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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.
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...
Is it me, or do reaction wheels seem to be the most failure prone part of space telescopes?
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.
Reaction Wheels on spacecraft have always had problems and fail regularly. They are only on spaceships that are flying in space as they are used to orient the ship without using fuel. Rovers don't need them.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
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...
To be fair, NASA already "burned" quite a bit of karma on previous Mars missions. It just seems like the last few have been exceptionally successful in comparison.
Play with my webcams and lights here
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?
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.
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
They might be, but it wouldn't matter. The friction is probably due to ice forming on the reaction wheel or its axle. Ice will eventually clog up even a mag-lev system. Space is just a difficult place to keep mechanisms working.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
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
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.
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.