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Mars Climate Orbiter AWOL
Moose2000 writes " The BBC reports that NASA has lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter.
If it doesn't get back in touch, it's not just the immediate science stuff lost - it was supposed to stay in orbit as a communications relay for future missions too.
" Communication has been lost for almost 3 hours now, it appears - so there's still hope. Update: 09/23 01:36 by H :It now appears that a steering problem may have caused it to crash into the planet.
I'm guessing it ran embedded software on double- or triple-redundant systems connected with good old 1970-era MIL-STD-1553 busses. Whatever it was would have to be radiation hardened.
In the spirit of 'lighter-cheaper-faster' I wouldn't be surprised if NASA already has a standardized hardware layout for all these next generation mini-probes.
The 1553 bus is _everywhere_ in space. It's even going to be on the ISS. Fortunately the crew will have a wireless LAN and IBM Thinkpad 760's (with Solaris & Win95) as well.
The link to the real time telemetry seems to indicate that the probe is still unreachable. The FLORIDA TODAY link says the same (and it seems to be updated very rapidly). Can you provide a URL?
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Xenu loves you!
Gino wrote:
;)
>
> here is a link to the real time telemetry
> of the orbiter.
Oh great. Now we're about to slashdot the orbiter!
They said it was 15 miles low of it's minimum altitude, when it fired it's orbital insertion motors, and looks to be a complete loss.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/23/mars.orbi
Scientific Reality:The ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe during an Earth flyby, (with the probe within a few light-seconds of the transmitter), is a hell of a lot higher than the ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe near Mars, (i.e. at a distance of many light-minutes). Thus, the probability of an MCO-style worst-case scenario happening to an RTG-based probe on Earth flyby (I don't recall even the most ardent eco-dude worried about the Venus flyby :-) is still negligible.
(You'll also note that I'm assuming, deliberately and incorrectly, that the dispersal of Cassini's plutonium in Earth's atmosphere would be the catastrophe the anti-nukes told us it would be. It wouldn't. Before they were banned, above-ground nuclear weapons tests had already dispersed many Cassinis' worth of plutonium into the atmosphere, and we're still alive.)
Political Reality:Unfortunately, the naive analysis, which is the only thing the media will propagate, and the only thing the politicians will understand - will read something like this: "We told you so! This is exactly what those eeeeeevil scientists said could never happen with Cassini! But we KNEW! We knew that NASA can't be trusted to fly its probes perfectly, but nobody listened to us! Well, yer gonna hafta listen now! MCO burned up in the atmosphere just like we feared Cassini would! We were right and the eeeeeevil scientists were wrong! Ban all RTGs now before NASA does this with an RTG-based probe in Earth's atmosphere!" And the politicians will obey the screaming hordes.
The loss of MCO is bad for Mars science, but not catastrophic, given the redundancy NASA is putting into its Mars program. Lots of small ships is better than one big ship. The political fallout from the preceding naive analysis of MCO's fiery demise, however, will be much longer-lived and carry a much higher price than the loss of one probe.
If we're lucky, it'll be limited to a ban on Earth flybys for any future RTG-based probes. If we're unlucky, it'll spell the end of RTGs altogether.
While you can easily explore the inner planets on solar power, and maybe even Jupiter if you're careful and advance solar technology somewaht, the mass penalty for larger-and-larger solar panels increases dramatically as you move away from the sun. If one of the side-effects of the MCO failure results in a ban on RTGs, we can basically forget about exploring the outer solar system for at least a generation (i.e. until we can come up with a better technology). That would be a major blow to space science.
If it is gone (and I'm hoping fervently that it isn't), then we've got a lot to thank Deep Space 1 for.
The beeb lists four or five possibilities, and most of them could have been taken care of by the new technologies on DS1. If MCO did lose its way, it may be one of the last NASA craft to do so.
Let's just hope that it's only in safe mode.
If it STAYS silent, there's a pattern forming that will bring the conspiracy theorists out of the closet.
Still, contact was lost AFTER a engine burn, just as Mars Observer disappeared after a scheduled burn. It's been theorized that Observer blew up, due to a design fault. Let's hope that it just went into that "safe mode", and not that our probe design teams need a major re-working. . .
Anyway, for those interested, if they do manage to make contact again here is a link to the real time telemetry of the orbiter.
something wicked this way comes...
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Press F1 to continue...
;)
There's never a damn keyboard in deep space when you need one is there!
something wicked this way comes...
Now if only my wife could understand this logic!
:-)
as well as your girlfriend and mistress do
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The latest breaking news on the Mars Orbiter can be found at Astronomy Now.
It's got to be Elvis. Not only did the Mars Observer "disappear" in early 1993, but the Soviets/Russians had two spacecraft fail (and disappear) just the year before.
Joe
I don't suppose NASA painted a picture of a Dove on the side of it, did they?
Please continue sending your crunchy satellites on a bi-annual schedule. This corresponds nicely to our feeding and breeding schedule. Failure to comply would be bad.
*Big Martian dude out.*
Obviously, it requires a much more precise heading to get into orbit around a planet than to simply flyby, and consequently the Martian probes require more course corrections than the Voyager probes did.
Also, and this factor cannot be forgotten, Voyager dates from NASA's "rich" time, when they could spend billions of dollars on a probe. These modern probes have had an order of magnitude less money spend on them. This means less redudancy, less testing, and therefore less reliablity.
Pluto is again the furthest planet out. It passed outside of Neptune's orbit last year.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
From the article: Engineers hope that the spacecraft has entered a "safe mode" with its internal computer executing commands designed to put it back into normal operation.
Damn, our space program running on Win95?
Moderators please! Don't give unfounded news items such a high score. The AC didn't even give a link to his news source!
something wicked this way comes...