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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."
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..
I didn't know McGyver worked at NASA.
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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In order to communicate the probe you need to rent time on the Deep Space Network. This network is currently running at capacity, so getting time on it is rather expensive.
But an even bigger expense is the mission software. Modifications to the programming of the probe need to be codded. Then the code has to be proved to be mathematically perfect. You cannot afford to compile it, upload it, and get a message back saying "stack overflow, press any key to continue". The software must be proven to be 100% bug free before it goes up.
It takes a lot of people to manage a space mission correctly. Cut corners, and your mission fails because of something stupid (e.g. metric vs imperial).
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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.
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.
Then the code has to be proved to be mathematically perfect.
Does the proof itself need to be prooved to be correct, or is that taken on faith?
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
The point of the Deep Space series of missions, of which the Mars Polar Lander was #2 and went AWOL, was to test new tech for next to nothing (in NASA terms).
Do any of you realise that DS1, apart from being 8 revs away from the greatest Trek ever, was powered by an ion engine? You know, like Star Wars?
Plus, when the nav system went tits up, they were able to retask other optical instruments to allow for autonomous piloting.
DS1 wasn't even supposed to make it this far. IIRC, it was expected to have a 3-month primary mission to test the equipment. Then, if there was enough gas in the tank and the thing still worked, they were going to find something else for it.
An asteroid flyby and now a comet encounter...not bad for $12 mil!
P.S. I'm a bit biased on this one - I watched the launch and have read every one of the oddball logs posted by Dr. Raymond.
C'mon, NASA, where's DS3?
GTRacer
- Wants to be first at something
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!