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One Last mission For Deep Space 1
Vertigo01 writes: "Looks like NASA has found a fitting end for Deep Space 1, they're going to fly her THROUGH the coma of a comet to try and take some pictures of the comet's core ... the kicker is that they're doing it with barely any fuel left, and a kludged-together science-camera to replace the toasted navigation system ... kind of a fitting end for her IMO."
I wonder how much scientific value will come out of this, compared to the cost of $12 million. I mean, they say they have to almost make a guess on where to point the camera and to set the exposure. They could have used those bucks on other space crafts or missions, perhaps. But then again, $12 million is not a lot in this business.
Will work for bandwidth
Now if they could make the satellite crash on the comet, and somehow get the comet to change trajectory to aim towards distant stars suspected of sustaining life -- what a cool way that would be to contact alien civilizations (provided they have the technology and they're eagerly searching for others in the universe).
This is just the sort of thing we used to expect from the JPL: "We've got fifteen bytes spare and a few milli-amps left in the batteries. We can probably take out the Death Star with that."
What was that old story? With a small amount of memory remaining after all the main programs had been entered, someone at JPL wrote a program to look for and identify previously unknown moons of Jupiter and send pictures back.
dave "wist"
Reminds me of that story about pens in space. NASA found out that pens did not work very well in zero gravity, so they decided to develop a pen that actually did work in zero gravity. After a long time and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they finally presented a pen working in zero gravity. The russians, facing the same problem, used a pencil.
Will work for bandwidth
I mean, you've got to give them credit for refusing to throw in the towel. Ideally, things like Deep 1 wouldn't malfunction in the first place, but at least NASA is trying to make the most of things.
http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/
Check out the monthly reports. They are quite fun to read, because they are written in a "layman" fashion. Especially the parts where they are putting together the "using science camera for navigation"-kludge. And rebooting a system half a solar system away and hoping it comes up again after an OS upgrade.
It's kinda sad that all the public focus is on the Mars missions, when there's stuff like DS1, Galileo, and NEAR that just keep on going..
perhaps it's not a lot "in this business", but face it, it is a helluva sum of money. I fail to grasp how NASA can manage to spend $12 million on a "duck-tape" mission. it's not as if they could have refueled the probe or anything, so all that money has went to radio contact, mission planning and reprogramming. Now, assuming that's the cost of the mission since October 1999, when the main mission ended, it's half a million dollars for every month of the continued existence of the probe. Where has it gone? $1000 floppy disks? 50 person full-time ground crew?
Not that I actually need to care since it wasn't me paying for it.
Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
I'm curious as to how the 12million is arrived at. Seems a lot for just pointing a nearly dead device in another direction. How many ground based resources are involved?
"Deep Space 1 is flying on duct tape and good wishes," he said.
I wonder how they got the duct tape to rendez-vous with the craft, or is this just some colorful american expression?
I didn't know McGyver worked at NASA.
did they manage to spend an extra $12 million? This is on a spacecraft that is already in space, the only changes are in software and in the control equipment (which should still work...).
The software needs to be reprogrammed to redirect the spacecraft and aim the cameras, and of course all the fun trajectory math and so on, but $12 million is over 60 person-years!!
No sig for me - too lazy to fill one in...
It was a good, clean and funny TV show that has made me want to become an engineer.
The space pen's development was funded by a private company.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Bravo in much agreement I was going to write that one down but seems you took it
Nasa forgets one basic concept
KISS
Keep It Simple Stupid
If this is kept all things will go well.
"If you want to get anywhere in the UK, then privatise the railways."
For goodness sake, will people stop posting this trolling story? As has been said before this is misleading.
For the first few missions, the Soviets did use pencils. Then the Soviets went to Fisher (the American company that made the pens) and bought several cases. The reason is that pencils produce a lot of graphite dust. When you are locked in a room the size of a telephone booth for a week, you don't want graphite dust floating around, getting into your lungs, eyes and your equipment.
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Back in about 1986 the ESA sent a probe called Giotto through the coma of Halley's Comet which sent back live video.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Warning, parent comment poster is the Goatsex man in disguise.
I didn't know NASA engineers are allowed to read Slashdot at work these days...
Hi! I've just sent my baby for conformal coating today. It's the flight spare model of the power supply units to power the ccds of two cameras and it took me about 2 years to design completely (as a flight unit). The experiment is called Osiris, also here, the satellite is ESA's Rosetta and its target is some comet named Wirtanen. I'm quite happy to see my first piece of flight hardware already being integrated with the full satellite and hope the Osiris will give us some nice pictures one day.
Cheers,
Alejandro
Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial - INTA
That sounds a lot like another Urban Legend (or is it?) I've heard:
NASA poured millions into an (story slightly souped up here) nuclear fuelled razor with a Facial Hair Emission Rate of below 1 ppm while the Russians simply used a hand razor (you know, with soap and water.)
cheers
pyz
Landing it on earth is much more likely to succeed
Look a monkey!
I was kind of hoping to see the ascii art picture of the guy with the huge member. But that particular troll must be sleeping right now.
(No, I'm not gay -- I'm just in awe!)
One of the important things to remember is that just like Apollo 13, these guys are where they are for coming up with innovative fixes to tough problems. This is just another great rehearsal for a situation that could just as easily come up with human life at stake. This is why these guys are kept on the project long after the system gets put into cruise mode. It's just another case of "I've done so much with so little for so long that now I'm attempting the impossible with nothing." You have to push the boundries to find where they are in practice. Also, real problems are far more challenging than anything they might have considered in simulation.
