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Equipment Failure May Cut Kepler Mission Short
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "According to the New York Times, an equipment failure on the Kepler spacecraft may mean the end of its planet-hunting mission. One of the reaction wheels that maintains the craft's orientation — critical to long-exposure imaging — has failed. 'In January engineers noticed that one of the reaction wheels that keep the spacecraft pointed was experiencing too much friction. They shut the spacecraft down for a couple of weeks to give it a rest, in the hopes that the wheel’s lubricant would spread out and solve the problem. But when they turned it back on, the friction was still there. Until now, the problem had not interfered with observations, which are scheduled to go on until at least 2016. Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, but one failed last year after showing signs of erratic friction. Three wheels are required to keep Kepler properly and precisely aimed. Loss of the wheel has robbed it of the ability to detect Earth-size planets, although project managers hope to remedy the situation. The odds, astronomers said, are less than 50-50.'"
Obvious Futurama response:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Isjgc0oX0s
Sad news for such a promising mission.
Surely the odds are astronomical?
That little probe has been put through a lot. I guess it would be okay to let it come home a little early. Maybe it can help prepare a party for its rover friends when they make it back! :)
Worry not! NASA's TESS and ESA's Gaia missions will be there to pick up the slack. Gaia launches this year and TESS in 2017.
We all knew when Spirit and Opportunity kept exceeding their mission lifetimes by different multiples, that some other poor mission would eventually get the karma burn.
It's the extended mission (to 2016) that may be cut short. The primary mission is already over, in 2012.
They still have 2 reaction wheels, and also thrusters, and a fair amount of fuel. In the press release there was a discussion of options, which "are likely to include steps to attempt to recover wheel functionality and to investigate the utility of a hybrid mode, using both wheels and thrusters."
My guess is that, if they cannot recover pointed mode, they will put the spacecraft in a slow roll, which (if it is slow enough) would be good enough to detect hot Jupiters, but not Earth-like planets.
I would have thought that adding a few extra comparatively simple mechanical components, commonly understood to be error-prone (remember Voyager 2...) into a billion dollar mission would be a no-brainer.
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe you missed the part where it mentioned the fact that they -had- redundancy, and that one had also failed?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
So we, as a species, should stop looking towards the stars and keep our noses to the ground and dig, dig until we build utopia on planet Earth? Somehow I do not think that is a long-term survival prospect for our species.
[insert link to graph showing NASA's budget as compared to DoD budget and other government agencies' budgets].
The reptoids will stop at nothing to prevent humans from finding their homeworld!
But seriously, bummer. Many years ago (1997!) I went to a NASA Ames / Moffet Field open house. Various working groups had set up displays showing the mission concepts they were working on. One of these was Kepler.
They added an extra wheel and whatnot to let it make it's mission, which officially ended in 2012. It is already in extended time and all data we get from it now is essentially a bonus.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The shuttle had humans on it... Kepler doesn't...
they were keeping their budget on MtGox...
Is it me, or do reaction wheels seem to be the most failure prone part of space telescopes?
Zoidberg: All six thousand hulls have been breached.
Fry: Oh, the fools! Why didn't they build it with six thousand and one hulls? When will they learn?
Something tells me if they want to, they can fix it. Eventually.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
That little probe has been put through a lot. I guess it would be okay to let it come home a little early. Maybe it can help prepare a party for its rover friends when they make it back! :)
http://xkcd.com/695/
Obviously the Galactic Ghoul operating on an interstellar scale. I'd be taking a good hard look at the systems next up on Kepler's observing schedule...
It's not exactly comforting to know that their technical support steps involve, "Have you tried turning it off and on?"
Did you try switching it off, then switching it back on?
Just send the space shuttle up to fix it.
Oh wait...
If only we had a vehicle we could send up with some astronauts to fix it. Couldn't be any harder than fixing Hubble could it? Oh, right.....
