Deep Space One Mission Comes To An End

jfoust writes "NASA's Deep Space One mission will officially end this week, according to published reports. The spacecraft was launched over three years ago to test advanced technologies like ion drives and, despite the failure of its star tracker, was able to make a successful flyby of the comet Borrelly in September. The project tried to extend the mission by several months to fly by an asteroid, but could not coax the funding needed for the mission extension out of NASA. There's a short summary about the mission's end at spacetoday.net, and more details from the AP and the JPL Universe employee newspaper."

Comments

Time on dishes

[freeweed]

Dish time can be hideously expensive, and keep in mind your average home pizza dish doesn't quite cut the mustard in communicating with a small transponder millions of miles away.

For example, there are many people who would willingly donate their time and expertise to the SETI program. But for years they had to fight for funding. Why? Radio telescope time doesn't come cheap. And building your own isn't exactly feasible, either.

Reflections on a successful mission

[Ethidium]

When DS 1 launched in 1998, I was in my junior year of high school, and taking physics, which is now one of my three undergraduate majors. There was a girl in my class whose mother is a JPL scientist, and she and I would always spend our lab times talking about the mission. I remember reading that the ion engine created only as much force as a sheet of paper exerts on the hand of the person holding it, and wondered how in the world they expected anything to come of this. But F = ma, and in space there is practically no friction, so with the hours-long burns that the team discovered they could do, the acceleration added up. (For those of you who have asked, the ion engine is just another Newton's-third-law technology, with the big nuance being that rather than relying on the expansion of hot gases from the burning of fuel to provide the counter-force, the spacecraft uses an electified grid to propel tiny charged ions out the back).

When the star tracker failed in 1999, I wept, for I was sure that the mission was doomed. When the ground crew, in a long stroke of genius, kept it going, I wept for joy.

In the past year and a half or so, DS 1 hasn't been doing so much. WIth most of its objectives achieved, the mission became largely a test of how long it would last. Nevertheless, it was always fun to read Dr. Marc Rayman's mission logs, "widely thought of and commonly spoken of in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy as the most reliable source of information on this bold mission of exploration."

This fall, the probe paid a visit to comet Borrelley. Nobody knew where in the tail the rock itself was, but DS 1's job was to get as close to it as possible, and send back pictures. Nobody expected it to work. If anything, this was supposed to be a dignified death for the bird, which the September 9 log referred to as being "kept flying with duct tape and good wishes." The chances that the probe would do anything but smash into the comet and die, or be pommeled to death by the microdust in the coma, were astronomically slim. But somehow, miraculously, it survived, and with the pictures to prove it.

DS 1 was the stuff of science fiction, and that so many things went right is simply amazing. While I , like Dr. Rayman, am happy that it lived so long, I think we are all somewhat sad to see it go. But we can be consoled by the fact that the funding, the DSN time, the space, and the positively brilliant staff that have kept DS 1 running will now move on to projects that have even more excitement and adventure to offer us, and science will march on, at a steadily accelerating tempo.