Slashdot Mirror
Resurrecting NEAR
JoeRobe writes "Space.com is reporting that John Hopkins researchers are going to attempt to revive the NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft at the end of the year. The spacecraft, designed to orbit asteroid Eros, finished its mission by successfully landing on the surface of the asteroid in February 2001, resting on its body and two solar panels. Now, after NEAR has been silent and cold for over a year, researchers are going to try to make contact with it and possibly try to turn on its scientific instruments one last time . How long can silent electronics last in space?"
methinks you mean Johns Hopkins....
How long can silent electronics last in space?"
If there is no one there to listen to it, is it really silent? Ahhhhhh
They might want to speak to the unemployment office. I hear they have some experience getting things to start working again after they've been resting for a year.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Sorry, all questions and no answers today.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
How long can electronics last in space? NASA contacted the Pioneer 6 spacecraft after 35 years in space. An even more interesting question is how long LIFE can last in space. The Surveyor III camera brought back from the moon by Apollo 12 had bacteria in it from where somebody had coughed on it. Commenting on this, astronaut Pete Conrad (who died recently in a motorbike accident) said, "I always thought the most significant thing we found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it..."
Perhaps there are some local scum who would be willing to give NEAR a bit of a push to get it going.
The /. article of the NEAR touchdown can be found here.
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
Money.
They were already operating past their budget when the mission was close to over. They literally had to get permission to try to make it take off again.
Keeping all of the sensitive bits of a satellite within a reasonable temperature range is tricky. You have electronics modules producing heat that must be radiated into space. The exterior of the spacecraft has to cope with the temperature extremes of sunlight and shade. You don't want the batteries to freeze. Some parts of the spacecraft might be damaged if they are allowed to get too cold.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And my guess would be they have three bootable setups: a mask ROM of version 1.0 flight software, and two flash images.
The hardware first tries to boot flash image 1, if that fails then it tries flash image 2, and finally if that fails it falls back to the mask ROM image.
--Rob
Well, I hope Bruce and the team have drilled to 800 feet and planted the nuke, cuz time is running out...uh, nevermind, wrong asteroid.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
This is a damn good question.
I'm not sure why but it is highly likely that there were any power generation concerns. Solar cells generate less electricity the further you get away from the Sun (yeah, I know it's obvious) and batteries/battery backups will have been limited in size and capacity, if only to keep down launch costs - if you run a space agency on a limited budget you don't put up any more mass than you need.
This topic and your question remind me of a conversation I had with one of my astronomy professors whilst at university many moons ago (if you pardon the pun) about the Apollo landings and their ongoing scientific value.
It seems that, at some point in the late seventies, many of the remote probes and instruments that NASA left behind were sending back more data than NASA could process. So, rather than leave them running indefinitely (which was an option as they had efficient solar cells and lower power demands) the bean counters at NASA told the various devices to shut themselves off - something that couldn't be reversed.
A few years later (well, maybe about 10-15, but who's counting?) some people at NASA decided they wanted some fresh numbers from the moon. Technology had moved on, computers were more powerful and accessible, and there was so much more that could be extracted from the raw data that could help NASA elsewhere (cometary studies, researching manned and unmanned missions to Mars to name but two). Now all NASA had to do was to get this new data was to add a new series of lunar missions to its already cash-strapped budget.
Apparently, there was a series of meetings in which it dawned on the boffins that they had had exactly what they wanted - except that, at some stage, someone had taken the executive decision to pull the plug. Millions of dollars thrown down the drain at the flick of one switch. According to my professor, all hell broke loose and the mother of all fingerpointing wars started.
Homer Simpson would have been proud.
Even today, there's at least one person I know of whose still ticked off at NASA for that toss-a-coin decision.
Bottom line: NASA et al turn things off all the time. A few years later, they wish they hadn't.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
NASA's science program is constantly under assault from the manned space station and Congressional budget cutting. Another success- the Jupiter Galileo- will be turned off in a few months. (Actually may be crashed into the clouds for one last experiment.) Galileo, despite a defective attenna that cut its data rate by 99%, lasted three times its planned lifetime. The Venus Magellan probe was detroyed after running out of money too. It later two cycles past its planned three cycle program. The situation would be much worse if everything NASA sent up worked. However, three major recent Mars failures freed up some NASA resources.
For a few (million) bucks we can try to turn it back on and get more info.
:-)
I'd rather they spend that money on resurrecting the Pluto/Keiper Express, or at least getting on with a cheaper replacement before Pluto moves out of it favourable position. (Or give me the money, and I'll tell you NEAR's status: it's still sitting on Eros.
