.... I agree with you Tony, much better to read some news about e.g. P3E status or HO-68 .... isn't it ?

73" Frank IW4DVZ

-----Messaggio originale----- Da: amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org [mailto:amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org] Per conto di Anthony Monteiro Inviato: giovedì 14 aprile 2011 21.42 A: AMSAT BB Oggetto: [amsat-bb] Re: ARISSat-1 - Battery Failure

Dear Friends,

There has been a great deal of speculation on the amsat-bb about the Russian battery on ARISSat-1 having failed. Be aware that this is nothing other than idle speculation. There has been no information from RSC-Energia to support this.

I believe the mis-information comes from a report on the ARISSat-1 power system that was written by me and sent to RSC-Energia. One of the sections included a prediction of the battery life in orbit. The 825M3 is a Russian space suit battery and its life was not specified or characterized for operation of a satellite. The most recent AMSAT Journal includes an article that covers this material.

The article in the AMSAT journal predicts that the 825M3 battery should last for about 2 months in orbit. That means that if the satellite was deployed in February as originally planned, it might be too weak to run the satellite reliably by the time the Yuri celebration commenced on April 12th. This fact was stated on the (Russian) Roscosmos web site but is being misinterpreted as the battery "is weak."

For the record, the battery in ARISSat-1 was a brand new 825M3 space suit battery and was charged on the ISS prior to the February test. After charging, the battery can run ARISSat-1 for at least 100 hours so it should have had more than enough remaining charge to operate through the Yuri Gagarin event. It is of course possible that the battery did indeed fail but any information propagated on amsat-bb to that effect at this time is not based on facts. AMSAT is working with RSC-Energia and NASA to identify the actual reason that the satellite was not heard.

73, Tony AA2TX

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