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Mirror Jams on Venus Express Spacecraft
tsarina writes "The European Space Agency is trying to fix a stuck instrument on its Venus Express spacecraft. A mirror in front of its interferometer is not pointing in the right direction, making it useless until it is moved. Managers hope to fix the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer this week. An identical instrument on the Mars Express probe has also acted up, but it is currently working properly.""
You can see that it analyses the atmosphere from the ground to 100km, but is only one of about 7 instruments.
Oh yeah, and first post.
Try jiggling it back and forth, sometimes that helps.
Alternatively, run it under some hot water for a few seconds.
If all else fails, give it a good swift kick.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
Let's do that! I'm happy with having a vital industry existing in a market with very little competition. That's sure to encourage progress and foster innovation! /sarcasm
I believe the CSA have been developing the CanadFinger for just this purpose. Any time something like this sticks you can robotically prod it from the safety of your nice warm Mission Control.
Note - The above post is humorous in content, and does not intend to violate patents past or present on the "Design and Implementation of Remote Digit Activation Devices"
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Passe
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
If it was raspberry jam, blame Barf!
The ESA should have learned from NASA, and gone with the strategy that has brought such success to the Space Shuttle program: Keep all spacecraft and instruments on the ground on earth, where if something bad happens like a mirror getting out of place, a technician can easily fix it.
I work in the flight dynamics team for VenusExpress at ESA and I can't let this comment stand. Even though the poster meant it as a joke (I hope ;), I don't think having smarter people is the issue. I think it is a matter of experience and money.
We are just beginning to expand beyond near-earth to the interplanetary part of space exploration. VenusExpress is only our fourth interplanetary mission (we count going to the moon as interplanetary). Nonethless, we've arrived at Venus without any problems in the spacecraft systems (this excludes instruments). We've reached our target orbit to within 0.3 seconds (sic!). We only could do this by applying what we'd learned on the previous missions; Smart-1, Rosetta, and MarsExpress.
As for money, our budget is a tenth of NASA's budget. To save cost, VenusExpress was basically built from MarsExpress spare parts. This brings a few problems with it, due to the different geometries: Venus being so much closer to the Sun than Mars, and being inside Earth's orbit poses a whole new set of thermal problems.
Since you are a flight dynamics person, you probably wouldn't know but...
What do they use to flip a mirror in place(switch back from a calibration lamp)? These movable things are often used in other missions and it's good to know what type of hardware would malfunction like this.
You're right, I don't know, sorry. But from people talking I got the impression that it was a servo. Is this possible? A quick look at the user manual revealed that it was a few thousand pages thick, so I didn't go looking for an answer there.
Oh, just *great*.
If YOU have the friggin manual HERE, how the hell are the VENUSIANS supposed to figure out how fix the friggin' mirror THERE?!?!
ESA has a very good track record.
XMM Newton, Mars Express and Venus Express, even considering this glitch, have all done very well.
Their program is following the robotic rather than manned approach to exploration, as has been suggested by many scientests. They are getting a lot more science for their buck (or Euro).
ESA, as opposed to NASA, has put scientific objectives first rather than political ones.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
Gut gesagt, Herr Doktor Flegel. And damn good English, too!