“Maybe they can fix the problem with the orbits ..”
If they are way off, they probably don’t have enough fuel to do it, or, it would take longer than the satellites would even function.
In what must be felt as a bitter irony in Europe, it was the U.S. Defense Department’s Space Surveillance Network — which publishes initial orbital parameters, known as two-line elements, of recently launched satellites – that first disclosed the problem Aug. 22.
Among the first to pick up the U.S. military data was Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to announced the badly off-target injection data.
The Soyuz-Fregat was supposed to deliver the two satellites into a circular orbit 23,222 kilometers in altitude, inclined 56 degrees to the equator. As McDowell noted, the rough two-line elements produced by the U.S. surveillance network showed the satellites in an elliptical, not circular, orbit with an apogee of 25,922 kilometers and a perigee of 13,700 kilometers.
The worse news: The inclination was 47 degrees instead of 56.
Climbing into correct position from a too-low perigee requires the use of fuel that would otherwise be used over the satellite’s life for regular maneuvers, but does not by itself signal the loss of the mission.
The inclination error, however, appears too serious to allow much, if any, use of the satellites, according to officials. Correcting the error likely would require more propellant than the satellites carry and, if they did arrive in correct position, would leave them with propellant levels so low that the effort would be deemed useless.
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