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NASA Struggles To Contact Lost Mars Probe
David Shiga writes "Just when NASA was about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft, the probe suddenly lost contact with Earth, New Scientist Space reports. NASA last heard from the MGS probe on November 5, two days before the 10th anniversary of its launch from Earth. The MGS team is not sure yet what the problem is, but a micrometeorite could have jolted the spacecraft's main antenna out of alignment with Earth, or it might have a solar array problem and too little power to talk to Earth as a result. If they can't re-establish communication this week, NASA may try to diagnose the problem by taking pictures of MGS with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The two spacecraft come within about 100 kilometers of each other several times each week."
We always either hear that NASA is doing a terrible job or that they are doing great in the face of great challenges.
I'd love to see a list of projects in table format that show either mission success or mission failure and the reasons behind the failure.
If anyone has a link, please post!
I had been wondering why updates from Opportunity had been so scarce over the last couple of weeks, given that the rover has reached the most interesting part of its traverse.
The communication bottleneck created by the MGS problem may be partly to blame.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
OK so it's a bit busted (potentially) but isn't it great that there is another vehicle nearby that can take a look? We're talking about Mars here! It's stories like this that show we really are starting to get out there in a big way, none of this one probe every 5 years that then lands and dies in a couple of days.
Let's have a big hand for the human race, people..
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Ahem.. TFA said they only passed each other within 100km several times a week. It's almost incomparable to the ~1000 functioning artificial satellites that are orbiting Earth (plus a few more thousand old satellites that are now classified as space debris) If you track the most notable ones with tools like http://www.heavens-above.com/ then you would see that they pass each other several times a day...
Some of the Rover software initially just allowed three-digit dates. Spirit reach 1000 Sols late October and Opportunity next week. Fortunately the software was repaired during a winter slowdown tuneup. Nice idea: reprogrammable robots.
Yeah, we did. It's called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. As an engineer who worked on MRO, I can tell you we learn from all of our previous spacecraft - successes and failures. While it is possible we may not restore contact with MGS, MRO will return more scientific data than all of NASA's previous Mars missions combined.