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NASA's Kepler Enters Emergency Mode 75 Million Miles From Earth (theverge.com)
Loren Grush, writing for The Verge: NASA engineers have declared a mission emergency for the agency's planet-hunting spacecraft Kepler, which has somehow switched into emergency mode. Now that a mission emergency has been declared, the Kepler team has priority access to NASA's deep space telecommunications system in order to try to get the spacecraft back to normal operations. Emergency mode is the lowest operational mode the spacecraft has. It also requires a lot more fuel than usual, which is why the Kepler mission team is working hard to get the spacecraft back to normal. But communication with Kepler isn't easy. The spacecraft is estimated to be 75 million miles away from Earth right now, according to NASA, so any communications signal traveling at the speed of light will take up to 13 minutes to travel to and from the spacecraft. Kepler has detected nearly 5,000 exoplanets over the years -- of which 1,000 have been confirmed.
Does anybody know if they wrote its software using the Rust programming language? I ask because as I understand it, Rust prevents segfaults. Segfaults are the number one cause of computer systems entering crash or emergency mode. If they didn't use Rust, would using Rust have prevented this incident? If they did use Rust, how could this have possibly happened?
> Emergency mode is the lowest operational mode the spacecraft has. It also requires a lot more fuel than usual
Why?
You know, if you say "is", you really don't have to say "currently" or "right now", much less both.
~7 minutes for a signal to get there, and another ~7 minutes for the reply to come back. Sounds like 13 minutes to me, given a bit of rounding.
To & from is 150 million miles, which works out to 13 minutes. How did they 'fail'?
"to and from the spacecraft" means *two* times 75 millions miles, the signal must come back to know if your action worked, the 13 minutes mark seems correct.
true, but still one restart should do it. Not a whole series of back and forth single responses. I'd think the craft would be sending a stream of status information anyway assisting in pinpointing the issue.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"up to 13 minutes".
Even if they don't get ti fixed, Kepler has had an absolutely amazing run. The initial planned mission lifetime was 3.5 years, and that was in 2009. So we've gotten almost twice as much out of it as it was planned.
One of my favorite computer games from the 1990s was Masters of Orion II, 4X space exploration/conquering game. One thing in that game and many similar games was the idea that you couldn't find out what planets were in a star system until you had actually sent a probe there. It is absolutely amazing that shortly after those games were made, we had the technology to detect planets in other star systems while remaining in comfort here.
13 minutes? More like 7 unless there's a lot of processing delay. Batch Jobs perhaps? Sorting cards?
People like you who are so eager to show how clever you think you are, that you'll find fault where there is none instead of trying to understand how something might be possible, are what's wrong with this site. You've made it a hostile environment for anyone who actually wants to communicate, especially something non-trivial. Anyone doing so will spend more time explaining how you've twisted and misunderstood what they wrote than actually conversing.
That you've become so common is part of the reason why so few stories have more than 30-40 comments these days. The bottom line is, insecurity is something you deal with inside yourself. You won't get rid of it for more than a second or two by trying to "prove" again and again that you're so clever you found the "obvious flaw" that "everyone missed".
You've made it a hostile environment for anyone who actually wants to communicate, especially something non-trivial. Anyone doing so will spend more time explaining how you've twisted and misunderstood what they wrote than actually conversing.
... which will spiral downward into endless bickering back and forth, because such people are not known for their ability to say "oh, yeah I did misunderstand, thanks for clearing that up". Entire threads are based on this all the time.
Never has a sig been more appropriate. What a huge failure you are!
If you restart, are you sure it'll actually boot up properly again? I can only speculate, but I expect their procedure is to determine the cause of the problem before they attempt to correct it.
Your comment just made me notice,
Why the hell don't sigs show up on the mobile site?????
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Seriously, who gives a shit about exoplanets? We'll never be able to visit them. It's mostly science fiction to satisfy you dorks.
Kepler already had 2 of its 4 reaction wheels fail. If a third is gone, it'd mean they have to use the thrusters more, reducing mission lifetime.
The summary clearly states:
"so any communications signal traveling at the speed of light will take up to 13 minutes to travel to and from the spacecraft."
You done goofed. You're not clever. You're not funny.
or NASA screwed up converting to metric time
rewriting history since 2109
Why the hell don't sigs show up on the mobile site?????
