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Mirror Jams on Venus Express Spacecraft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the only-one-man-would-dare-give-me-the-raspberry dept.

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.""

3 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. You could... by AlexanderDitto · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  2. Re: Should take a trick from NASA's playbook by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny

    > 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.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  3. Re:With the string of bad luck the ESA has had, by mlflegel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.