Feb 4, 2006, 11:46 GMT
Houston - A space suit relased by astronauts on a space walk outside the International Space Station (ISS) failed to function as a mini satellite Friday.
This image provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday 03 November 2005, shows the latest image of ISS taken from Space Shuttle Discovery in July 2005. EPA/ESA / NASA / HANDOUT
The space suit had been expected to transmit radio messages before burning up in the atmosphere, NASA had said earlier, dubbing it one of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age.
The suit did not send any signals, NASA said on NASA-TV, adding that it was likely that the batteries were frozen.
Bill McArthur and Valery Tokarev had released the old Russian space suit, dubbed SuitSat, into the Earth's orbit, where it was expected to continue transmitting radio messages for several weeks.
SuitSat tumbled untethered out of the ISS about 350 kilometres over the South Pacific. A camera on board the ISS showed its black shadow sailing over a bank of white clouds.
The Russian Orlan spacesuit was equipped with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power.
Messages had been recorded by students in Russian, English, Japanese, Spanish, German and French to be broadcast on an FM frequency that could be picked up on Earth.
A radio with a large antenna, a police band scanner or a hand- talkie ham radio could have up the broadcasts.
Unlike a normal spacewalk, with a human inside the suit, SuitSat's temperature controls were turned off to conserve power. The suit was to be exposed to the fierce rays of the sun with no way to regulate its internal temperature.
The suit was worn by US commander Michael Foale, who was commandant of the ISS from October 2003 to April 2004.
McArthur and Tokarev concluded their six-hour space walk early Saturday. They worked on a cable connection, reassembled parts of the ISS's robot arm. They also retrieved an experiment of micro-organisms from space. It was McArthur's fourth space walk and Tokarev's second.
Russian flight control centre in Moscow said they completed all the task that were scheduled for them. On March 30 their replacements on the ISS are scheduled to depart from the Russian space launch centre in Baikonur.
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