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NASA Reconnects With 'Lost' STEREO-B Satellite (businessinsider.com)
NASA lost contact with its STEREO-B spacecraft twenty-two months ago during a routine 72-hour test. On Sunday, the spacecraft reconnected with NASA roughly 189 million miles away from Earth. While that would seem like a cause for celebration, "the very hard and scary work is just the beginning, says Stereo project scientist Joe Gurman, as the agency has to turn on the computer to learn more about the current state of the spacecraft -- a process that may make the craft lose contact with them again. Slashdot user bongey writes: NASA may have only two minutes or less to fix a STEREO-B satellite before the computer causes it to lose contact again. NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly twenty-two months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientists are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again. A more detailed technical summary can be found here. "We have something like two minutes between when STEREO-B receives the command to boot up one of its computers and when it starts doing what we don't want it to do," Gurman said. Business Insider writes, "Making matters worse, it takes about 20 seconds to send commands to the spacecraft -- a data rate that makes a dial-up modem seem lightning fast."
Can't they boot it up in safe mode? I'm serious.
22.2 is where it's at!
It might get 50MB/s you just ahve to deal with a 20 second delay. I could live with that over a modem for downloading media. Just not a FPS.
Just boot it up in Safe mode
Related:
Start Wandows Ngrmadly
After a silence of 22 months, contact was regained at 10:27 UTC on August 21, 2016, when the NASA Deep Space Network established a lock on STEREO-B.[4] The following day, additional telemetry received confirmed the spacecraft is in an uncontrolled spin of about 3 deg/sec, which cannot be corrected at current power levels. Stabilization may not be achieved for another year due to insufficient power reserves.
STEREO
This is the kind of stuff that is truly exciting to an engineer interested in space. A satellite in an uncontrolled spin due to a bad inertial unit, without enough power in its batteries to transmit at full power, a network of deep space communications satellites colliding signals to create constructive interference to boost communications, a plan to point several radio telescopes towards it in the hope to hear something, sweeping the sky with different frequencies and if all else fails point the Hubble at it.
Combined with the short time window to make things work the only thing missing here is Matt Damon and you got yourself a summer blockbuster.
NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly twenty-two months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientists are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again.
What's the point of being able to talk to it if they can't turn it on and actually do stuff with it?
If they thought they lost it 22 months ago, they have nothing further to lose if it goes away again now.
With no javascript the page is black-on-black. Congrats for leading edge tech.
You have to be trolling.
Knowledge of what the Sun is doing is essential for anything we do in space, including studying the weather and climate, because solar radiation is dangerous to equipment as well as people. And down here on earth - someday there is going to be a solar storm such as happened in 1859, which set telegraph cables sparking across the planet. Today, such a thing would fry our phone and electric systems if we can't predict it with the certainty needed to, literally, shut down and disconnect our electricity and copper communication networks while it passes by.
And of course, while it is CO and methane that are driving climate change, the heat it traps comes from the Sun, so good knowledge of what the Sun is doing is needed to understand our measurements of temperature.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2 F2
Dammit!
TFA quoted one of the NASA engineers "If we turn on the computer, which is the only way we can get insight into the current state of the spacecraft ... what got us into this mess in the first place could turn back on again."
It seems that in order to really know what commands to send, they first need to query some data from the computer. So something like:
Query the most interesting parameter. 20 seconds to rx the reply. (1:40 remaining)
Decide what to query at next. 10 seconds to think and decide. (1:30 remaining).
Decide on a fix and get it sent off, 1 minute. (30 seconds remaining).
Commands take 20 seconds to reach the spacecraft (10 seconds remaining).
Craft executes the instructions, changing its orientation or whatever is required.
Unpucker.
View the page source. It seems that stalking analytics code from iPerceptions and Google is the reason their forcing Javascript use.
https://www.google.com/analyti...
> It seems that stalking analytics [...] is the reason their forcing Javascript use.
Yeah. I imagined that much. Sometimes I got the time to read the page source, even to find out how to get to the "content". Other times I just think "too bad".
But this reinforces me in what I'm doing: by default, no Javascript (no: not NoScript, no AdBlocker*. Simply disable Javascript execution).
Advertisers: *I* fucking decide what code is run on my machine. And yours isn't most of the time allowed to. Cry me a river.
When are they ever going to implement the AE-36 units??
The great and powerful United States can't even communicate with one of their new satellites, HA HA HA, sooo funny. Maybe we ought to cut them some slack when their launches fail.
mother fucker please. what carrier tech do you think can be used to signal that far? aint no stereo up there. slashdot is fraud
Why is this even on Slashdot? It sounds like it belongs on the Missed Connections page of Craigslist or something like that?
You're right. I interpreted that "20 seconds" as meaning 20 seconds delay. That would indicate a distance about 12-13 times as far as the moon. As you mentioned, the craft is actually roughly on the opposite side of earth's orbit, near where the earth will be in 5-6 months. That's a much further distance, about 16 minutes at the speed of light.
> most likely the result of the small bandwidth they can work with due to the computer not being booted up or something - because for example the "BIOS" can only receiver commands at 1kb/s or something
That, or since it's low on power, the data rate is much lower than max. (That's to be expected, over long distances, lower power signals need to be slower.)
The transceiver is capable of up to 427 Kbps or 720 Kbps, depending on the source you read.
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/im...
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/sp...
As you said, it's entirely possible that the main computer can do that data rate, but the IPMI/DRAC/ILO is far slower, or the lack of available power dictates a slow rate.
Can't they just switch it to "Stereo A"? I mean even my A/V receiver at home has that switch.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Space is made in a Hollywood basement.
I don't know anything about there systems, but I am pretty sure I know what will happen when you turn on the "spacecraft’s command loss timer". And I'm guessing that the timer is set to 22 months. I'm just trying to work out how many parsecs that is.
I wonder what it would be like running a CD mount on that IPMI...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?