev to pay for its transportation to the Baikonur cosmodrome or to Ukraine and the cost of Russian components in the production of the Zenit-3SLBF carrier, with which it was planned to launch Libid.
