Reports about the quick death of the radio transmitter on the obsolete Russian Orlan spacesuit released by crew members of the International Space Station last Friday, turn out to have been exaggerated.
"It's a whole lot of static, but I could definitely tell something was there," Allen Pitts, media and public relations manager for the American Radio Relay League, told SpaceDaily.com. "It's weak, but it's there."
Pitts said members of his organization, as well as amateur radio operators worldwide, have reported and recorded signals from the spacesuit-turned-satellite.
Called SuitSat, the device was intended to transmit the recorded voices of schoolchildren to ham radio stations worldwide. NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston reported that the transmitter had done so faintly and for a brief period, but then it seemed to cease sending signals. The announcement was quickly superseded, however, when ham stations all over the globe began picking up the suit radio's faint signal.
Suitsat is an unneeded Orlan spacesuit that had reached the end of its operational life for spacewalks in August 2004. ISS crewmembers Bill McArthur and Valery Tokarev outfitted Suitsat with three batteries, internal sensors and the radio transmitter before ejecting it from the orbiting facility during their five-hour, 43-minute spacewalk Friday.
Tokarev pushed the suit away toward the aft end of the station as the complex flew 225 miles above the south central Pacific Ocean. The suit initially drifted away at a rate of less than two feet per second, slowly floating out of view below the Russian Zvezda Service Module and its attached Progress cargo craft. The suit is now separating from the station at a rate of about four miles every 90 minutes.
NASA officials said the suit will enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up within a few weeks.
