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Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by
Saint Aardvark writes: "All right...Space.com is reporting here that NASA's Deep Space 1 probe successfully made it through Comet Borrelly -- pretty good for a spacecraft using up the last of its fuel, 'way past its expected lifetime, doing something it wasn't designed to do'. About 30 pix are being downloaded right now, and there's a press conference planned for Tuesday. In the meantime, read NASA's press release here. Way to go, DS-1 and NASA!"
The is fscking ace. Real science is waaaay better than sci-fi. Check out yesterday's astro pic of the day for a sexy photo of deep space 1 at
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010922.html.
The bit I like about this mission is that they didn't really expect success, but decided to go the whole hog anyway as ds1 is almost dead.
What I thought was interesting when I saw the great episode on DS1 on "The Discovery Channel" was the navigation system. Aparently DS1 does most of the decision processes by iteself, and I might add that is quite a task when you think about it. After all there are no real landmarks or other solid navigational aids in space so it uses picture comparision on where it is and where to go next. This AI allows minimal amounts of people required to keep her running and if I remember right they only had about 7-10 guys in this room watching and codeing on Sun workstations. Sun?! No wonder all the manuvers they made were "risky" and no wonder they ran out of funds to keep her going. I wonder why they didn't use linux, or if they plan to in the future.
NASA has a few bits of eye candy detailing the position of DSA relative to Borrley, the position of DS1 relative to the sun, and two viwes of the position of Borrlley (1, 2). The image page is here; the DS1 page is here.