MOSCOW, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Russia has likely lost a military satellite it shot into space this week.
Russian news agency Interfax quoted an unnamed source from the Russian space industry as saying that the GEO-IK-2 satellite, designed to help the Russian military pinpoint targets on Earth, can't be reached.
"Contact has still not been established with the spacecraft and it will most likely be considered lost," the source told Interfax.
Launched Tuesday from the Pesetsk station in northern Russia via a Rockot carrier rocket, the satellite was designed to create a detailed three-dimensional image of the Earth's surface
A loss of the satellite would be yet another blow for the Russian space industry, just five weeks after Russia lost three Glonass positioning satellites when their Proton-M carrier rocket crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
The incident angered the Kremlin, its main backer Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, who fired two senior space industry officials.
The Glonass satellites, of which Russia has 26 in orbit, are the backbone of the Russian system that's competing with the U.S. Global Positioning System.
The new satellite was intended to circle the globe at an altitude of around 600 miles. Interfax said there were reports that U.S. monitoring services detected the satellite orbiting just 200 miles above Earth.
"The spacecraft will not be able to perform its intended functions at these orbit characteristics," another space official told Interfax.
The Russian Defense Ministry and Russia's space agency Roscosmos have set up a joint task force to locate the satellite and possibly steer it back on course, a difficult, if not impossible task, observers say.
The loss of the Glonass satellites had already been a major blow to Russia's ambitions to restart its once highly advanced space program and become independent on foreign technology.
After a state commission concluded that experts from Energia, the space company that designed the booster attached to the carrier rocket, had miscalculated the booster's fuel needs. Medvedev sacked Energia's chief rocket designer and the deputy head of space agency Roscosmos.
Russia in October said it would put eight Glonass satellites into orbit between 2011 and 2013 to ensure the worldwide operation of its positioning system.
