12-08-2012, 08:25 PM
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BARCLONE Rocketry
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Mobile, Alabama
Posts: 5,357
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Another Embarrasking Moment For the Russians...
From SFN:
Quote:
The Russian space industry suffered another malfunction Saturday when the upper stage of the heavy-lift Proton rocket failed to perform the full duration of its final boost-burn, leaving a domestic telecommunications satellite in a lower-than-planned orbit at the end of a 9-hour flight from the Baikonur Cosmodrome...
The lower three stages that comprised the Proton core vehicle sequentially fired through the initial 10 minutes of flight, leaving the Breeze M upper stage to step through four burns over the next several hours to achieve a preliminary parking orbit before heading into intermediate orbits to hit the geosynchronous transfer orbit...
The rocket would then coast away from Earth for nearly five hours until the Breeze M would re-start its engine for a fourth and final burn of the day, raising the orbit's low point from 317 miles to 4,642 miles and bringing the inclination down from 48 degrees to 9 degrees relative to the equator where it ultimately would be stationed...
But instead of delivering nearly 9 minutes of propulsion as planned, the burn lasted several minutes short of that, leaving the satellite in the "off-nominal" orbit, according to a statement released by Proton rocket-builder Khrunichev...
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