The costs stated are the continuing costs of tracking the satellite versus turning a deaf ear and ignoring it. Deep Space Net time isn't free, they have to allocate it and maintain the dishes used.
When this is done, continue past the nucleus into the comp and try to get a closeup picture or two of the coma before being blown to smithereens by the particles.
It's the continuing cost of tracking that add up to the $12 million versus just turning it off.
"below 1 ppm"
Is that pages per minute or parts per million? That's either one slow printer or one accurate parts-per-million-machiney-thing.
(Yeah, I know it's a typo. Please don't hurt me.)
Come on, there is no reason for jealousy. If you're not skilled enough to be a hacker working in space projects, it doesn't mean you're an asshole. Just try not to behave as if you was. By the way, our salary says that we do this because we enjoy to do this, ie not for money but for the fun of it (much like most Opensource folks, to give an example). I definitely think that you should know some facts of this kind before posting, right?
I don't really know how much they expect DS1 to retrieve getting in such proximity to the commet. I remember when 4 or so minutes into the start of the mission a single spec of space dust prevented the ion drive from working. Now they expect it to pass through a commets coma which is filled with all kinds of particles? I expect it will be yet another failure to rack up on the DS1 as soon as it gets within range of the commet. I wouldn't hold my breath, after all look at what happened when they tried to get the picture of asteroid Braille (just a bunch of black pics). I would also like to ask why the heck they couldn't have put more than one camera and in addition a light source to enhance the pictures?
For a NASA tech, you're pretty illiterate.
And that is the reason the Russians got a serious case of ALIEN space fungus onboard MIR. The graphite dust in the pencils floated around and got hit by cosmic radiation and mutated into ALIEN fungus. Just watch out if the Russians are bringing down MIR to let it burn up in the atmosphere or else it will spread and wreak havoc on this planet (The ALIEN fungus and not MIR, that is).
Nah, it's just that english is not my mother tongue. Just hope you don't feel offended by that. Note that I said I work designing hardware for space applications. I am not a NASA tech.
The problem NASA had with the Metric vs Imerial calculations was due to rounding errors in the conversion equations (ie: only going out x amount of decimals points; where x wasn't large enough). The error introduced by the lack of precision wasn't due to a single conversion but due to multiple back and forth conversions (probably in the order more than a hundred). It was not a single incident of "oops, I meant five meters, not five feet."
This doesn't justify it, but I don't think a lot of people actually know what the real problem was. It was a precision error, not a Metric vs Imperial error.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Yep, it's about time you guys learned:
High quality software ain't cheap. Sometimes, for some programming jobs, slapping togther a 100 line Perl script ain't good enough.
If you were smart, you'd tell your boss too.
>But an even bigger expense is the mission software. Modifications to the programming of
>the probe need to be codded.
And do you have any idea how much it costs to send that much fish into space? Why, the dill sauce alone runs into the millions.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
This mission is somewhat similar to that of the Giotto probe in 1986. Here is the link to the ESA site with more information about Giotto. But where Giotto was a dedicated mission, designed to take pictures and collect data of a comet core, the DS1 comet mission is "just" a great bonus mission.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
A comet gives off gas which is fairly tenious and gets blown away more or less directly away from the sun. Its the dust and grit that is the risk, and that gets left behind in the vicinity of the orbital path, in the same region of space where DS1 will be. (same stuff also causes meteor showers when earth orbits accross the dirt trail)
The important thing from DS1's point of view is to keep the relative motion between the coment and the probe as small as possible, both to maximise encounter time and to make it easier to 'aim' the probe and its cameras at the comet. (this also saves fuel, which is a heavy, scarce and precious resourse in outer space)
In effect, the two objects are on almost on a parallel path, at slightly different speeds, not a perpendicular intersection as one would think.
Its like two veichicles on a slowly curving highway, one slowly overtaking the other. If the comet is an open dumpster truck in the slow lane, you will be showered with garbage for miles before you eventually pass it out! (even though you are only 'alongside' it for a few seconds)
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
go read the log entries. ( http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/archives.html )The software they wrote seems pretty sophisticated. It attempts to find the comet by analyzing the pictures the camera takes and steering accordingly. Probably not easy to do...
"There's a very real chance that none of this is going to work"
Yeah...there's a chance that something nasa does (think polar lander) isn't gonna work...what is he, some kind of rocket scientist? =)
Juiced? Or Not?
Yes, probably not easy at all to do. It's probably good that they have the help of CASPER.
There's also probably some magic bean counter stuff going on as well. The project likely gets assigned its "share" of a lot of things like the cost of the building, electricity, phones, the coffee machine and the salaries of people who would be doing the same job regardless: janitors, security, support staff, etc.
Weird, but it's a common accounting practice.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
'cause they forgot the bubble gum and baling wire to go along with the duct tape!
"Deep Space 1 is flying on duct tape and good wishes," he [Marc Rayman] said.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Look at it as if it were an intergalatic snowballfight....of course we shooudn't complain if they send a dozend of comets back...we started after all! But it's not "war", it's all fun and games.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This has been one of my favorite recent NASA projects. It tested all of the technologies that I read about in SciFi when I was a kid.
The failures have been highly publicized, but most of them came well after the primary mission was completed. Overall, this little probe has been a great experiment.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
You know, we have a fine collection of very able programmers and the like here, how 'bout a little demonstration, aimed at any and all web sites promoting terrorism in all its forms?
Nothing organized, nothing planned, just give a little back to the society that has nurtured (most of) us.
Geeks of the Internet, Unite!
Woa. For a second there I thought you said ESR.