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Japanese 'Minerva' Robot Lost in Space
space_weasel writes "A little Japanese robot that was supposed to land on the surface of an asteroid has accidentally been flung into space by its mothership. New Scientist Space reports that the accident occurred as the data link with the spacecraft was being switched from an station in Japan to one in Australia. Mission controllers still plan to punch a hole in the asteroid and collect samples, which will be returned to Earth."
...is, after roaming the galaxy for 200 years collecting information, it will come back to Earth to destroy us.
Dark Reflection
robot 1 : target acquired, beginning landing sequence...
robot 2 : roger that, beginning land... OH LOOK A STAR!
[all robots turn towards the star]
robot 3 : OOHHHHHHHHHHH PRETTY!!!!
If Star Trek has taught us nothing else, it is that probes lost in space are a bad thing. And the fact that it's Japanese means that it's definitely going to come back and go apeshit.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
When working with the USA, spacecraft get lost due to forgetting to switch between metric and common units.
When working with Australia, spacecraft get lost due to forgetting that their maps of the universe are up-side-down.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Exonature is as cruel as mothernature herself. Obviously, the mothership began to ovulate, and, sensing a potential mate nearby, cruelly cast off her young to fend for itself.
During this 40-minute antenna change, information about the spacecraft's vertical motion was unavailable to ground controllers.
For a country which prides itself as being at the forefront of robotics technology, this is rather surprising. The latency inherent in space communication over great distances is the primary reason for using intelligent robots in space. If the probe was sufficiently intelligent, it would perform its tasks without supervision from ground control. I hope they (including NASA and the ESA) put a lot more effort into automating their space probes in the future.
The probe was named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom and skill. The mothership is named Hayabusa, after the world's fastest flying bird.
Unfortunately, the mission controller was named Bob, after the Roman god of lazy eyes and uncoordinated pitching.
This was a series of truly bad rolls of the dice. Two of their three stablizers failed, they had bad altimeter data because "the slope of the asteroid's surface had apparently caused the altimeter to misjudge... estimates of the craft's altitude," and then they got below 100 meters while the antenna switchover was happening. They sent the separate command without realizing the thrusters to maintain minimum altitude had just fired, because of that break in communications. So the article says, though it's not a sterling example of great science writing, I'll give you that.
The "mission officials are saying "Our readiness was not so complete," to their credit, but it's not like they're complete incompetents. More like they're pushing the technology: the altimeter hadn't ever been used before, for the obvious example.
Sort of fits the cheaper/faster model of robotic exploration. You have your hits and your misses. This isn't a Cassini Cadillac of a probe.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You'd sure know more if you went to the (somewhat unclear) article, which would obviate the need for lots of your conjecture.
The main probe has been going on one of its three "stablizing wheels," the other two having failed. There's a sidebar link in the article to an earlier one about those failures. Mission controllers have been burning extra fuel keeping the thing at the right distance from the asteroid, facing the asteroid, and with its solar panels facing the sun; they already had that against them. Then the altimeter data they were getting was bad, they were closer than they thought, because some combination of the laser altimeter (previously untested) and the slope of the asteroid's surface confused the data.
They realized they were within 100 meters and had to send the detach command while the antenna switch was happening. The blackout prevented them from realizing a "keep above minimum altitude" engine thrust had just gone off.
This is much more of a reflection of this model of probe: it's cheaper, it's faster to develop, and there are going to be failures like the Beagle and this.
(Personally I do think there'd be a big gain if, before and after missions like this, the code got reviewed. I doubt very much that hackers in Idaho would have foreseen the failed stabilizers, the workaround, the potential for misjudging the altimeter data, and the combination of the blackout and the necessity for the release command. But in terms of intellectual freedom, it'd be a nice statement, and the Post Mortems would sure feature a lot of people asking Feynman-esque questions about icewater and O-rings.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
As a politician instead of a scientist, the first thing that came to mind when I read this story were the faces of the people who made the budget for that robot. They just heard that their spacecraft flung a $20million bag of money into the great unknown. I imagine that feels just about the same as getting kicked square in the nuts.
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
You joke, but I know something many of you probably haven't heard of.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics against Evolution. A chaotic soup of particles doesn't just magically tend towards order. For scientists to have any credibility, they would have to prove that there is some sort of huge source of energy external to the Earth. Consider this: according to my calculations, there would need to be at LEAST a few million terawatts of power hitting the Earth's surface, averaged over a year, for any of what we see now to have happened.
What say you now? *Crickets chirping.*