These seem to be a relatively common source of woe for spacecraft that use them. I understand it's moving parts and all that, but surely in 0-G there can't be *that* much wear on bearings. Anyway, there seems to be plenty of work on magnetic bearings for momentum wheels, which would eliminate mechanical wear. Or is it not the bearings that fail? Can any /. readers shed some light on why these things seem to pack it in so frequently?
no, the United States as a nation (just as all other nations) should address its terrestrial problems before looking to extraterrestrial ones... if it can never address its terrestrial ones then it kinda doesn't give it much credibility in solving extraterrestrial ones.
Anyone who thinks the survival or our species really depends on NASA is even more deluded than the ignorant Keynesian economists.
The other problem with trying to look to the stars whilst problems on earth get worse is that the problems on earth can affect the stellar mission... and I suspect that's what may have happened in this case... trying to achieve difficult objectives on a relatively shoestring budget is always going to result in shortcuts being taken and quality processes being compromised.
When America can afford to look to the stars, they should. Until then, they are wasting their time (and precious taxpayer money).
one reaction wheel failed and they lost a primary mission objective... where's the redundancy in that?
so what if there were four wheels... if it only takes one to fail and kill the mission, then that one is a single point of failure and the other three aren't redundancies for that critical one.
I'm sure there's lots we can do with it, even it can't perform either of it's primary roles anymore.
Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, but one failed last year after showing signs of erratic friction. Three wheels are required to keep Kepler properly and precisely aimed, and now there are only two.
There you go.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
- Make better reaction wheels
- Make better valves
Those two things always come back when missions end, or when a rocket launch has to be delayed.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
When America can afford to look to the stars, they should. Until then, they are wasting their time (and precious taxpayer money).
If that isn't the finest example of short-sighted thinking, I don't know what is. What you're suggesting is we wait until the last possible second to explore what might be out there just because NASA's budget represents a fraction of a percent of the overall national budget.
If you're that concerned about Federal spending, we can cut the military by 50%, stop all subsidies to business (sugar productoin, ethanol production, farm subsidies in general, scientific advances, production incentives, etc), not to mention all the entitlements people complain someone else is receiving but not the ones they're receiving.
If you want to go that way, I'll back you, but you can't then complain when things fall apart because the private sector has come to rely on government largess.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Is there some other way to use this instrument in it's hobbled state? Lunar mapping? Asteroid hunting? Etc...?? Would be nice to salvage the hardware, even if the primary mission is toasted.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
We need to seriously reconsider how sapce assets are deployed, serviced, and supplied. Launching a satellite and then relying on onboard reliability, supplies, and redundancy may have been a valid strategy in the 20th century however, considering the assets we now have deployed, it is obsolete. The obvious downside of the onboard strategy is that one single component failure of a critical system can result in the failure of the bird. And considering that one of the largest cost of a satellite is the launch and insurance for the launch throwing away a satellite because of one failure is very wasteful. What is needed is a new strategy where satellites can receive service including consumables, new components, and rebuilt systems. We have the ISS up there so have a location to start with. What we need is two things, standards for capture and hardware. All satellites need to have a common adapter ring to fulfill the need to capture the bird in orbit. The second component is a space tug that can then capture a bird and bring it down to the ISS. I understand that the ISS would have to have some type of service module added to it for fuel and probably some type of space dock. Considering the amount of space hardware in orbit that can be reused if it simply had fuel or a component be replaced this type of system would surely pay for itself.
OMFG, I've seen it all now.
space programs are great, but not at the expense of burying future generations in debt
Do you ever read newspapers? Or do you get all your news from Limbaugh and FOX? The deficit is shrinking far faster than thought. And the space program is one half of one percent of the budget. Eighteen billion compared to the 711 billion military budget, as big as the five next largest armies in the world combined.
Stupid brainwashed fool! There seems to be a lot like you here lately, where did the idiots all come from in the last few years? You, sir, are a fucking moron. What the hell is an antiscience, anti-nerd, ignorant refneck doing at slashdot? Go away and stop trolling us, idiot.
