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!"

Comments

Lovely quote

[ronys]

"As expected, there were lots of surprises."

(Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

So if there wouldn't have been any surprises, would that have been a surprise?

Re:Any pictures?

[Megane]

Apparently the fuel problem isn't the ion engines. As long as the craft gets solar power, they can run indefinitely. The problem is that they used conventional hydrazine fuel engines for attitude control, and that's the fuel they were low on. So DS-1 can still do a great job of going in a straight line; it just can't turn around to aim itself in the right direction.

woohoo

[tetrapod]

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.

Poor little space ship...

[A Commentor]

From the article:

By late November, if the craft is still operating, NASA will cease communications with it.

Does all this work and they just abandon it ;-)

Re:Poor little space ship...

[CheshireCatCO]

Oh, no. It's getting a nice severence package, including a small, but helpful, pension, stocks and it can keep that little beach place in the Bahamas if it likes. Except there was this clause about having to show up in person to claim the stocks and checks.

Re:Poor little space ship...

[sconeu]

Yeah, but they were dot-com stocks! It's not worth showing up for those!

Re:DS1 Location

[A Commentor]

is a nice view of where DS9 actually is in relation to our solar system planets

Looks like someone been working star trek too long ;-)

NASA hype makes lemonade out of lemons

[kingdon]

It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money :-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.

This is a VGT (Very Good Thing)

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you know, I can't log into slashdot, DOH! This'll have to be an AC:

While we in the technology industry have never really doubted NASA's ability, this shines good on NASA in the public forum. To me, many in the general public view NASA as something that once had a purpose, but now is struggling to get their missions to work right, etc. (which is far from the truth). But something like this tells the world "Hey, so we forgot to convert back to metric... everyone makes mistakes... look at this!". NASA is still very much an important entity. Look at all of the advances made because of the space program. If anything, hopefully this will serve to deter (if only a little bit) the budget cuts NASA has been facing as of late.

Just a thought...

Re:Sound minds in NASA

[Saint Aardvark]

Weird: I submitted both of those. Glad I restored your faith in Nasa...:-)

Using Sun

[Ankou]

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.

Re:Using Sun

[alispguru]

DS1's AI ran on more than "just" Suns. The probe itself runs VxWorks on a rad-hardened RS6000 (PowerPC) at the awesome speed of 25 MHz (see here).

Development of the planning/scheduling was done on Suns and Power Macs, using two different vendors' Common Lisp implementations (see here for a message from one of the implementors). During development, NASA management decided there were too many programming languages flying in DS1, so they decided to drop one of C, C++, or Lisp. C++ lost, but is being wedged back in for political reasons.

The planner was only given 10% of the CPU, which meant DS1 was doing real-world AI at 2 MHz (!).

[mlp] Positions of DS1 and Borrley

[Wuppertal]

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.

Hacking space probes

[kreyg]

And sensors that monitor the ion propulsion were reprogrammed to listen for magnetic fields and plasma waves in and around the comet.

OK, that part is definitely cool. Whoever came up with that one deserves some credit.

Re:Hacking space probes

[Graymalkin]

If you want to read some really cool shit head over to JPL and read the event log for the entire mission. Those boys down there are really impressive. Of particular interest to me was when they used the planetary telescope as a starfinder when the DS1's dedicated starfinder busted a nut. Crazy shit them NASA engineers. All of the mission logs are great reads though.

Yeah, we should cut NASA's budget some more!!

[alienmole]

This is at least the second time NASA has done something like this: the last one was the landing of the NEAR-Shoemaker probe on the asteroid Eros.

So the obvious conclusion is, stop paying NASA to do stuff! Things clearly work better when they're retasking existing equipment to do something else, preferably involving a crash landing. From now on, we should forbid NASA to build anything other than Earth-orbit satellites.

But once the satellites are in orbit, heck, anything goes! Put people on 'em and send 'em to Mars! Or maybe skim the solar atmosphere! How about sending them to the nearest star at 0.9c? Or why not the galactic nucleus? There may be no limits to the potential of this new "non-funding" technology!!