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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.
> 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.
Pretty sure they wrote it all in Ruby on Rockets.
~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"
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".
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.
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
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.'"
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.'"
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.
Yeah, but it uses systemd as well.
We can't visit them but we could send messages to promising ones.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.
who gives a shit about the Earth's moon and planets, we'll never be able to visit them.....
-- some moron like you who doesn't know what is technically possible
Typically spacecraft software is computer verified for its correctness -- the main reason it is so expensive. So using Rust would not have helped.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
if you want to call those that seek scientific information about the universe nutters go ahead; if you want to jerk off at the end of life of successful monumental project go ahead, you're just being a jerk-off troll.
kepler already did its job and from backlog of data which is still being processed we'll know percentages of what types of stars have what kinds of planets, distributions of rocky and gaseous planets, percent planets in habitable zone and also gas giants in habitable zone.
Its code of conduct simply forbids bugs. Awesome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Jokes aside, there was an interesting presentation by Mark Maimone at CppCon 14 about using C++ on the Mars rovers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They use a fairly restricted set of C++ features, but overloaded new and delete operators to avoid fatal memory space issues.
Still not as bad as StackExchange dot assholes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Then we should be all set. It will boot up even faster, now!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
A "computer" can not "verify" software for correctness.
Aka, halting problem and such.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Typically spacecraft software is hand verified for its correctness -- the main reason it is so expensive.
On a space program, the teams are highly experienced at verifying software.
Correction: A "computer" can not "verify" *all* software for correctness.
It makes quite a big difference, there is an entire field devoted to Formal Verification.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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"
More importantly, it's the people who do give a shit, and who don't really care about what is "technically impossible," because that only encourages the invention of new technologies. Remember - even into the 1940s, people were decrying Goddard as an idiot for thinking you could reach orbit with a liquid-fuelled rocket.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
Its code of conduct simply forbids bugs. Awesome.
When the NASA engineer stated that "failure is not an option", he was really talking to the computers.
Yes, I simplified.
Formal Verification requires a program and a specification (in a formal language like Z) and only proves that the program is conforming to the specification or not. In other words it does not prove that the program does what it is intended to do.
So: for twice the work, once formulating the concepts in Z and then coding them in a particular language you now can run a a formal verification, either manually or with computer assistance.
However: with double the work you have now double the options to make mistakes (which might be found by the verification process). But: no one saves you from "wrong specifications".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So what? You're not going there. Ever. Nobody is going anywhere.
Just because you haven't been able to leave your mom's basement, doesn't mean others are so restricted. The only thing slowing space exploration currently is political will, not technological progress. If the human race worked together to really make an effort at space, we could have orbiting colonies in around 20 years, it isn't that hard.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You are still over-simplifying somewhat.
The option to make a mistake program and in the specification are not exactly the same. Bugs in the code and bugs in the spec are two different kinds of mistake. One has a lower probability and is more visible than the other. Rather than doubling the number of places that a bug can be made, it remove the options for implementation errors and replaces then with fewer options to make specification errors.
Assuming that specs are being written manually. It is far more useful to derive a spec automatically from a smaller definition of how it should behave. Again this is reducing the number of options to make mistakes and increasing their visibility. So now we are quite a long way from what you originally wrote?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
You're right, no one from Earth will ever walk on another world such as the moon. Puny minded little turd, aren't you?
So now we are quite a long way from what you originally wrote?
Actually not.
As a automated verifier only can check if a program confirms to the specification.
With manual verifying like Hoars method etc. you can "figure" what the program is doing. And then make a rational choice if that makes sense. An algorithm can hardly do that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.