Russia announced the loss of one of the two satellites launched on Dec. 5 that was on board the carrier rocket ‘Soyuz 2.1B’.
According to the Russian Defence Ministry, the Soyuz-2.1B rocket was successfully launched on Dec. 05 through the Plesetsk cosmodrome, located in the northwestern Arkhangelsk region of Russia.
As reported by the news agency TASS, a source in the Forces Aerospace Defense Russia admitted that its satellite Kanopus-ST “was recognized as lost” after it didn’t separated from the rocket due to a technical malfunction of one of the four locks holding the satellite.
The other satellite launched aboard the most modern carrier rocket in Russia (Soyuz 2.1B), was placed in its orbit as expected and is operating in a normal way. The lost satellite is expected to fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, in the next two or three days.
The Russian space sector has presented a series of failures in the last months, as the loss of the cargo ship Progress, which was intended, in late April, to deliver supplies to six-person crew of the International Space Station, but it was stranded in a low orbit, falling into the earth on the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, there is also the failure occurred in May, on the launching of a Mexican communications satellite, which presented a problem in its engine.
Source: TASS