Dawn's last mission extensions at Ceres, From XMO3 to EOM |
Dawn's last mission extensions at Ceres, From XMO3 to EOM |
Feb 1 2017, 02:37 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 544 Joined: 17-November 05 From: Oklahoma Member No.: 557 |
This thread will cover all final phases of the Dawn mission, the end of which is not certain at this point.
XMO3 was suppose to be the final orbit, but now plans have changed and it will move into a new higher altitude and higher phase orbit soon. This will be XMO4. An interesting monthly journal for January details the plan: Dawn Journal 31 January 2017 |
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May 4 2017, 04:37 AM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
There are many old spacecraft with great reaction wheels still working fine. But there must have been some batch - some particular hardware version rev that has hit Kepler and Dawn.
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Jun 19 2017, 05:36 PM
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Director of Galilean Photography Group: Members Posts: 896 Joined: 15-July 04 From: Austin, TX Member No.: 93 |
There are many old spacecraft with great reaction wheels still working fine. But there must have been some batch - some particular hardware version rev that has hit Kepler and Dawn. Yep, here's a comment from this article ( https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/06/17/dawn-...ecrafts-future/ ) Benjamin Hunt Mass and size are always an issue on spacecraft, especially deep space probes. Remember, however, that Dawn is an exception in terms of reliability...while reaction wheels have failed on other missions, they all (I believe) failed *after* completing their primary missions, and usually their extended missions. That said, the reaction wheels that have failed on Dawn and several other spacecraft that have made the news have been noted as coming from a bad batch made by Ithaco Space Systems. The decreased lifespans weren't understood until it was far too late to do anything about it, except for the Kepler mission; those wheels were sent back to Ithaco for preventative maintenance shortly before launch, but even that didn't fix the problem. Still, Kepler made it 4 years before failure compared to its planned 3.5 year mission, and it is still returning very useful science, even if at a reduced capacity. -------------------- Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks
-- "The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C Clarke Mother Nature is the final inspector of all quality. |
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