Aust. takes satellite care

Press, 8 January 1983, Page 8

Aust. takes satellite care

NZPA Canberra The Australian Government has begun contingency planning to cope with the possibility of a crippled Soviet nuclear-powered satellite hitting Australia.

The Science and Technology Minister, Mr David Thomson, said yesterday that an information and co-ordi-nation centre had already been set up within the National Disaster Organisation.

There was nothing to suggest yet that the Cosmos 1402 spy satellite would land on Australia, he said. United States Intelligence sources said on Wednesday that the satellite, which is carrying nuclear-powered radar, had been acting erratically and may fall into the Earth's atmosphere late this month.

But Vladimir Kotelnikov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, told a news conference in Moscow yesterday: “There is no danger. We have no alarm about the fate of this satellite."

In Washington the State Department said that there was a 70 per cent chance the satellite would plummet into the ocean, but an American emergency search team was standing by. A spokesman said that the United States was in touch with the Soviet authorities. If the satellite behaved like another Soviet satellite that crashed in northern Canada five years ago. its nuclear fuel would burn up in the upper atmosphere, he said.

In that case, "the only hazard will be from the few radioactive pieces that strike the ground,” he said.

A British astronomer who is one of the country’s leading satellite trackers said yesterday that he was relieved that the Soviet Union had reported that its satellite was not in trouble, “but I don’t necessarily believe it." Geoffrey Perry, head of the physics department at Kettering boys’ school in the Midlands, which has been monitoring Soviet and American space flights for years, said: “All the information I have is that it’s still in trouble.”

Mr Perry said that the Cosmos malfunctioned on December 28 when the nuclear reactor remained in low orbit of 250 km instead of being raised to a “safe" orbit of 950 km.