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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."
Shouldn't that be an "if"?
Umm... they're talking about unmanned craft dude...
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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.
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....
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.
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.
But if the transmitter is damaged you'll still have to go find it.
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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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.
Or when the spacecraft explodes over texas, and people take it home as a souvenir.
"Why this must be a NeXT cube. I always wanted one!"
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
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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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...
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The plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
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Maybe because the entire craft is subject to different performance requirements than the black box alone? You know, like low weight? And note that the survivability of the black box results from the survivability of the entire craft that houses the box. The black box only remains after most of the reentry energy has been used to burn up the rest of the craft.
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.
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
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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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.
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.
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.
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is this where the aerospace union corporation originated from?
My Gawd WTF...