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..

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).