NASA Fixes Galileo, Starts Recovering Data

linuxwrangler writes "After radiation damaged the recorders on Galileo it was feared that the data from the November flyby of Amalthea would be lost. Today NASA announced that they have repaired the recorder and are busy downloading the data. Meanwhile they also contacted pioneer 10 (64 bytes from pioneer10.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=80700000 ms)"

Comments

Rocket scientists

[MacAndrew]

I asked a friend about the Galileo problem, and the heck do you fix something from thousands or millions of miles away? It's very difficult he replied, and if aero/astro people are like him in general, these are bright folks.

Most of his experience had been with trying to figure out why solar arrays in orbit weren't doing their job, where the problem turned out to be not a loose wire but defective engineering (not his :).

Re:Technology

[MacAndrew]

About Galileo, some tales from several years ago, mentioning the current tape problem.

I would like to hear what exactly the engineers did. I have a feeling it was the interplanetary version of whacking your TV set to stop the whine.

Not all twiddle-the-computer exercises work out well. NASA is not one to dwell on failure, but they'll hand-deliver a press release to your door for great news. E.g., I read that contact with one of the Viking landers was lost years ago after someone sent bad data to its antenna tracking system. The lander was very late in its lifespan, but would you like to have been the guy who did it? We've found reasons to keep in touch with even the Voyagers (or should I say V'gers?), as well as the nearly 4x too old Galileo.

The Web is so cool: Galileo's current position

And Galileo tour guide -- the Galileo stuff at the NASA site is a little dusty. :)

Should we have a moment of silence with spunky Galileo burns up? Do you think the Jovians will retaliate?

Re:Technology

[david.given]

I remember hearing, but can't verify, a particularly inspired hack on, IIRC, a Pioneer: something needed adjustment, possibly an antenna arm. So they turned on all the heaters around the part in question. The resin softened. Then they fired the thrusters to jolt the spacecraft, and switched off the heaters. The arm bent into the correct position, and then hardened.

I suspect that it's a myth, but damn, it ought to be true.

Incidentally, did you know that the Pioneer computers were so simple they didn't have any jump instructions? They just executed all the instructions in memory one sweep after another. Conditionals were done by masking out blocks of code using condition codes. Slow, yes; but the processor could be implemented in a handful of radiation hardened transistors, and if the computer ever reset spontaneously due to, e.g., passing through Jupiter's magnetosphere, noone cared.

And they're still going...

Don't feel bad

[marcus]

Very few of these guys are rookies. They are culled from vast fields of applicants. Work hard, study hard, think hard, and apply for jobs at astro/aero/comm companies. You might just turn into one of these "elites".

Started with pilot lessons, then my eyes went bad. Even though I could no longer meet the mil spec for pilots (much less astronauts), I still got a Navy ROTC scholarship. I became an expert at writing embedded real time code. I got a job at Motorola. My code(not my body, but part of my mind) flies in space today. ;-)

Just as open source goes to show, pride is the greatest motivator when you want inspired, ultimate quality work. Even though my rate today is more than twice what I made back then, I have never, ever put so much effort and thought into a project as that one.

Cheer up, if you really, really try, chances are you will succeed.