Engineers bring Psyche's thrusters back online NASA's Psyche spacecraft is back in business after engineers successfully switched to a backup fuel line in an impressive piece of remote maintenance. The switch fixed a solar electric propulsion problem first detected in April - where engineers noticed a pressure drop in the line feeding the xenon gas to the thrusters. The …
Weight of three USD0.25 coins (bit like the airspeed of swallows)
Post 1965 issue mass 3 × 5.67g = 17.01g => force 0.1668N
1932-64† issues mass 3 × 6.25g = 18.75g => force 0.1839N
The CAD0.25 coin since 2001 mass is 4.4g.
† still contained silver, debased thereafter.
So cool that these projects are carefully planned and designed and launched over most of a decade and they manage to keep them running despite faults and distance.
So sad that this administration defunding science to feed money to billionaires is likely to create a five year hiatus in which no projects are designed or launched and those that are already in flight are maintained on a shoestring. With the length of these flights that is likely to have a knock-on effect on space science for years.
The hiatus will be longer than the length of the Trump regime. Many of the boffins will leave for other jobs and to countries with a more space science friendly government. Students will be studying other subjects and won't be considering it as a career post graduation. The institutional knowledge will be lost. Probably decades to get back to top tier space science for the USA.
That's why you get servers with Compaq/HP ILO boards, Dell DRAC boards, or something similar.
If you haven't remote power management hardware for your servers, I guess you could build a little LEGO mechanism which goes *POKE* on the server power button, when said mechanism is accessed via a dialup modem and given the proper DTMF tones to activate it.
The speech "We choose to go to the moon..." might not be familiar to younger, especially non US readers but profitable viewing for Americans to compare their current (for want of a better word) leadership with that of their nation six decades ago in arguably far more difficult and dangerous times.
The flame has long flickered, increasingly feebly but I am afraid it's now extinguished.
I was curious how you would place a craft in orbit around an asteroid of presumably indeterminate mass at a distance of something like 25 light minutes?
Obviously not by direct remote control (~50 minute round trip.) Fairly clever autonomous flight systems but I also discovered that 16 Psyche is sufficiently massive that it perturbs the motion of other passing objects which has allowed astronomers to calculate its mass < ±10% which should permit precalculculation of the greater and critical parts of the required manoeuvres.
Extremely clever work by very clever people in an increasingly less clever nation that might not even exist in 2029.
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