MOSCOW - RUSSIA'S top military and space official launched a search on Tuesday for a missing military satellite that apparently was put into the wrong orbit shortly after its launch.
The Russian defence ministry confirmed that it had lost sight of the craft - a dual-use vessel that can draw a three-dimensional map of the Earth and locate the precise positions of various targets.
The incident came just a month after President Dmitry Medvedev sacked two top space officials for a similar setback and delivered another humiliating blow to Russia's much-maligned space industry.
News reports said that the satellite had been put in an an elliptical orbit whose lowest point brought it to within 330km of Earth. 'We have still not been able to establish contact with the craft, and it looks like most likely, it will be declared lost,' a Russian space source told the Interfax-AVN news service.
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