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NASA Universe-Watching Satellite Losing Its Cool
coondoggie writes "NASA this week said its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE satellite is heating up — not a good thing when your primary mission instrument needs to be kept cold to work. According to NASA, WISE has two coolant tanks that keep the spacecraft's normal operating temperature at 12 Kelvin (minus 438 degrees Fahrenheit). The outer, secondary tank is now depleted, causing the temperature to increase. One of WISE's infrared detectors, the longest-wavelength band most sensitive to heat, stopped producing useful data once the telescope warmed to 31 Kelvin (minus 404 degrees Fahrenheit)."
Sometime in it's orbit, would it drop down to 12K? Meaning, could it be still used when and if it cools down enough - at least until someone can get up their to replenish it?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I'll bet it's because of the alien heating lasers. They don't want us to see too much/far.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
If you read the article it says that the solid hydrogen was expected to disappear about 10 months after launch, and it was launched in Dec 2009. Now it's 8/10.
What's so remarkable about something being used up that was designed to be used up?
Nothing to see here, move along!
--PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enfn9PL5htQ
The primary tank is still running, and now will do a
It appears, to the uninformed such as myself, that this satellite was meant to have a life of about 2 years. The good news is that it accomplished its primary mission. The bad news is that the NASA boys either didn't plan accordingly to cool it properly for its second run, or it was a hopeful objective.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Plus, you know, it's been rather hot outside. Waaayyyy outside.
K - 273.15 = C
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I think people in the USA with a brain will be able to grasp kelvin/Celsius fine... The others don't need to be reading this.
Yes. As a matter of fact, global warming is heating space! And eventually, the ice caps on Mars will melt and release even more CO2 - heating space even more! Then, the ice rings around Saturn will melt causing more global warming and eventually, it will affect Uranus - then a true disaster, you'll need K-Y.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I don't understand your numbers. I talk in Celsius.
I talk in English myself.
NASA is US-based, Slashdot is US-based, and the US uses Fahrenheit as the common measure of temperature. As for Kelvin, it's very easy for the rest of us to convert it to Celsius.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
It finished the first pass a month ago and will be doing another pass as it heats up to check for differences since the last pass.
The new infrared data provided by WISE should be approximately 1000 times more sensitive than previous data.
I talk in English myself.
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
But NASA is a scientific entity. We use SI units. Fahrenheit is, as you put it, just a common measure of temperature.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Is it possible to change its orbit so it's constantly in the umbra of something? The earth, the moon, IIS, anything?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
You're obviously not too cultured, then.
There are things outside of your door, my friend.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Several years ago I got the idea to use my wife's feet as a heat sink for an overclocked CPU. Once I solved the issue of frost buildup on the chip, it worked great.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
Language wise, English equals British about as much as Spanish equals Spain.
In other words, lots of countries were subjugated many hundreds of years ago by the two empires. English is simply a footprint from that period of time, as is Spanish. Since most of the countries are now separate entities and disparate, logic would dictate that the ousted countries' activities would hold no bearing on said countries' activities.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
The only place which would be "constantly" in the umbra from the Sun would be the L2 LaGrange point, opposite the sun. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Lagrange_points2.svg The Sun-staring SOHO uses the opposite L1 to stay OUT of the umbra. However, it's roughly a million miles from earth. So, let's just say no and build another one.
Any other place that you "park it" will end up revolving into view of the Sun. Sorry. I didn't design this system.
But NASA is a scientific entity. We use SI units.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Astronomers and astrophysicists don't use SI, we use cgs (centimetre, gram, second) in Europe. I'm not sure about USA.
Don't make it worse than it is. IF the data doesn't fit, it's fairly simple to smooth it. Or just correct for the assumed errors. This is not uncommon in other NASA projects.
Nothing new here.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, a quick google on NOAA-16 leads to this:
http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2000/nov00/noaa00r323.html
So, you're right, "America" plus "Space" doesn't equal "NASA", but "NOAA-16" equals "NASA, NOAA plus contractors"
Apology accepted :)
In May of 2009, the Spitzer IR space telescope ran out of coolant and transitioned to a "warm mission":
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-086
However...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer ...The WISE group's bid for continued funding for an extended "warm mission" was recently scored low by a NASA review board, in part because of a lack of outside groups publishing on WISE Data. Such a mission would have allowed use of the 3.4 and 4.6 micron detectors after the last of cryo-coolant had been exhausted, with the goal of completing a second sky survey to detect additional objects and obtain parallax data on putative brown dwarf stars.
Even more interesting, there's a lot of people in Spain who don't speak Spanish. They speak Galician, Basque, or Catalan. Also interesting, there really isn't any such language as "Spanish". The language referred to by that name is really called Castillian, only one of the languages of Spain.
If you don't understand Kelvins, then you're no geek and you have no business on this site. Anyone with a half-decent college education, who took Chemistry in college, would understand Kelvins.
My favorite language is Mexican.
Frankly, this whole discussion is moot. -404F isn't any more or less informative to most people than -242C. They're both "really really fucking cold".