They have to schedule time on the DSN (Deep Space Network) to communicate with the spacecraft. Time on a global satellite tracking network is not cheap. There are probably additional costs for people and support services.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think the primary aim is to find things out, not to stop other people finding things out. Either way, the data gets here, so it doesn't really matter.
I suspect that there's some sort of time limit on the electronics packages. However, it's probably more dependent on the fact that it's not be whacked by a handful of micrometeors since we put it into hibernation mode. Something like that could definitely make it a lost cause, real quick.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
There is a hard limit... Since theoretically almost every atom does decay eventually, an electronic object can sit in space until enough of it's constituent atoms decay away to break the electrical connections. Then it's broken. This limit is generally much longer than the age of the universe so far.
Then there is chemical/mechanical stability. Some compounds do degrade over time, such as plastics. Plastic parts become brittle, crumble, or otherwise age. Batteries and RTG's degrade or wear out. The same goes for moving parts. The time for this to happen is much less than atomic stability of the actual device. If cheap parts are used, even ten years is easily possible, sometimes much less. Chemical degredation is heavily dependant on the temperature of the object in question. It would also more affect the support systems of the electronics worse than the electronics itself. Batteries, fuel cells, electrical shielding for moving parts such as gyros, for example.
Since empty space is not really empty, we also have degradation due to interaction with the spacecraft's environment. Micrometeorites abrade the suface of the craft, but larger ones behave like bullets, and these can definately cause harm to electronics inside. Then there is the radiative environment. Cosmic rays, or other exotic forms of radiation can be really nasty to electronics. At the least, they can cause random noise in running electronics, and say, flip 1's into 0's or vice versa every now and then. The much harder rays can permanently damage or fuse microcircuits. As any overclocker knows, simple heat kills electronics very nicely, so objects closer to the sun may have much shorter lifespans. Radio wave radiation from solar storms, if intense enough, can have the same effect on electronics as a highly statically charged cat rubbing against my motherboard when I took off the case.. (you don't wanna know.) There's a fair amount of redundancy in space based electronics for this reason, but there is a limit to how much abuse these systems can bear. Engineers can't insure against every eventuality, such as ET cats.
In my opinion, the practical limit of a spacecraft is balanced between chemical/mechanical degradation, and environmental hazards. I feel that right now, mechanical degradation is much worse than environmental effects, but as durable solid state devices become more prevalent, this will tip the scale in the other direction. I'd be interested to see statistical information on the reason satellites fail.
Bork!
Bumblefuck? It's in Baltimore. I go there.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
On our probes and satellites that we send out to deep space, do we stamp anywhere that has our co-ordinates of Earth?
I would hate to think that we would have a dead probe sitting on a asteroid then another intelligent life form discovers it light years away without any real information of who and where we are.
Seems to me with our thirst of "Is anything out there?" We would do something like this.
Then again.....It might be the borg and may be better.
Electromigration of dopants in semiconductors are another factor.
Also, dissimilar metals being in contact over very long periods of time can have interesting interactions (they had to address such problems when renovating the Statue of Liberty, as the iron framework was reacting with the copper skin).
DNA just wants to be free...
You mean, there AREN'T any buggers on Eros?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I think we all know what will happen when they make contact:
NASA Operator: What happen?
NASA Operator 2: Somebody set us up the bomb
NASA Operator: We Get Signal!
NASA Operator 2: What?
NASA Operator: Main Screen Turn On.
NASA Operator 2: Its you!
NEAR Probe: How are you gentlemen?
NEAR Probe: All your base are belong to us.
(cheezy techno starts now...)
-Sean
"Hello? Hello! Stupid 3rd-planeters!" seismic event, seismic event. "Stupid POS!", decreasing after-shocks...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I can't tell if you're kidding or not, so I'll bite: "bumblefuck" is an expression that means "the middle of nowhere." synonyms include "the sticks", "butt-fuck nowhere", and "the boonies."
But Johns Hopkins (where I go to school) is in Baltimore, MD, which is a large, albeit ghetto, city.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
On this page cited by "Cally":
a 12 / s12-48-7133.jpg
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/
(remove any spaces from URL)
I noticed that the lighting looks strange. It looks like the lander in the distance is under a cloud shadow or dust shadow. Obviously there are no clouds on the moon, so dust is the next best candidate. However, that is a lot of dust to stay suspended for several minutes when there is no atmosphere.
Table-ized A.I.
(* They have to schedule time on the DSN (Deep Space Network) to communicate with the spacecraft. Time on a global satellite tracking network is not cheap. *)
It is my understanding that they use mostly ground-based dish antennas, and not Earth-orbiting satellites to communicate with space probes. Either way, there are barely enough of such antennas to do the work, being there are many probes out there right now. The Mars orbiters require a lot of antenna time, for one.
Table-ized A.I.