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Black Boxes for Spacecrafts
karvind writes "NewScientist is running story about NASA's plan to put small, heat-resistant black boxes that will transmit data back to Earth when future space probes break up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. NASA will work with Aerospace Corporation to develop black boxes called Reentry Breakup Recorders (REBRs) weighing just 1 kilogram and spanning less than 30 centimetres."
Now just try finding those black boxes in the bottom of the ocean. Or when the spacecraft explodes over texas, and people take it home as a souvenir.
Shouldn't that be an "if"?
Umm... they're talking about unmanned craft dude...
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
How can you avoid it if you don't know how it happens?
The Blue Screen of Orbit Reentry is not a fun thing to experience.
By that logic, aircraft wouldn't have black boxes, software wouldn't have error logs and no one would ever figure out what broke things and how to improve them.
There I was, walking down the street, minding my own business, when .... BONK! Black box to the head.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There's got to be a beacon incorporated into the design because if that thing (30 cm.) lands in a very deep spot in the ocean it's going to be hard to find!
What good is a lost blackbox?Hmm, I wonder what could be inside....
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is 'craft', not 'crafts' :)
Andy Armstrong
For the same reason that airplanes have black boxes. No one's using the black boxes as an excuse to neglect safety concerns. Things go wrong, and it's useful to know why.
"These things are so light and easy to attach, we would like to have several on everything that flies"
Try getting back in your hive now, bitch!
Besides, they are planning on attaching these to unmanned craft first. This will give them a great deal of information about how the materials used react to reentry. This helps make things safer for people on the ground as they really can design craft that disintegrate on reentry.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
that, and the fact that black boxes arent even black-colored.
If we made stuff that never failed, how would we ever know we'd done it? We only learn that we haven't successfuly made things that never fail when things fail, and when things fail then we need the best evidence as to how they fail so we can stop it happening again.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I don't think he had time to read that as he was trying to get in the first post.
Why can't we just call it a recorder?
Those urine and feces filled "blue ice" bombs from airplanes?
I'll think I'll stay inside with my new toy instead
I probably shouldn't even justify this with a comment - in fact I'll ignore the bigger idiocy, and just focus on one particular error.
If it's unmanned you *want* it to break up on reentry. And if it's in low earth orbit it will reenter.
Breakup = smaller pieces = more likely to burn up = less likely to cause damage on the ground.
Because the recorders transmit on the way down, so losing them on impact is no big... With craft that survive re-entry you have to find them - or worse, they find you (anyone fancy something the size of even a small satellite landing on their car? No? Thought not...)
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
So... after a crash the only thing that's left is a black box?
Why don't they make the space shuttle out of the same material as the black box?
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I've heard of squeezing Linux into small devices, but a window manager on a space probe is a bit ridiculous, don't you think? TCP just isn't designed to handle that much lag time and network interference.
Why didn't they just make the probe from the same material as the black box then? ;P
Especially when you do it by using the atmosphere to generate heat and bleed off all that energy.
Stop things from breaking up? How? Solid NiFe bodies (sometimes known as meteors...) break up when they enter the Earth's atmosphere at those speeds.
And "find[ing] out how we killed people" is the first step in not doing it again.
I've seen wreckage of large aircraft. A lot of pieces were very recognizeable, or still in one piece. Engine turbines, weapons hard points. But obviously, you can't make the whole aircraft out of that. It would never get off the ground.
Better blame management. No more engineers round the table going "dunno" and shrugging shoulders.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Launching an extra kilo into orbit? That's actually pretty expensive isn't it.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Keep that in mind.
I suggest you read Slashdot
...but I'd think desinging the spaceships so they don't break up on reentry might be a better idea.
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That's what they used to say about heavier than air aircraft.
My Honda Civic has a black box to record crash data, but $100 million space craft don't. Um, duh.
Obviously, the editorim didn't pay attentions to verb endae during their English classices.
I, for one, welcome our new black box overlords!
2001 Space Odyssey
Table-ized A.I.
...our new era of information saturation.
As sensors become smaller, lighter, and more networked, it makes sense to put recording devices on ANYTHING remotely mission critical, mainly because at a certain point it becomes negligent not to.
When I ride over the Queensboro Bridge in NYC, I stare up with apprehension at the thousands of rusting girders that hold that rattletrap together. The only thing forestalling a collapse is having actual dudes crawling over it all the time checking visually for cracks and obvious failures. The smart pebble technology previously mentioned on Slashdot - http://www.betterroads.com/articles/feb03b.htm - would make me feel more comfortable.
I feel the same way on airplanes- do I trust that a ground tech working for a lowest-bidder maintenance company has adequately checked the airframe? I sure would like real-time fatigue information being beamed to the pilot, so he can decide wether to fly or not based on risking his own skin.
The most amazing thing about our age of astounding engineering is still the amount of ignorance we maintain about our constructions (Bucky Fuller's famous, and unanswered question to an architect: How much does your building weigh?). Thus, safety margins, inspections, building codes, all serving as bandaids to a fundamental ignorance that bites back BIG when a failure does occurr (sure, the WTC can absorb the impact, but can it survive the potential energy bundled in a plane, including the BTUs in the fuel? Nope).
