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."

Comments

The JPL: Geeks in Spaaaaaaaace!

[odaiwai]

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"

Official NASA pages

[Zarhan]

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..

duct tape

[astafas]

I didn't know McGyver worked at NASA.

Re:$12 million

[FTL]

> Where has it gone? $1000 floppy disks? 50 person full-time ground crew?

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).

Why fly downstream from the comet?

[Mxyzptlk]

I was just wondering - why fly downstream from the comet and subjecting DS1 to the shower of particles, when you could approach it from upstream (put DS1 between the comet and the sun). The primary purpose is to get pictures of the nucleus, not the coma, right? So - let DS1 slowly drift towards the nucleus, and steer it by looking at the whole of the coma and centering on it (we know the nucleus is in the middle, because we've placed DS1 approximately in the middle between the sun and the coma). This allows as much time and small adjustments (saving fuel) as possible, getting DS1 as close to the nucleus as possible.

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.

Re:Scientific value?

[GTRacer]

Ugh...

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