NASA Solar Sail Lost In Space

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NASA Solar Sail Lost In Space

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday December 12, 2010 @09:33AM from the never-to-sail-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to Spaceflight Now: 'NASA has not heard from the experimental NanoSail-D miniature solar sail in nearly a week, prompting officials to wonder if the craft actually deployed from a larger mother satellite despite initial indications it ejected as designed.' NanoSail-D's spring-ejection was indicated at 1:31 a.m. EST Monday, leading to a predicted release of the spacecraft's sail membrane around 1:30 a.m. EST Thursday."

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Long gone by MichaelSmith · 2010-12-12 09:37 · Score: 4, Funny

Maybe it worked too well -D

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1. Re:Long gone by rally2xs · 2010-12-12 21:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  As long as you have a mod category like "funny", people will compete for it.
Reason by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-12 09:37 · Score: 5, Funny

The reason it was lost is that it forgot to tack in a particularly bad solar wind.
FASTSAT Post by DamonHD · 2010-12-12 09:40 · Score: 2

Bad luck on losing the sail. I had some tiny direct extra stake in the Planetary Soc's solar sail attempts and still have a little on their latest as a member. I'd really like to see this work as it seems so much more elegant than just throwing more chemicals at space travel.
Reminds us that not much in space is routine; indeed it's still rocket science.
Rgds
Damon

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1. Re:FASTSAT Post by david.given · 2010-12-12 10:58 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  All is not lost; JAXA's IKAROS is doing just fine. According to their blog (no link because accurséd Slashdot won't let me paste into text boxes) it did a flyby of Venus a few days ago and is now on its way... nowhere in particular (as a propulsion testbed it's more important that it is going than where it goes). But they've demonstrated deployment, acceleration, attitude control and power generation; it's now a fully functional interplanetary spacecraft powered purely by the sun.
  Of course, given that its tiny solar sail produces a thrust of about 1mN, which given IKAROS' 300kg mass comes out at about 3 um/s^2 or approximately 0.0000003g, I don't think it'll be blazing across the solar system any time soon; but it does show that the whole principle works. Now we need a full size one (and JAXA's planning a solar sail-powered Jupiter missing in the late 2010s).
2. Re:FASTSAT Post by Kell+Bengal · 2010-12-12 15:45 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  you cannot use them to go towards the sun, unfortunatly
  Not true at all! Due to the way that orbital mechanics works, you can use a solar sail to travel anywhere in orbit. If you tilt your solar sail so that the deflection of light occurs at an angle to the oncoming photons, you can produce a net force on the spacecraft retrograde to your orbital path. This slows your orbital velocity, causing you to spiral inward towards the star. To stabilise your orbit or to head outwards in a transfer orbit, you can tilt back the other way to apply prograde force.
  
  It's a simple and elegant means of getting around space. The only real problem is that it's a tremendously slow way of traveling across orbital distances.
  
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3. Re:FASTSAT Post by Yvanhoe · 2010-12-13 00:21 · Score: 2
  
  Also note that it took JAXA a few failed tries before managing to deploy correctly a solar sail. The fact that NASA failed its first one does not strike me as very surprising. What I find surprising however is that they don't seem to use the Japanese experience very much to prevent these failures...
  
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More like a ... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-12 09:41 · Score: 5, Funny

... Solar Fail!
Ha ha! Ha ha! ... *vomits*
Gone with the (solar) wind by sourcerror · 2010-12-12 09:42 · Score: 4, Funny

Gone with the (solar) wind
Meanwhile in a /. a few lightyears away by Haedrian · 2010-12-12 09:48 · Score: 2

"Weird solar sail with "NASA" written on it found"
1. Re:Meanwhile in a /. a few lightyears away by MichaelSmith · 2010-12-12 10:07 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  They are going to be confused when they find out that NASA is a brand of lubricants in Malaysia.
  
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2. Re:Meanwhile in a /. a few lightyears away by Kjella · 2010-12-12 14:39 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Nope. Both Voyager probes are well over a light-day away from earth. Voyager 1 being over 31 light-hours away. So it's more like .0035 ly
  Check your sources. It's about 116 AU or 16 light hours away.
  
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  Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
3. Re:Meanwhile in a /. a few lightyears away by anyGould · 2010-12-13 07:10 · Score: 2
  
  For a smooth glide through heavenly bodies?
Fucking Martians nicked it. by Arancaytar · 2010-12-12 09:52 · Score: 4, Funny

They're always stealing or breaking our stuff, those jerks.
pics or it didn't happen by confused+one · 2010-12-12 10:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

Sad when an internet meme is so appropriate... So they had a microswitch that says it deployed. Why not put a small camera on one or both to provide some visual feedback? It is an experimental deployment of (1) a cubesat from a microsat, and (2) an experimental sail membrane, yes? How would they know, for certain, that it deployed correctly if there are no pics? Given how small cameras are today, it seems like a no-brainer.
1. Re:pics or it didn't happen by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-12 11:46 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  God damn it, you're right. I wish they hired people like you at NASA, instead of those brain dead twits. A camera? Brilliant. No one ever thought of that. Thank god for /. armchair rocket scientists!
2. Re:pics or it didn't happen by Animats · 2010-12-12 13:29 · Score: 2
  