Because, sigs is short for signature, and signatures were originally on paper...aka STATIONARY. Therefore, they can't be mobile.
rewriting history since 2109
Your logic is infallible.
I'm not quite sure... was it an emergency?
Why do they have to estimate the position? I mean to some extent it will be estimated, but that's probably 1 part in a few million potential difference which is not probably worth putting the word "estimated" in there.
Oh, are they approximating it and just used the not-best word I wonder?
Would you restart a mission critical computer before testing all possible alternatives? I'm glad you don't look after my systems!
Fun fact: right after the French Revolution, there really was a decimal time standard, with a 10-hour day, a 100-minute hour, and a 100-second minute.
To & from is 150 million miles, which works out to 13 minutes. How did they 'fail'?
It's actually an English failure, not one of mathematics. The statement is vague, and doesn't make it clear whether they're talking about a round trip, because it talks about "a signal" when in reality if you have a round trip, you have at least two signals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not sure of you are pointing this out, but it will not take up to 13 minutes, but rather at least 13 minutes. But since we can assume they are using light speed communication, it will take 13 minutes.
Have gnu, will travel.
true, but still one restart should do it. Not a whole series of back and forth single responses. I'd think the craft would be sending a stream of status information anyway assisting in pinpointing the issue.
No, because you have to figure out what went wrong before you try and issue such commands. The first rule is "do not lose the spacecraft," which can (and has) happened if the wrong commands are uploaded.
The spacecraft will send back a bunch of status info (bandwidth is limited, so that typically won't be everything), the spacecraft engineering team puzzles over that, and then send commands such as "try doing X, and then send us back the readings from sensors Y and Z." 15 minutes+ later they get the results from that back, and iterate. They probably have a spacecraft emulator here on the ground they try such things on first, which also adds to the time. This all takes time, and it really cannot be rushed much (besides having full DSN time to do these iterations, which a declared emergency will get you).
This is fucking Slashdot, not a youtube comments section. We should not be coddling people who can't figure out how to use the internets.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Swatch time!
true, but still one restart should do it. Not a whole series of back and forth single responses. I'd think the craft would be sending a stream of status information anyway assisting in pinpointing the issue.
I doubt the computer system is the problem here, or that it crashed. The problem is more likely an unexpected response to a command for the spacecraft to do something.
To use a metaphor, this is not like a robot with a CPU crash, this is like a robot reporting that it stopped moving because can't tell what its leg is doing.
75,000,000 miles / 186,282 miles per sec / 60 sec per min = 6.53 minutes each way. That's 13 minutes round trip, which is what they said.
Must have detected a planet that didn't want to be detected.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
When the spacecraft is in emergency mode it means something serious went wrong. It can't even assume its radio receiver or transmitter is working right. It tries to put itself into a safe power positive orientation and then waits for instructions. It may not know if it is properly pointing its antenna toward Earth, so it switches to a low speed, low gain antenna so it doesn't need to point accurately. Several back and forth comm exchanges happen to check status and put the spacecraft back into a good configuration. They don't just reboot it.
What are they used for?
Interesting. It might just work.
"safe mode" is probably what they are in.
and 75 million miles isn't very far. Mars is farther, and NASA has lots of spacecraft farther than 75 million miles.
At that kind of distance, DSN has a very good link margin, even if the spacecraft is on omnidirectional low gain antennas: and they're probably running at about 8 bit/second fallback rate.
In fact, at this very minute, they're receiving from Kepler at Madrid at 500 bps. -149dBm is pretty low (kTB for 300K is -174 dBm/Hz, and 500 Hz puts it at -147)
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
Still not as bad as StackExchange dot assholes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Probably second best joke ever, best one still goes to phantomfive, I believe. :-/
To bad no one will get it
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I thought something seemed off as it takes 8 minutes for sunlight to reach us and the Sun is 93 Million Miles away.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
As of Sunday morning, the Emergency Mode was resolved; and the spacecraft was returned to normal mode. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/m...
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
NASA are working on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It probably got hit by the Windows 10 Upgrade.
Kepler is now out of Emergency Mode and responding to commands.
The Event happened before the manuver was started and probably did not involve the reaction wheels.
The actual cause is not known yet.