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NASA Revamps Historic 4-Million-kg Mars Antenna

Posted by Soulskill on from the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-bumper dept.

coondoggie writes NASA is working on some difficult renovations to reinvigorate its 70-meter-wide 'Mars antenna.' The antenna, a key cog in NASA's Deep Space Network, needs about $1.25M worth of what NASA calls major, delicate surgery. The revamp calls for lifting the antenna — about 4 million kilograms of finely tuned scientific instruments — to a height of about 5 millimeters so workers can replace the steel runner, walls and supporting grout."

5 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. In other news, Apple is happy. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Antenna problems are not specific to the iphone.

    1. Re:In other news, Apple is happy. by Flea+of+Pain · · Score: 5, Funny

      I hadn't made used the joke yet!.

      In Soviet Russia, joke hadn't made used YOU!

      --
      Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
  2. We had to do this with a 7 million kg antenna by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We had to go through this with a 7 million kilogram antenna at the Green Bank Telescope:

    http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbt/track.shtml

    The original azimuth track wore down too quickly, apparently due to faulty materials, workmanship, etc. You can see photos of the scope rotating out of the way sections of the track could be replaced at a time.

  3. 4 million kilograms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    4 million kilograms; why can't we just use metric as it was intended?

    4 Gigagrams.

  4. Happened where I work by mangu · · Score: 4, Informative

    I work at a commercial communications satellite company and we have an old earth station with a 32 meter antenna that's rarely used today, but we still keep it as a backup. Actually, the cost of bringing it down is more than the scrap value, so it's mostly just standing there.

    What nobody realized was that the antenna had been tracking a single geostationary satellite for decades, so it was moving very slightly around one position. Geostationary satellites aren't exactly stationary, but close, there's a slight movement around a central point.

    The result was that, when they tried to point the antenna to a different satellite they found that the circular steel rail had been cold-rolled over the years so each wheel was sitting in a small valley in the rail. The azimuth motor didn't have enough torque to get off that valley and point the antenna to a different position, although there was no problem in tracking a satellite in the old position.

    The solution was to jack up the whole antenna, cut off a section of rail and weld a new piece of rail beneath each wheel. The trickiest part was grinding the rail so that the new parts were perfectly aligned.