From the Slashdot summary:
One of the reaction wheels that maintains the craft's orientation — critical to long-exposure imaging — has failed.
Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, but one failed last year after showing signs of erratic friction. Three wheels are required to keep Kepler properly and precisely aimed. Loss of the wheel has robbed it of the ability to detect Earth-size planets, although project managers hope to remedy the situation.
No mention of two anything.
Your quote is from the TFA (which I usually don't bother reading).
Still seems as though if they can lose two wheels out of four in a single mission, with three wheels required, any reliability engineer would tell you that the level of redundancy is insufficient.
If that isn't the finest example of short-sighted thinking, I don't know what is. What you're suggesting is we wait until the last possible second to explore what might be out there just because NASA's budget represents a fraction of a percent of the overall national budget.
Not really. I'm just highlighting that America's budget is so far down the toilet that fixing it should take priority over making it worse.
America should cut military spending... by 80%, and all subsidies should be stopped.
If the Slashdot article was about a defense issue, I would have raised the issue of defense spending. The story in this case was about space, so I highlighted how much of a waste of taxpayer money NASA is at the moment. If NASA was doing anything that benefited average Americans I would be all for it, but NASA is full of bureaucrats and academics peddling their own bandwagons.
By the way; I'm a Ron Paul supporter.
You are an idiot if you really believe what you read by Reuters.
Even the CPI numbers are cooked. Maybe instead of reading Reuters (where do you think Fox gets its stories?) you should listen to Peter Schiff and Ron Paul, who have predicted recent events. A lot of people seem to think that Peter is wrong on the dollar collapse simply because he refuses to nail it down to a specific time, but it will happen soon enough. Keynesians are fools... always have been.
Keep chugging your mainstream media kool aid.
$17 trillion in debt - that means every American taxpayer is $150k in debt merely from government spending (not including their own debt), and that doesn't even include unfunded liabilities that aren't included in the national debt. Taxpayers are forking out $220 billion on interest alone, at a 0.25% interest rate... if that interest raises (due to Fed pressure to raise it if demand for bonds falls) Americans will be fucked. The Fed will print to oblivion and the world will stop trading in US dollars. If the US defaults on it's debt, it will lose all international credibility and the world will stop trading in US dollars.
The writing is on the wall. It's just unfortunate (for you) that you (like many others) seem to be unable to read.
So if the odds of remedying the situation is less than 50-50 what exactly is it; 42-42, 37-37, 24-24?
- Peder
But what if the extraterrestrial mission end up solving the terrestrial problems. Just look at Tang and all the other great inventions that came about from the space program. More seriously, if we started moving populations into space that would probably help things quite a bit. There is only so much economic growth you can have in a closed system. And if the economy is not growing it is considered to be failing.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
inventions that came out of the space race weren't due to the "space race"... they were because of huge R&D investments made by government during a cold war with Russia, and American taxpayers probably still haven't broken even from R&D investment in the mid 1900's.
The space race was merely a front for ridiculous unwarranted missile and spy satellite R&D.
if we started moving populations into space
The United States doesn't even have it's own regular access to Low Earth Orbit... humanity is decades away from making space stations beyond the size of supporting specialists.
The problem isn't that the economy isn't growing... growth cannot be sustained (on earth alone anyway) but the problem is that many Americans don't realize just how fucked the economy really is.
It's pretty hard to be upbeat when you can see a country collapsing through cracks between fake backgrounds propped up by a government out of control that show off how great things are meant to be. There's nothing to be optimistic about in America today. The best you can do is look after yourself and your family and forget your country, because your country doesn't give a fuck about you or your family.
The mission was supposed to last until 2013 so the wheels lasted as long as they were supposed to. The problem is other components did not work as initially predicted so the mission did not produce as many results as they hoped to.