BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil has asked for help from U.S. space agency NASA to rescue a satellite that lost contact days after being jointly launched with China last week, Brazilian space authorities said on Thursday.
Marcio Barbosa, director of the National Institute of Space Investigations (INPE), told reporters that they had asked NASA to photograph the errant satellite to check its condition and to figure out how to recover it.
Brazilian scientists have been in a state of alert since Sunday, when they
discovered they could not communicate with the Saci-1 satellite at the times it was in orbit over their space stations on earth.
Scientists suspect there could be a problem with the solar panels, which either never opened or opened but are not able to transmit communication signals.
``We aren't giving the satellite up for lost because we know where it is,'' said Luis Meira Filho, president of the Brazilian Space Agency.
The $4.6 million Brazilian-made probe was launched on Oct. 14 from a cosmodrome in China together with another satellite that was built jointly by the two countries.
The CBERS-1 satellite was functioning as planned and has already sent back images of the South American country.
Brazil's space program suffered a major setback two years ago when a rocket with a satellite on board exploded soon after blast-off from the Maranhao launch pad.
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