What mission was this? Options

[ddeerrff]

When I was a teenager (45 - 50 years ago), there was a mission launched where the main parabolic high gain antenna did not open fully. What was this mission and how did they solve the antenna problem?

[stevesliva]

That tape recorder was a nightmare, too. The whole "stuck head" thing was just miserable to read about in the status reports. But at least they had lots of power to "condition" things.

I work in solid state memory development, and from afar, the reverse engineering they have to do on the Flash memories these days seems just about as painful. I'd love to hear what actually makes these things debuggable. From what I can tell, all the hopes about being "rad hard" devolve into "what now?" after a few years, so perhaps simple architectures are what's really needed.

[mcaplinger]

I'd love to hear what actually makes [space flash memory] debuggable.

Paywalled, but this is the most technical description I could find.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7119257

Near as I can tell, most of these flash issues have been more about software and less about hardware. For the internal flash in our instruments on MSL, I intentionally used the simplest possible flash management code, all written in-house, instead of a more featureful but more complex file system. So far, so good. Our application, by design, is not very stressing. For example, erasing is pretty rare.