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SpatialNews Press Release
Russia Loses Contact With Satellite
The AP has reported that Russian ground controllers lost contact with an American commercial satellite on Tuesday.
The Russian Kosmos-3 rocket carrying the satellite blasted off at 2 a.m. Moscow time from the Plesetsk
cosmodrome in the Arctic
The QuickBird 1 satellite belonged to the Longmont, Colo. company Earth Watch, and was the first of
two satellites Earth Watch planned to launch with Russian rockets.
The half-ton satellite was made by another Colorado company, Ball Aerospace. It was designed to take
high-resolution pictures of the Earth's surface for commercial purposes, such as land management, mapping and
environmental studies.
About Quickbird 1
QuickBird 1, manufactured by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., is equipped with two Motorola Viceroy(TM) spaceborne Global Positioning System (GPS)
user receivers designed and developed by Motorola's Integrated Information Systems Group (IISG) in Scottsdale.
The advanced radio frequency equipment will aid in the collection of one-meter panchromatic (black and white) and four-meter multispectral (color) images of Earth.
Designed for the unique requirements of the space environment, the Viceroy GPS receivers detect, decode, and process the GPS satellite signals to provide position,
time, and velocity information to the spacecraft. The relative position information will improve the accuracy of the spacecraft navigation and image processing.
Additionally, the ground contact time can be precisely predicted using the GPS position and time. The time information will be used to synchronize the
instrumentation on the QuickBird 1 spacecraft to a universal GPS time.
"QuickBird 1 has very demanding positioning requirements for image processing. In order to get better than one-meter spacecraft positioning precision and
accuracy, QuickBird 1 needs ground information to augment the information received in space," said Ken Crawford, a business unit manager in Motorola's Space
Systems and Services Division.
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