Space Station's 'Cubesat Cannon' Has Gone Rogue

astroengine writes: Last night (Thursday), two more of Planet Lab's shoebox-sized Earth imaging satellites launched themselves from aboard the International Space Station, the latest in a series of technical mysteries involving a commercially owned CubeSat deployer located outside Japan's Kibo laboratory module. Station commander Steve Swanson was storing some blood samples in one of the station's freezers Friday morning when he noticed that the doors on NanoRack's cubesat deployer were open, said NASA mission commentator Pat Ryan. Flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston determined that two CubeSats had been inadvertently released. "No crew members or ground controllers saw the deployment. They reviewed all the camera footage and there was no views of it there either," Ryan said.

Comments

Where are the interlocks?

[wiredlogic]

This is pretty bad. I designed a controller for some mechanical actuators on a satellite once and the design was filled with carefully designed interlocks and watchdog logic that would prevent an unintentional deployment in the event of multiple failures. It's astonishing that this could get installed on the ISS without a similarly rigorous design.

The joys (and problems) of romaji

[zooblethorpe]

Or, because its a Japanese module it is a word in their language. I don't know, something like "Hope".

Depending on how it's spelled in Japanese, it could be tons of different words.

Looking just at how it's spelled in romaji (the Roman alphabet), Kibo has no macron over the "o", which, strictly speaking, means a short "o" value. (Instead of syllabic stress as used in English, Japanese uses a concept called a "mora" by linguists, referring to the time length of a sound.)

(Also, because Slashcode is still not unicode-compliant, and is fundamentally US-centric, I'm using the ^ circumflex over vowels instead of the overbar macron, which Slashcode just eats and refuses to display.)

Kibo with a short "o" could mean:

• one's youngest aunt
• the size, scale, or scope of a thing
• the Buddhist divinity Hârîtî, sometimes viewed as a goddess of childbirth and children
• a family's death register

Meanwhile, kibô with a long "o" could mean:

• hope
• something planned and hoped for
• a plan, planning
• a deadly crisis, a critical moment
• an unusual or wild plan
• prayerful hope
• the sixteenth night of a lunar month
• starving poverty
• a devilishly clever plan or plot
• the fourteenth night of a lunar month
• hopeful anticipation
• deception, glamour
• slander, blame, strong criticism
• a plan to ensnare or entrap someone
• a shortage or deficiency after running out of something

This range of meanings for the Japanese word kibo or kibô is almost silly, it's so broad. I hope this might begin to explain why written Japanese still uses kanji (Chinese characters) -- all of the above meanings that fall under one or two romaji spellings are each spelled differently when written in kanji.

Anyway, for the satellites, I'm pretty sure the intended meaning must clearly be youngest aunt. Or maybe it's a plan to ensnare or entrap someone? :-P

Cheers,