WISE, a mission that will find ALL the neighbours |
WISE, a mission that will find ALL the neighbours |
Aug 27 2009, 08:31 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
I'm used to reading excellent articles by Emily, but this one I found to be of truly extraordinary interest:
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002070/ |
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Dec 13 2009, 04:33 AM
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#2
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
If I recall correctly from my conversation with them, they re-run the chilling routine every other day. So every other day you reset the clock on the frozen hydrogen. Which means that if you're the science team you really want the spacecraft to launch on that first rather than second day. I would imagine that with the weekend's delay, Monday will be "day 1" of that cycle.
Also, I just remembered that the chilling routine involves a team of poor guys whose sole job is to run those tanks of liquid helium up the tower to the top of the rocket, where the spacecraft is, remove the old tank, hook up the new tank, run the old tank down to the bottom of the tower, and repeat. -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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Dec 13 2009, 07:59 PM
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#3
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 87 Joined: 9-November 07 Member No.: 3958 |
I just remembered that the chilling routine involves a team of poor guys whose sole job is to run those tanks of liquid helium up the tower to the top of the rocket... Something similar happened with ESA's ISO far-IR observatory (pardon the redundancy with the acronym). A team had to head out to check something on the Ariane 4 booster well after the area would normally be cleared, and one of the payload teams took the opportunity to head out at the same time and top off its liquid helium dewar. With the boiloff from external conditions in French Guyana, scuttlebutt was that this added a few months to the cryogenic mission lifetime (something like 27 months of an expected 24 and required 18). |
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