Hum, strangely, the American Radio Relay League website is reporting that SuitSat-1--the Russian Orlan spacesuit --is likely to fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up in a few weeks.
"The orbit life is dependent on the atmospheric drag that the satellite experiences" - Frank Bauer, ARISS International Chairman , KA3HDO.
An analysis done prior to its deployment predicted a 70 to 120-day orbital life for SuitSat-1. That suggests the end should come by sometime in early June at the latest.
The Radioskaf experimental hardware designed by Russian students and manually launched from the International Space Station (ISS) in early February worked for two weeks before getting silent.
"The satellite worked for 14 days and seven hours and made 3,500 transmissions of greetings from space" - Sergei Samburov, project technical director.
Every 30 seconds the satellite was transmitting congratulations on the 175th anniversary of the Bauman Technical University and the 70th anniversary of the Moscow Aviation Institute and greetings by children in five languages – English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. Besides, the satellite transmitted telemetric information and an ISS picture taken during an ISS crew spacewalk.
The experiment was successful.
"That was the first hardware of the kind, and we did not know what would happen to it in space. Now we know that the satellite can function in the vacuum and amateur radio operators receive the signals despite the hardware’s rotation. The Radioskaf signal was not very strong because we used old storage batteries. Next time we will supply our satellite with solar batteries and install a video camera and some other equipment." - Sergei Samburov.
More than 1,000 earthlings from Alaska to Australia received Radioskaf messages, and approximately half of them made reports to the project administration and would receive special diplomas. The number of applicants for diplomas may still increase as “the storage batteries warm up in dense layers of the atmosphere and the satellite may broadcast messages for another day or two” .
Now that techniques of making satellites of spacesuits have been tested, experts will use Russian Orlan-M spacesuits with the expired service life for similar projects. It is planed to launch Radioskaf 2 and Radioskaf 3 in 2007, when anniversaries of space exploration pioneers Sergei Korolyov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky are celebrated.
Now heading into its third week of operation, SuitSat-1 continues to put out a faint signal on 145.990 MHz. While hearing the spacesuit-satellite's telemetry and voice messages can be difficult even for the best-equipped stations, recent as-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that SuitSat-1's battery voltage is entering its final stage.
Current thinking is SuitSat is transmitting, but far weaker than expected. Several reliable reports of short snatches of the voice and SSTV signals have been reported.
Reports from amateurs around the world indicate that only a few with very powerful antennas were able to detect anything being transmitted from the ill fated satellite. NASA television is reporting the batteries have probably failed or have frozen after just two orbits.