[amsat-bb] Re: ARISSat-1 - Battery Failure

[Anthony Monteiro]

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