June 4, 1996, European Spaceport, French Guiana…
It took more than 10 years to design and build four identical satellites in Europe for launch; And only 39 seconds to lose it all in a massive fireball.
Their remains rained down on the South American jungle when the Ariane 5 missile derailed and exploded. VIPs who had sipped champagne in the outside showroom moments before were brought back inside to avoid injury from falling debris.
The disaster was one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) most visible and awe-inspiring failures. But within a few months, he started working on alternate assignments, Group Two.
The group was designed to fly in formation to investigate interactions between charged particles from the sun – the solar wind – and the magnetic bubble that surrounds Earth, known as the magnetosphere. The most successful long-term science mission ever. The satellites (named Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango, as you asked) just celebrated 23 years in orbit.
“This mission was designed to last only three years,” said Bruno Souza, director of operations for the Kloster mission at the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. “It has a very enthusiastic group of scientists working on the mission – some of them waiting for it to finally be completed so they can enjoy their retirement.
Cluster is one of many missions still alive today thanks to the skill and ingenuity of the engineering team and science behind it, solving problems through glitches, malfunctions, and near-disastrous failures. The challenge of preserving a spaceship long after its original, best-before history has been highlighted recently The controller temporarily loses connection with Voyager 2.
Launched almost 46 years ago in 1977, the two Voyager probes continue to send back data from outside the solar system.
I contacted NASA, who assured me the spacecraft was still being controlled from the same beige cabin at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) annex I visited in 2017, with a homemade cardboard sign that read: “Mission Critical Instrumentation . ” – Please don’t touch. (You can read and hear the full mission story here Radio shows I produce here.)
The setup will be familiar to Cluster mission controllers, who have had to struggle with 20th century ground control software built on outdated operating systems.
“We developed a complex setup where we have a modern Linux server running a virtual environment with an emulator of an older operating system,” said Sousa. The person running the program is part of the original team, and will retire when the job is done.”
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Power is also an issue. The cluster’s satellites are equipped with solar arrays to generate electricity, but twice a year they pass through Earth’s shadow and need batteries to survive.
“Batteries are only designed to last for five years and after six years we start to lose capacity,” says Souza. “Then we had cracks and leaks and eventually it became completely unusable.”
The solution is to turn off the satellites as they approach an eclipse and then send signals to turn them back on in an automatic sequence. It’s like giving the Cluster a factory reset twice a year. Indeed, when it comes to spacecraft aftercare, manufacturers are often asked to step in.
2023-08-16 02:15:40
#Ancient #technology #space #missions #alive
