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What's Up With Ulysses?, alive? dead? cancelled soon?
ustrax
post Sep 22 2008, 04:06 PM
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I'm starting to get the chills...Can it be related to this?...


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Del Palmer
post Sep 22 2008, 10:32 PM
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Don't fret, a new sunspot just appeared today. smile.gif

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Del Palmer
post Sep 23 2008, 05:47 PM
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Ulysses finds that the solar wind pressure and magnetic field strength is 20% lower than the previous solar cycle, and the lowest since such measurements began.

Implications are that Voyager 1 and 2 could reach the heliopause sooner than predicted, if this trend continues. smile.gif


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SolarSystemRubbl...
post Sep 23 2008, 06:21 PM
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QUOTE (Del Palmer @ Sep 23 2008, 12:47 PM) *
Ulysses finds that the solar wind pressure and magnetic field strength is 20% lower than the previous solar cycle, and the lowest since such measurements began.

Implications are that Voyager 1 and 2 could reach the heliopause sooner than predicted, if this trend continues. smile.gif


Even though most of the questions at the audio conference had to do with the earth's climate.

sigh....
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Guest_Sunspot_*
post Sep 24 2008, 07:11 AM
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QUOTE (SolarSystemRubble @ Sep 23 2008, 07:21 PM) *
Even though most of the questions at the audio conference had to do with the earth's climate.

sigh....



I wonder what it does mean for the climate...... clearly something unusual is going on.
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imipak
post Sep 24 2008, 09:27 AM
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Climatology's been ruled off-topic for UMSF I'm afraid. For alternative forums, you may find this search of interest (or not smile.gif )


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Paolo
post Jan 4 2009, 11:06 AM
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There are status updates on Ulysses at http://ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int/ulsfct/the_..._continues.html
This is the latest, dated 11 December:

Dear Ulysses colleagues,

It has been a couple of months since my last status report. That's
because nothing much has changed. We are continuing with our S-band
science mission and typically we are now tracking once a day for
about 2 to 4 hours. We don't want to increase pass durations much
more than that because the temperature of the TWTA radiator panel
(close to the cold hydrazine pipework) now falls rapidly when we
switch the S-band transmitter on. But we are looking to increase our
tracking time by taking two short passes per day separated by enough
time for the radiator panel temperature to rise again.

The data we have been getting recently has been of very good quality.
The spacecraft-Earth distance has been decreasing and the link margin
has increased to a point where we don't need to drop to 256 bps very
often. In fact, we are close to being able to support 1024 bps which
would enable us to get data from the tape recorder again. We're
keeping a very close eye on the downlink SNR and we'll try 1k data
again if we think the data quality won't be degraded. No promises though.

There's another benefit from the low Earth range when coupled with
the fairly low Earth drift rate that we're experiencing this month.
If the hydrazine froze or ran out tomorrow, we could continue to
acquire telemetry for around 20 days before the High Gain Antenna
offpointing was too great to support even 128 bps. That's compared to
about 5 days if the fuel had frozen back in May or June this year.
However, this is a short-lived effect and by February next year,
we'll only have 8 days of data before the end.
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Paolo
post Mar 17 2009, 04:54 PM
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The latest mission status. Ulysses is still alive!



Status report: 20-Feb-2009

Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2009 11:45:38 -0800
From: Nigel Angold
Subject: Ulysses Status Update 5

Dear Ulysses colleagues,

Yesterday was mission day 6712 and we surpassed 400 days of S-band
mission operations. Given that we thought the spacecraft would only
survive a few months after the X-band transmitter failure on 15
January 2008, that's pretty good going!

The last month or so has seen a dramatic increase in data return.
This is due in part to a request by NASA HQ for additional DSN
coverage and also due to the fact that we can record and play back
data again on board the spacecraft. That's possible because the
spacecraft-Earth distance is low enough to support a 1024 bps
telemetry data rate at the moment (this situation will last until
sometime in mid-March). I've attached a plot of our weekly data
return percentages which clearly shows the recent improvements.

As far as the hydrazine is concerned, it's obviously not frozen yet,
but there can't be very much left. Our estimate is that we have
almost no fuel left even using our best-case estimates. However, it's
very difficult to get an exact figure of fuel usage over the mission
given that we have had about 3 years of closed-loop conscan
operations to control nutation when the spacecraft fired the thruster
autonomously. During those periods, we had to estimate the number of
pulses fired by monitoring the increase in catalyst bed temperature
after each period of thruster activity which is not the easiest thing
to do. So the bad news is that we don't have an exact estimate of how
much fuel is left but the good news is that it's still above zero!

We hope that the data returned is continuing to excite you as the
solar activity slowly begins to increase.

Best regards,
Nigel


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elakdawalla
post Mar 17 2009, 06:44 PM
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I was in JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility (SFOF) yesterday afternoon and saw a scrolling display indicating that, at that moment, the DSN was receiving data from Ulysses. So it was still alive as of about 00:00 March 17 UTC...


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tedstryk
post Mar 18 2009, 01:34 PM
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I would love it if it picked up one last comet tail!


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G0DXS
post Jun 24 2009, 04:15 AM
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The day has finally come! The last day for mission operations on Ulysses will be 30th June 2009 (see newsflash item on http://ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int/). The LAST ground station pass of the mission is currently scheduled for 30th June 2009 over the Madrid DSN 70m station (DSS-63) from around 15:25 to 20:20 UTC (08:25 to 13:20 PDT). This will be a full year after the originally announced mission end date of 1-Jul-2008!

An open-loop slew manoeuvre will be executed before the start of the pass to set up the spacecraft to point directly at the Earth for the middle of the pass in order to maximise the downlink margin. Due to the short notice and low priority for DSN allocation, a full decommissioning of the spacecraft (including some end-of-mission engineering tests that a number of former and present Ulyssess engineers have been waiting to try out) will not be carried out.

It is expected that the events in the Ulysses mission support area at JPL leading up to the ceremonial last command to the spacecraft will be carried live on real-time streaming video and/or with mission ops blog update in real-time. Check http://ulysses-ops.jpl.esa.int/ often for announcements and the timeline for the final day of operations. The mission ops team members can now all be counted on the fingers of one hand, so plans can change ...

... so long and thanks for all the fish ...
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robspace54
post Jun 27 2009, 06:53 PM
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The little spacecraft that could... and DID from Oct. 6, 1990 to June 20, 2009. STS-41 got you started, but the rest was on your own!

Fare the well, good friend.

-Rob
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dmuller
post Jun 29 2009, 11:33 PM
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Man I saw the launch live at Cape Canaveral. I was still in high school then. Now I have 3 kids, the oldest half-way through primary. And the mission lasted for that long. Amazing.


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dmuller
post Jun 29 2009, 11:36 PM
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From the mission ops blog:

QUOTE
UTC Timestamp: 29-Jun-2009 21:00
Received notification that DSS-14 (Goldstone 70m ground station) has been declared RED. We are scrambling to rearrange the command sequences for the final day of operations which are due to be transmitted during our scheduled pass over DSS-14 which is supposed to start tomorrow at 00:00 UTC. We are also persuing alternate coverage over the 34m network, in which case the command sequences will be transmitted in the blind, i.e. without telemetry verification.


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Astro0
post Jun 30 2009, 06:58 AM
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While Goldstone is down, the torch has been passed to the Canberra DSN.
We are uplinking to Ulysses and Madrid will be receiving its last telemetry before bye, bye.
(this is the second time we've said goodbye, and most likely the last) sad.gif

So long Ulysses and thanks for all the data!
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