The only useful unit for temperatures that low is K.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
Language wise, English equals British about as much as Spanish equals Spain.
In other words, lots of countries were subjugated many hundreds of years ago by the two empires. English is simply a footprint from that period of time, as is Spanish. Since most of the countries are now separate entities and disparate, logic would dictate that the ousted countries' activities would hold no bearing on said countries' activities.
a) The British Commonwealth includes the United Kingdom.
b) The British Commonwealth equates to 'the English-speaking world' more legitimately than the United States alone.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
I think you'll find it is true that the US 'left' the Commonwealth some time ago.
I did not mean to imply the United States is still part of the Commonwealth.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Astronomers use a hodge-podge of units in different systems. Cgs units are common, but for the really fun things we tend to use units like solar masses, parsecs, magnitudes, and foes (although that one never really caught on).
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Aw nuts! For a second I thought you were talking about the Reaumur scale.
> Apparently their problems include the NOAA-16 satellite too
I hope WISE scientists aren't up nights worrying about every sensor of everybody else's satellites.
Nor do hardware glitches support the allegation that climatology is a fraudulent global conspiracy. Such FUD works great in politics, but to disprove AGW, scientists need reproducible counter-evidence. Press releases about anomalous sensor readings shouldn't influence otherwise tech-savvy people like you.
It achieved 100% objectives. Its on extended mission now. But probably will not complete a 2nd full-sky mapping.
Ask the Mars Climate Orbiter which set of units we use.
Okay, stupid question, but isn't space 'cold'? I'm having a hard time picturing why the thing is heating up when it is in outer space.
At least it didn't get on the radio and swear at everybody, then grab two beers and jump out into space.
Or maybe it did....
Actually, to disprove AGW, or more specifically catastrophic AGW, it first must be stated as a falsifiable hypothesis. Simply claiming that every weather condition and every measurement is an affirmation of the theory is a tautology, not science.
There is plenty of counter-evidence out there, but the AGW dodge is always about "the preponderance" of the evidence, neatly avoiding any refutation by pretending that science is some sort of democracy with majority rule.
Anyway, it looks like the NASA folks who helped NOAA with NOAA-16 are suffering the same types of measurement problems as the NASA folks who worked on WISE - I certainly hope there is some sort of coordination between groups (if they are different), to share best practices and learn from the failures they've had.
No need for a disposable satellite if you want to do IR astronomy. It flies in the tropopause above the atmospheric water vapor so the sky is transparent. There's no need to worry about running out of cryogen. Just keep enough for the mission on the plane, and refill with each landing.
Frankly, this whole discussion is moot. -404F isn't any more or less informative to most people than -242C. They're both "really really fucking cold".
The only useful unit for temperatures that low is K.
It seems the only thing missing here is u. FCK!
-404F = Heat not found?
So if your server is in Nashville, all text should be in a southern accent, rest of the country be damned?
Newsflash: political boundaries are figments of the imagination.
All Kelvin, all the time?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So if your server is in Nashville, all text should be in a southern accent, rest of the country be damned?
Of course not, but I would logically expect the site's text to be in English.
If a US-based organization's data is released by way of a US-based website (Network World) to what I assume is mostly a US audience I'm not going to be surprised they used Fahrenheit. Celsius would have been nice for the rest of us but it's not hard to convert.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
If Britain is on the metric system, why does Top Gear always talk about MPH?
> it first must be stated as a falsifiable hypothesis
For GW, how about
"Significantly increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere causes global temperatures to rise"
After proving that, for AGW test
"Human activity has caused a significant net increase of carbon in the atmosphere".
For catastrophic AGW, pick your catastrophe:
"Increased global temperature causes polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise."
"Increased global temperature causes more intense weather events."
"Increased global temperature makes individual habitats unsuitable for their installed base"
> the AGW dodge is always about "the preponderance" of the evidence,
> neatly avoiding any refutation by pretending that science is some
> sort of democracy with majority rule.
Ah, the logical fallacy we call "the straw man". You are the one that equated preponderance of evidence with preponderance of opinion.
And I would think their refutation has merit; the preponderant evidence deserves more weight than anomalies.
If their data is inaccurate, submit the corrections. If their logic is flawed, woops, never mind, you've demonstrated that's not your specialty. But if you can prove any of the hypotheses above to be false, please do. Until then, you contribute nothing but FUD, of which we have a surplus already.
So, let's take the falsification of that as rising CO2 levels, but lower global temperatures. Ice cores clearly show a CO2 lag to temperature, so we've refuted that. Or you could take a 15 year period of rising CO2 and lower or stable temperatures.
That's not a test for AGW - that's a test for ACO2 emissions. Not the same thing.
You've completely missed out on magnitude here - polar ice melting with a 2cm sea level rise isn't a big deal. There of course, is no association between intense weather events and average global temperature (you can have many many distributions of temperature around the globe with an average temp of 22C, not all of them are prone to intense weather), and your last one, on "individual habitats" completely conflates weather with climate.
