La voce di Suitsat, già debole, pare essersi ormai definitivamente spenta.
Ma per uno strano caso, pare che uno dei guanti di questa Orlan sia divenuto a sua volta un… satellite!
Riporto da FPSPACE…
Cosmic Log (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11485023/#060222b)Feb. 22, 2006 | 10 p.m. ET
‘GloveSat’ spotted: More than two weeks after it was pushed into orbit from the international space station, the spacesuit-turned-satellite known as SuitSat appears to have gone silent (http://www.suitsat.org/). Its amateur-radio signal never was all that strong, which came as a disappointment to many listeners around the world - but the drama surrounding SuitSat provided plenty of buzz nonetheless.In an e-mail, NBC News space analyst James Oberg reports that SuitSat itself apparently spawned a curious minisatellite of its own just a few days after its deployment:
"The mystery object was detected on Feb. 11 in the routine tracking data released by NORAD, which assigned a new ‘object number’ to the debris on Feb. 9, showing it to be orbiting very close to the spacesuit. Amateur satellite watchers in North America and Great Britain shared their calculations with me that indicated the object’s orbit had diverged from the spacesuit three days earlier, on Feb. 6 - four days after the spacesuit was jettisoned.
"Space engineers I exchanged e-mail with suggested it might be one of the gloves, or the ‘control box’ mounted on the helmet. Now I’m being told that the ‘working hypothesis’ is that the object is one of those gloves, which may not have been fully ‘engaged’ when the suit was prepared for jettison.
"The glove is even lighter than the suit and will decay even faster. The suit itself is visible to trained observers, both with binoculars and even the naked eye, but the glove would take a computer-steered telescope of some size.
“Suitsat is proving to be even more interesting in its hiccups than it would have been if all had gone as planned. It’s a great experiment.”