  Yes. NASA's claimed purpose for this launch was to "test NASA's ability to deploy a massive but fragile spacecraft from an extremely compact structure." It wasn't capable of sailing anywhere; it was placed into such a low orbit that atmospheric drag would bring it down in about four months. Now they have to do the whole project again (or give up) without having learned much from this failure. While there's a weight, power, and data storage penalty for having a camera, it's far cheaper to add one than to launch again.
3. Re:pics or it didn't happen by Brett+Buck · 2010-12-12 14:11 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Well, sort of. But supplying a sufficient downlink and the associated extra weight and power just for a mechanism check that is generally trivial to verify with limit switches or break wires might have put the entire thing in jeopardy of never launching in the first place. Note that the deployment test proper was a full day after separation. Separating it wasn't part of the test.
  If the limit switch/breakwire showed it ejected, the overwhemling likelihood is that it did that - and then failed to come alive 24 hours later when it was supposed to. Could have deployed properly and just had a telemetry failure, that's at least as likely as anything else, and for a nano-sat on a very short mission it's pretty unlikely to have any more than a single-string system for anything, so no redundancy.
  Brett
4. Re:pics or it didn't happen by MobileTatsu-NJG · 2010-12-12 16:07 · Score: 2
  
  Why not put a small camera on one or both to provide some visual feedback?
  
  Because every gram of mass is expensive and hindsight is 20/20.
  
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not exactly rocket science by jandoedel · 2010-12-12 10:39 · Score: 5, Funny

Solar sails are not exactly rocket science...
Weight and telemetry by mangu · 2010-12-12 11:21 · Score: 4, Informative

Given how small cameras are today, it seems like a no-brainer.
Perhaps the name "NanoSail-D" will give a hint on how small this satellite is.
However, the camera size itself is not all that matters. In order to send telemetry down there must exist a telemetry transmitter on board. It might surprise you to know that even large satellites often transmit telemetry at 1 kbps or so.
Transmitting wide band, such as needed by a video signal, requires higher power. Sending high power down needs a bulkier and heavier transmitter. More power in the telemetry beacon requires more DC power, which means bigger batteries and bigger solar panels.
These are the two main constraints in a spacecraft: mass and consumed power. Every piece of equipment on board must be screened for these two parameters, nothing is included unless it's absolutely certain that it couldn't be done with less mass and less power.
1. Re:Weight and telemetry by careysub · 2010-12-12 12:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Given how small cameras are today, it seems like a no-brainer.
  Perhaps the name "NanoSail-D" will give a hint on how small this satellite is.
  However, the camera size itself is not all that matters. In order to send telemetry down there must exist a telemetry transmitter on board. It might surprise you to know that even large satellites often transmit telemetry at 1 kbps or so.
  Transmitting wide band, such as needed by a video signal, requires higher power. Sending high power down needs a bulkier and heavier transmitter. More power in the telemetry beacon requires more DC power, which means bigger batteries and bigger solar panels.
  ...
  The camera would not be on the "NanoSail-D", it would be on the mother satellite FASTSAT which weighs 148 kg. How much does a simple solid state camera weigh these days? It couldn't be more than several grams I would think. And what's this about a "video signal"? To confirm satellite deployment they would need only one single still frame which would only be transmitted if they needed it. And so what if it takes a dayor two to transmit the image along with its other data streams? They are going to be wondering about this for months or years.
  
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2. Re:Weight and telemetry by c6gunner · 2010-12-12 16:08 · Score: 2
  
  Those things are a necessity when the camera is a mission-critical piece of kit that needs to survive and function perfectly for a couple years; they're just a nice-to-have when the camera is meant to take pictures - which you probably won't even need - bare minutes after achieving orbit.
3. Re:Weight and telemetry by Muad'Dave · 2010-12-13 01:55 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Those things are a necessity when the camera is a mission-critical piece of kit ...
  Not really true - it only takes one piece of non launch-rated equipment to mess up the whole works. Imagine it shorting out or breaking into a zillion pieces on launch and getting into the science instruments.
  Your idea would work if it were physically and electrically separated from the main payload, but that would entail a lot of extra weight.
  The microswitch probably did its job - the sat probably moved enough to trigger that. The fact that no amateur satellite watchers have seen it and the Air Force hasn't found it with radar are good indications that it hung up on deploy.
  
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4. Re:Weight and telemetry by tibit · 2010-12-13 02:11 · Score: 2
  
  A "current" camera is essentially a chip the size of a SO-8, a small cast lens retainer that's attached to the PCB, and the lens -- everything fits in under a cubic centimeter. It'd take tremendous accelerations to "dissolve it into tiny bits" -- if the camera would disintegrate, there would be nothing left of the rocket. F=m*a after all, with m on the order of a gram.
  If you go for a pinhole, it'd be even simpler -- the pinhole and enclosure (light shield) are a little cast piece that can be bonded to the PCB while the PCB itself is being laminated. Probably the cable will weigh more than the camera, even if you manufacture the camera and cable as a flex PCB, as many aerospace gadgets are done for weight savings and reliability (at least one connector less).
  
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Re:You can't buy those at walmart by tibit · 2010-12-13 02:17 · Score: 2

There are two aspects of space radiation: errors and cumulative damage. When you shop for mission-critical equipment, especially for the control computers, you want them to work just fine in spite of radiation. For a camera like that: who cares if there are upsets in individual pixels periodically, or if it becomes noisier after a few days. COTS laptops work just fine on IST, and it's hardly a radiation-tight environment, so I think that the space buffs here who are used to $1E6 through $1E8 price tags for cameras just need to calm down. It's not a Cassini mission.

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A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.