But seriously, what would be your refutation test for any of those catastrophes? Higher global temperatures and lower sea levels in the historical record? Lower global temperatures and more intense weather events in the historical record? Stable habitats over the course of thousands of years despite increases and decreases in local "individual habitats"? We got all of those.
Um, no. If you have the hypothesis that "all swans are white", finding 10,000 white swans doesn't stop the discovery of a single black swan from refuting your hypothesis. If a theory has to dismiss every refutation by calling it an "anomaly", or come up with ad hoc adjustments to account for contrary evidence, it's not a very good theory at all.
Well, perhaps explaining logic to you is not my specialty, or maybe you're just having a hard time understanding it :) Let me know what data observations would refute your hypothesis, and we'll work from there.
> Ice cores clearly show a CO2 lag to temperature, so we've refuted that.
Wow. Great news. Please show your work so I can verify.
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth
Feel free to verify at your leisure.
Now, can you think of any other observations of either the historical record or future records that would refute your hypothesis. Be specific, like "10 years of increasing CO2 with flat or decreasing temperatures".
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Astronomers and astrophysicists don't use SI, we use cgs (centimetre, gram, second) in Europe. I'm not sure about USA.
NASA isn't a astronomy/astrophysics research organization, but rather an aerospace engineering organization that does some useful astronomy and astrophysics on the side. So it uses SI units. Second, parsecs and solar masses (two commonly used units of measure in the field) don't fit into the cgs system. So saying that astronomers and astrophysics use cgs is not particularly accurate.
What I see at your link appears to show that historically, temperature increases weren't driven exclusively by CO2.
I don't see where it refutes the hypothesis that increasing atmospheric carbon causes temperatures to rise. In fact, FTA:
Any laymen will understand from [Al Gore's] statement that the ice-cores demonstrate a causal link, that higher amounts of CO2 give rise to higher temperatures. Of course, this could indeed be the case, and to some extent, it necessarily is .
The question before the house is whether increasing carbon increases temperatures, and the page you cite allows that possibility and admits "to some extent" that reality.
I don't think you have refuted the GW hypothesis, you've only shown that spikes in temperature have happened without a preceding spike in CO2.
That's mostly a function of how they operate. When you're only going to produce one or two of a particularly complex device that you can't touch after it starts working, it's generally either going to work great (because you spent a whole lot of time making sure everything was perfect) or fail completely (because you missed that one important detail and turned it into a cloud of fine ash).
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I think perhaps you need to specify your GW hypothesis more carefully then. We may not have very much disagreement as to whether CO2 can have a positive feedback effect, the disagreement is in the magnitude. There really are three scenarios:
1) It has a strong positive feedback effect with no upper limit. CO2, once started, overwhelms all other effects. Obviously this is falsified by the fact that we never had a catastrophic feedback in history, and CO2 has been much higher. If CO2 overwhelmed all other effects, we'd never see a return from the positive feedback loop.
2) It has a strong positive feedback effect with a very high limit. CO2, once started, overwhelms all other effects until it reaches a saturation point, but then it stops applying. If the historical record showed an increase in CO2 to a maximum saturation level, and then that established a temperature floor, we might agree, but obviously the historical record shows no such thing.
3) It has a minor positive feedback effect. CO2, once started, can add a small bit of positive feedback, but is generally overwhelmed by any other effects, including clouds, Milankovich cycles, etc, etc. Most likely given the ice age cycles observed, and even the past 15 years of cooling with increased CO2.
For #1, we should definitely be worried, but that's really the least likely of all. #2 might be worrisome, except for the fact that a warmer world has historically been better for humans - if we believed it to be true, we might actually want to encourage CO2 emissions to increase plant growth, crop yields, and habitability across the globe
Of course, #3 is probably closest to the truth. CO2 is a minor player, and more often follows rather than leads temperature changes.
But again, I ask you, if you believe either #1 or #2, what evidence could you observe that would be an acceptable refutation?
Old news, NASA managed to solve this cooling problem. They'll be sending my ex-girlfriend into space to bring the satellite's temperature closer to absolute zero.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I did not mean to imply the United States is still part of the Commonwealth.
I talk in English myself.
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
So... you meant to imply that we don't speak English in the US? Or what?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
I did not mean to imply the United States is still part of the Commonwealth.
I talk in English myself.
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
So... you meant to imply that we don't speak English in the US? Or what?
I meant to imply that 'talking in English' doesn't necessarily oblige one to use the Fahrenheit scale. Or any of the hideous Imperial units Americans seem to be so fond of.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
b) The British Commonwealth equates to 'the English-speaking world' more legitimately than the United States alone
Are you bloody kidding? The US, has, by far, the greatest number of primary and first language English speakers than the rest of the world combined. KTHXBIBI.
The rest of the world covers more ground than the United States alone. America is not 'the English-speaking world' (related: it is not 'the world'.) America is one country, and unlike military or economic power, size alone does not dictate legitimacy in such matters. Millions use English for commerce or education at a first-language level and aren't counted as primary speakers merely because they have a different mother tongue.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Gotcha, thanks for that clarification.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-