MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. An interdepartmental commission at the Plesetsk spaceport has admitted that the Kanopus-ST satellite launched into the orbit on Saturday was lost, a source in the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces told TASS on Monday.

"The Cosmos-class spacecraft was recognized as lost due to impossibility of using it for the intended purpose," the source said.

He noted that specialists tried to establish connection with "satellite - upper stage" to repeat commands on separation, but with no success.

The source said that the reason of the contingency was preliminarily established. One of the four locks holding the satellite malfunctioned, he noted.

On Saturday, December 5, the Soyuz-2.1b rocket was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome. The Russian Defense Ministry’s press service said that both satellites carried by the rocket were successfully put into targeted orbit. TASS reported earlier that among one of them was the Kanopus-ST small Russian remote sensing satellite for ocean and weather research. Kanopus-ST features a microwave radiometer with a swath of 2200 km and a spatial resolution of 12-160 km and a multispectral camera with a swath of 1000 km and a spatial resolution of 30-50 m.