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.""

Comments

You could...

[AlexanderDitto]

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.

Re:You could...

[corngrower]

Damn those power mirrors. They always start sticking after the warranty is up.

Re:With the string of bad luck the ESA has had,

[Monkeys!!!]

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

The CSA could help here

[Mindwarp]

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"

Should take a trick from NASA's playbook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Should take a trick from NASA's playbook

[__aaclcg7560]

You got it backwards. Ground the manned space program to keep everyone safe from large shuttle parts raining down from the sky, cancelled the science space program to save money to get the manned space program off the ground in the next century, and let the politicians spend all the money on freeways to nowhere. :P

Re: Should take a trick from NASA's playbook

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

Yes, the moon missions would never have been possible if they hadn't kept everything on the ground in Arizona.

Re:With the string of bad luck the ESA has had,

[mlflegel]

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.

Re:With the string of bad luck the ESA has had,

[helioquake]

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.