Originally Posted by
Captain-Crunch
Without a sucessful response from the Satellite, it will start over and attempt repeated interigations of the spacecraft, until it gets a response.
If I remember correctly, the aircraft isn't supposed to send anything unless it can sync to transmissions from the satellite at the correct frequency: in fact, I don't think it can since it won't know the correct timebase for the channel.
So I agree: the fact that it was transmitting implies that the aircraft had some kind of location and orientation information (I presume the beam steering unit gets that from the same system the crew would) and wasn't so unstable that the antenna couldn't lock to the satellite within the transmission tolerance.