Mars Camera's Worsening Eye Problems

Mr_Foo writes "According to a Nature article, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE imager is suffering from a loss of peripheral vision. The problem surfaced less than a month after the orbiter reached Mars. One the camera's four color detectors has completely stopped working, and it is feared that the problems are spreading. Currently seven of the fourteen HiRISE's detectors are sending back corrupted data and although the issue is only creating a 2% loss of signal at this time it is expected to worsen. The lead investigator for the mission is quoted as saying the problem is systemic: 'In the broken detectors, extra peaks and troughs are somehow being introduced, causing... a "ringing" in the signal. "We don't know where the ringing is coming from," [the investigator] says.' Warming the electronics before taking images seems to help the problem. This effect might be one reason why the detectors on the cold periphery of the array were the first to pack up."

Comments

the probe's got a cell phone

[macadamia_harold]

"We don't know where the ringing is coming from,"

I can only imagine what that roaming charge looks like.

Its all lies

[LiquidCoooled]

Its all lies.
The camera is not sending back corrupted images, it is selectively censoring the portions of mars which contain sensitive terrorist targets.

All is not lost yet though, just look at one of the amazing images from todays bundle, it shows gullies within a crater.
I really hope they manage to solve this problem.

Fiingerprint

[flyingfsck]

TFA shows an image with a huge fingerprint in the middle of a crater. Either the lens is dirty or that was a very large Martian...

A Damn Shame

[fsh]

Although the rovers are certainly the superstars of Mars research, the MRO has provided more usable data than any other Mars mission so far. I certainly hope they can fix this problem, or at least work around it; the MRO should have many years of good science left in its system. I believe that the primary mission is scheduled to run through 2008 and then extended missions will be tacked on after that.

Incidentally, this is the camera that could pick out the rovers from orbit. Losing definition on this camera would certainly impact one of the missions objectives, which is to look for good landing spots for future missions (robotic and human).

Re:Surpising? No.

[pnot]

I don't know why anyone is every surprised when stuff goes wrong on missions, or equipment breaks down. Nasa is a governmental agency and as such has a big beaurocratic morass...

NASA was a governmental agency when they successfully landed human beings on the moon and brought them safely back to earth. They were a governmental agency when they sent out Voyager 1, currently leaving the solar system and still operational after thirty years. Certainly NASA's administration appears to have been getting a bit top-heavy of late, but it's short-sighted to put that down to the simple fact of NASA being a governmental agency.

The fact is, space exploration is hard. Things go wrong all the time, on both commercial and government-agency missions. For a far more dramatic commercial-sector cock-up, you only have to look back two weeks to the latest Sea Launch disaster.

I'm all for private investment in space, but as far as I know no commercial mission has yet made it out of Earth's gravity well. Good luck to Burt Rutan et al., but I think it'll be a while before they land anyone on the moon, or get a probe as far as Mars.

Re: Surprising? Yes.

[fsh]

First off, inside NASA, all projects are referred to by particular names and acronyms, and you'll often see people that aren't aware of the 'street name' of a particular project.

Second, the office of operations is more into the financial stuff than the technical stuff. That'd be like asking Linus Torvald's banker about the next Linux release.

Third, although NASA is a governmental agency, is has a disproportionate number of extremely intelligent and driven engineers and scientists on board. This is evidenced by the simple fact that although we have put millions of dollars into orbit around Mars, people *expect* it to work perfectly every time. The reason we're looking up there is that we *don't* know everything; perhaps these problems indicate an unexpected radiation belt or dust belt around Mars; maybe the problem was during the aerobraking which somehow didn't go as expected.

To simply blame it on the bureaucracy inherent in any large organization is intellectually indolent at best. Any undertaking this huge will, by its very nature, involve many people doing many different things, and as such will be infested with bureaucracy. This does not mean that all such projects are doomed to failure by way of miscommunication;quite the opposite in fact.

From your post:
I used to date the daughter of the Vice President of Operations at Nasa.
Please do not take your failings in communication out on NASA.

Re:Slowly degenerate?

[starman97]

I read that as ringing in the electrical signal. Possible caused by a ground on a coax cable working loose
or maybe a component failing due to thermal cycling or cold stress.

The boards are built at room temperature, it's pretty cold in space if the sun isnt shining on something.
Parts contract and if whatever they're attached to doesnt contract at the same rate, if can loosen things
or even crack them over time. Qualifying parts for that sort of thermal stress is what makes things cost so
much for Space Grade parts. It's also where they try to save money, only test 10 parts instead of 100 or
only test for 10 day/night thermal cycles instead of 1000. It's always easy to say after the fact that
they should use better, more expensive parts, but sometimes if you do, the mission goes over budget and
doesnt get done at all.