NASA hacked hardware of camera orbiting Jupiter – and fixed it NASA has revealed that one of the cameras on the Juno craft it sent to Jupiter malfunctioned, and that it fixed it with some very, very, remote hardware hacking. As explained in a Monday post, NASA designed the visible light JunoCam to survive for eight orbits of Jupiter – about 400 days – but wasn’t confident it would last …
77°F is room temperature. That sounds far too low. My CPU is reporting 28°C-31°C, which is 82°F-90°F, right now. Granted, it's running Firefox, but...
77°C is 170°F which does sound like a temperature that would anneal silicon.
I see the JPL press release has 77°F, but I see other ones from 2023 that say 150°F-170°F which is 65°C-77°C.
God knows NASA never makes units errors. Ahem.
Yes, I stopped using steam engine units myself, several decades ago.
I just had an acquaintance at work say that a gallon of gas weighed 128oz or 8lbs, instead of the actual 6lbs, because "there's 128oz in a gallon and 16oz in a pound"
No clue that different fluids have different densities. Of course I asked her "which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?"
I have the greatest respect for NASA's many scientific achievements.
That being said, I think there is a certain amount of historical revisionism going on here.
Originally the Juno mission was supposed to visit Jupiter and investigate it's magnetic field. It was to have entered an elliptical orbit where it dipped down into the magnetosphere before returning to relative safety. The orbit was to be modified so that it went deeper and deeper into the magnetosphere until destruction.
Something went wrong with a thruster so it is now stuck in its original, relatively safe, orbit.
Originally there was no camera on the craft until a Congressman/Senator (can't be bothered to check which/who) made a fuss and said that NASA must provide pretty pictures.
Don't get me wrong, I have gawped at and enjoyed all of the images/timelapses from Juno as much as the next armchair astronomer. When politicians are redesigning your spacecraft five minutes before takeoff something has gone seriously wrong. (May have been more than five minutes, this is an exaggeration.)
To summarise, Juno should have been irradiated to death many months/years ago.
There shouldn't even have been a camera in the first place.
Some of this may be on Wikipedia, I haven't looked.
Let the downvotes commence.
Marketing has always been at war with the truth.
To be quite honest: I believe the senator was right. Pretty pictures are important.
Let's face it: people are visually oriented. While it is true that great scientific data has been obtained from spacecraft that sent back nothing but numbers, there's nothing like an image to tell you what it's really like out there. Even hard-core scientists who can interpret the numbers are eager for images. The numbers may be their bread, but the image are the jam. This is even more true for Joe and Jane Public who can't do anything with the numbers but can get excited, or at least interested for a fleeting moment, in pictures that show what the far reaches or the solar system actually look like.
Which is now more important then ever. NASA, in true NASA fashion, has once again pulled off an amazing feat of getting malfunctioning kit going from millons or even billions of miles away, using nothing but brain power and radio signals. Yet these are the guys who are currently facing an administration that wants to trottle them to within an inch of actually shutting them down.
So this is a case when marketing is not at war with the truth; it is a vital element of keeping science going. NASA needs all the PR it can muster right now. So keeping the pictures coming for marketing purposes is a Good Thing.
I believe the Senator was right too.
I have been visiting the APOD site virtually since it started.
It is probably one the most successful marketing ploys NASA ever came up with albeit in a low-key way.
I realise that the US public's perception of the Administration's
usefulness is key to it's continued funding.
I still feel justified in pointing out the Texas Sharpshooter aspect of their press releases.
Juno isn't doing what it was supposed to do. Fixing an afterthought camera from afar is impressive, but not part of the original mission.
The Hubble space telescope didn't pin down the Hubble Constant once and for all.
Apollo 13 didn't land two astronauts on the Moon.
Painting circles round bullet holes is only fooling yourself.
LOL. You do know that the camera that captured Neil Armstrong climbing down the LM ladder was an afterthought as well?
You can tell because it's basically activated by slapping it open as he goes by, and it's not very good quality. However, that crappy footage is probably one of the most played clips of recent memory.
Had to do this for one of the huge Dell XPS luggables (big screen, dual RAIDed hard drives, can't remember the model number.) Had to bake the graphics card in the oven for a short while, after which it worked fine for the remaining life of the machine. Was a bit concerning for the 10 mins it was in, then the first power up afterwards!
