Skip to main content

NASA Restores a Spacecraft by Turning it Off and Then On Again

When faced with a potentially mission-ending problem with NASA’s 15-year-old Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, engineers performed a time-honored procedure to fix it: they turned it off and then turned it back on again.

Success! IBEX is now fully operational again.

Actually, they told the spacecraft to turn itself off – which unlike the famous HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,”– IBEX obeyed the command and then turned itself back on again.

On February 18, IBEX experienced an anomaly and the flight computer reset itself during a planned contact with Earth. But something didn’t work right and IBEX put itself into a “contingency mode.”

NASA said that while fight computer resets have happened before, this time the team lost the ability to command the spacecraft during the subsequent reset recovery. The team also was unsuccessful in regaining command capability by resetting ground systems hardware and software.

All other systems appeared to be functional, but no commands were being processed, essentially making the spacecraft not operational.

Artist impression of IBEX (NASA)

Of course, in space there’s a more ‘official’ term for the ‘turn off, turn on again’ power cycle reboot that we’ve all done with a finicky computer. It’s called a firecode reset, which is an external reset of the spacecraft. This was done on March 2, and done pre-emptively instead of waiting for the spacecraft to perform an autonomous reset and power cycle, which was scheduled for March 4. Engineers decided to take advantage of a favorable communications environment around IBEX’s perigee – the point in the spacecraft’s orbit where it is closest to Earth.

The command worked, and IBEX is fully operational and functioning normally again.

IBEX has been operating nearly flawlessly since it launched in October 2008, IBEX, tasked with mapping the boundary where winds from the Sun interact with winds from other stars. IBEX is a really small spacecraft, about the size of a bus tire. It’s observing the solar system boundary while in orbit around Earth.

This image illustrates one possible explanation for the bright ribbon of emission seen in the IBEX map. The galactic magnetic field shapes the heliosphere as it drapes over it. The ribbon appears to trace the area where the magnetic field is most parallel to the surface of the heliosphere (the heliopause). Credit: Southwest Research institute

It has “telescopes” that look out toward the edge of the solar system, but these telescopes collect particles instead of light. From IBEX, we have the first all-sky map of the heliosphere, which revealed a surprise: the maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin. Scientists are still working with IBEX data to understand this phenomenon.

The post NASA Restores a Spacecraft by Turning it Off and Then On Again appeared first on Universe Today.



from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Xx1ycSC
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Researchers Match Up 12 Meteorites with the Near-Earth Asteroids They Came From

Every day meteoroids blast through our planet’s atmosphere to hit the ground as meteorites. A team of researchers in Italy traced twelve of them to progenitor asteroids that orbit in near-Earth space. Scientists treasure meteorites because they reveal information about their parent bodies. In an arXiv paper, two Italian researchers—Albino Carbognani and Marco Fenucci—analyze the characteristics of the parent bodies of 20 selected meteorites. They were able to track all but eight back to their parent asteroids. Based on their work, the pair says at least a quarter of meteorites come from collisions that happened in near-Earth space and not in the Main Belt. Meteorites from Near-Earth Asteroids: How They Got Here Many meteorites are chondritic, similar to asteroids in the Main Belt (or came from it). In their paper, the authors point out that progenitor meteoroids (including many that fall to Earth and become meteorites) formed millions of years ago following collisions between main-...
Post a Comment
Read more

JWST Takes a Detailed Look at Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede

Nature doesn’t conform to our ideas of neatly-contained categories. Many things in nature blur the lines we try to draw around them. That’s true of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. The JWST took a closer look at Ganymede, the moon that’s kind of like a planet, to understand its surface better. Ganymede is basically a planet, except it doesn’t orbit the Sun. If it did orbit the Sun instead of Jupiter, it would be indistinguishable from a planet. It has a differentiated internal structure with a molten core that produces a magnetic field. It has a silicon mantle much like Earth’s, and has a complex icy crust with a deep ocean submerged beneath it. It has an atmosphere, though it’s thin. It’s also larger than Mercury, and almost as large as Mars. According to the authors of a new study, it’s an archetype of a water world. But even with all this knowledge of the huge moon, there are details yet to be revealed. This is especially true of its complex surface...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Blew Up the Local Bubble?

In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KvVDeiC via IFTTT
Post a Comment
Read more