Stardust-NExT, Revisiting Tempel 1 |
Stardust-NExT, Revisiting Tempel 1 |
Dec 28 2010, 01:46 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1729 Joined: 3-August 06 From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E Member No.: 1004 |
I thought it was time to start a new thread on Stardust's flyby of Tempel 1, the first time a comet receives a second visit from a spacecraft one perihelion later.
There was an interesting story about this on Spaceflight now recently http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1012/23stardustnext/ note that the flyby will be around 23.30 eastern time on 14 February, so thinking in GMT it will not happen on Valentine's day. Stardust should have started imaging Tempel 1 twice weekly in mid-December, but there is nothing yet on the mission site http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html see also http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/m...tatus10_q4.html for updates on the mission status |
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Dec 30 2010, 01:13 AM
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
In the hopes of dragging this thread back to some actual discussion of the Stardust mission, I thought I'd post this somewhat worrying mission status update from December 15:
QUOTE The spacecraft experience another safe mode entry on Thursday, December 9. The next communications pass was scheduled for Friday morning, and the team was able to establish communications quickly with the help of the DSN personnel, and a health check revealed all the subsystems were healthy and operating normally. The playback of all available data – command history logs, error logs, lower DRAM dump, etc. – was started. Safe mode entry was completed on Saturday, December 11, getting the spacecraft back under the control of the background sequence, easing communications during the planned DSN tracks. The data showed that this safe mode entry was caused by a MEEB (Memory Error External Bus) event. This a phenomenon observed on other spacecraft using this processor and memory architecture. It is caused by a latch-up of a redundant memory address register that causes the memory checking software to check a region of memory never used before and encountering many uncorrectable errors due to this. In response, the system is rebooted, and the reboot process then checks and corrects these new memory addresses and the system continues operating. The analyses performed on other missions have concluded that the standard response to a MEEB is a cold boot that resets the memory address registers to the original values. A tiger team was convened to help the project address this latest event in light of the two other recent safe mode entries. The tiger team has concluded its work and concurs with the project plan to perform a cold boot on side B to prepare the spacecraft for the upcoming comet flyby. This reboot is currently planned for January 4, 2011. Until then, the spacecraft will be acquiring optical navigation image sets twice a week. According to an earlier update, Stardust should have acquired its first optical navigation images of Tempel 1 on December 16.
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