Electric power doesn't recharge!?

[Diofantos]

I have a satellite in equatorial orbit scanning for kethane.

It has four batteries and four solar panels, but the batteries do not recharge, so I can't activate RCS to change inclination or even the main engine to do a reentry burn.

[The_Rocketeer]

Casting my net wide with suggestions, assuming you have no prior experience. A few thoughts:

Kethane probes have a rather high power draw. I would start be making sure that the probe is turned off, as even if your panels are generating charge it might not be enough to charge the batteries while the scanner is on.

Secondly obviously if the panels aren't facing the sun then they won't generate electricity. Check your orientation.

Third, if you've used deployable arrays then they need to be deployed before the batteries are drained or they won't have power to deploy.

Fourth - are you sure you're not in time warp? That will lock out all controls and could make it seem like you're out of power when you're not.

Edit: Incidentally, equatorial orbit isn't particularly efficient for scanning with probes such as Kethane and ScanSat (although there are sometimes good reasons for doing this anyway). You might want to consider a polar orbit and look at this thread for inclination and altitude guidance.

Edited October 24, 2014 by The_Rocketeer

[michaelhester07]

The kethane scanner is overpowering your satellite's power input and still draws power even if your probe runs out. If you run out of power on the probe you lose control over it.

Best way to prevent control loss is to lock the power resource on your probe core. You'll need to provide another battery to power things on the probe but you'll never lose control of it.

[Diofantos]

Thank you!

It's the solar panels! I'm only using the tiny panels and only 1-2 panels facing the sun.

I'll try a new design with unfoldable panels.