Privacy wonks will worry about networked sensors in their toilets watching them take a crap, but really, if anyone wants to see mine, they're more than welcome to it- I just don't want to hear about it (eeewwww).
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Real overlords use fluxbox
>> Why not put more effort into knowing ways not to break up? on reentry its not like we have to die. So why not put the effort into fixing things beforehand unstead of how to find out how we killed people?
Uhmm.. because 1) people want to know the cause of accidents after the fact, but more importantly because 2) knowing the cause of accidents helps you to prevent them from happening again.
So spending money on development of black boxes, is one way of spending money to design/build better vehicles. One reason why modern air travel is so safe, is because designs have been refined using knowledge of past crashes (and black boxes helping to find the cause of these).
> Umm... they're talking about unmanned craft dude...
From the article: "These could be used in the space shuttle's successor, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), planned for launch in 2014". So for manned vehicles, and unmanned as well (to gather more data).
Just wondering: would they consider more than 1 of these on board? Ofcourse most interesting data will be gathered before an actual breakup, but maybe some data directly after a breakup helps as well. With 1 black box, only data for the piece of spacecraft where the black box was installed, could be monitored briefly after breakup. I suppose that's a matter of how useful, or expensive (read: how small/light they can make these boxes).
An astronaut is probably more likely to die in the plane ride from Wherever, USA to Florida.
And even more likely to die from a car accident on his/her commute from the airport to the Kennedy Space Center than from a shuttle reentry.
Another thing to consider, black boxes are resistant to destruction because they are small (small surface area to be charred or impacted) and compact (little space inside the box for dislodged components to move about and further destroy themselves or other internal components.) -- Something you can't do with an entire spacecraft, it's crew, or the experiment apparati onboard.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
It's about $10000/pound, so a kilo would be $4500 - just a small fraction of the cost of the black box.
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Black box in space, you say?
And it took them how long to think of this?
Why don't they make the whole damn space craft out of that heat resistant material.
Really, if you can make something that will survive falling from space, shouldn't you just build that around the astronauts so that they can survive too? Hell, I'd like my car built like one as well.
porp
Well, the key to "black boxes" is not solely the box.
Of course the box should be built to remain intact after e.g. falling through the athmosphere without external heatshielding, then impacting on the ocean with Mach-2. But the components inside must be built robust enough to survice an Mach-2 impact as well. And I don't think today's astronauts can really take that...
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
The plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't make the damn things black! There's enough dark matter out there as it is! Didn't science fiction teach these people anything? You're supposed to put colorful panels and flickering lights on it!
What's next, powering it with dark energy??
Fox can take the sky from you.
Too heavy to fly?
If you have enough lift opposing weight, and thrust opposing drag, then what's the problem?
I thought, yeah, that's just what I need. A bed that comes apart in orbit and burns up on re-entry.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Damn nancy environmentalists objecting to the nuclear rockets / orion engines needed to get really heavy objects to fly into space. What's a huge global increase in cancer and birth defects against getting GIANT LASER DEATH RAYS into space?
The name includes the "The".
The Aerospace Corporation is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), located in lovely El Segundo, California. El Segundo is also home to Los Angeles' Hyperion sewage processing plant, a Chevron refinery, the Los Angeles Air Force Base, and numerous other aerospace-themed venues that hearken back to the good ol' days (The Proud Bird, The Wild Goose, etc.).
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
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Doesn't redundant mean that it has already occured? Funny that my comment was the first of this type...
But I really think that it should be called the Neon Box.
Ok the Black Box rolls off the tounge which is the leet part of lingo, but besides that.. Make it Neon or they deserve to loose it.
Taco you pathetic illiterate, the plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
Grandly entitling yourself "editor" is just wrong. You don't edit, all you do is choose from submitted stories and post them.
Haha, originally just the words 'black' and 'space', 'black' and 'box', and 'future' and 'space' stuck out at at me. (plz pick apart the grammar of that last sentence. Spacecrafts.) So I thought we were gonna put black boxes in spaceships, then fly them into black holes. That'd be awesome.
even though they do go off in bed.
I read somewhere that if you create a negative ion field around the space ship as it re-enters, it lowers the air resistance, therefore causing the ship to 'increase' in speed as it enters the atmosphere but at the same time causing less friction on the whole ship, so a purpose built 'slow-down break' could be deployed or the ion field reduced in strength to control the slow down.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If possible, have hull changing colors to represent heat or stress.
Sure the ship wont be 'white' but wierdo colors, so get off the high horse on 'visual cuteness' and make it work. There are plenty of none-electronic tricks you can do for feedbacks/status.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The shuttle crew said they've always wanted to vacation all over Texas.
Bad I know... but I actually met Rick Hubbard one time at a dinner and a lecture. I ran sound at the event (400-500 people or so). He was very intelligent (tall too) and a very personablly friendly guy. I actually chatted with him for a few minutes about his time in the USAF. It is ashame of what happened; he will be missed!
Redundant: Needlessly wordy or repetitive in expression: a student paper filled with redundant phrases.
Oh well. I have -plenty- of karma to burn. Note to moderators: I metamoderate.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
is this where the aerospace union corporation originated from?
My Gawd WTF...