NASA's Jupiter probe wakes up after unexpected snooze NASA's Juno probe is back up and running after unexpectedly putting itself into a hibernating "safe mode" during its last orbit around Earth. juno Juno is back online and ready to rumble "The spacecraft exited safe mode at 4:12 p.m. CDT (5:12 p.m. EDT) earlier today," said the Southwest Research Institute, which instigated …
Too right, some of us could wipe out the entire planet's life if we did that sort of near-light s thpeed thing.
If the RF sent Juno's way was problematic then it's going to fall over when it reaches Jupiter as the fields generating the RF there are quite a lot of dB larger than we can generate from earth.
"'The safe mode did not impact the spacecraft’s trajectory one smidgeon.' With the accuracy that they need for navigation in this type of manoeuvre, I'm surprised that they weren't measuring the trajectory in milli-smidgeons."
What surprised me, was that NASA would even use that kind of arcane scientific terminology in a public pronouncement at all. Because it is, after all, rocket science.
Quite possibly. I imagine that most of the staff at NASA have read the book.
(For those who don't get it, one crew member on a ship comments that all systems are 'normal.' Another then points out that they are hurtling in a one-of-a-kind craft the furthest from earth any human has ever traveled: This is not normal. The first character then rephrases the situation as 'all systems nominal, then.')
Yippie skippy, they went off to some fancy college and got themselves a graduate degree in 'space science'. Fat lot of good it does them if they never bothered to learn even basic science fiction.
Everybody knows when a person or a probe 'disappears' from communication for a while then reappears it is no longer the thing that went missing. It has always been replaced with the consciousness of an alien being or reprogrammed and it is never a positive thing.
I can't believe these assholes haven't hit the self-destruct button yet. This is all going to end in tears. And screaming. Yep, definitely tears and screaming.
Hopefully they mean relative to the Sun. Since most probes are sent out in the plane of the ecliptic, speed relative to the Earth would vary depending on where the Earth is in it's orbit, approaching towards or receding from the current point in space where the probe is.
When I were coding milspec embedded, it was standard practice to fill spaces between subroutines with jumps to watchdog code, the theory being that if EMP cosmic rays or whatever knocked the program counter into outer space (sic!) the code had a chance of resetting itself.. I wonder if that's what happened here..
"If the RF sent Juno's way was problematic then it's going to fall over when it reaches Jupiter as the fields generating the RF there are quite a lot of dB larger than we can generate from earth."
Well, last I heard, the most spacecraft have is perhaps a checksum on each command so it does not run a corrupted command due to interference... but nothing else to prevent anyone with a powerful enough transmitter to send the spacecraft any command they'd like. I have no idea what experiment would involve hams beaming RF at the craft... unless this was attempts to revive it.
That said, several spacecraft have had on-board failures (not just RF) due to Jupiter's intense magnetic fields and radiation belts. One of the Voyager's had a few bits of RAM permanently damaged by this if I recall correctly. (So, it sent back photos with some bits flipped as it loaded each photo from it's onboard storage into the (faulty) RAM, until NASA rewrote some bit of code to jump around the bad memory for the remainder of the mission.) I recall one of the Voyagers also rebooted when going through an especially strong radiation belt.
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