Amount of fuel onboard, Potential life expectancy? |
Amount of fuel onboard, Potential life expectancy? |
Guest_PhilCo126_* |
Oct 31 2008, 04:02 PM
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#16
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Guests |
Great that made my sol
Remember Mars Global Surveyor worked for 10 years ( 7th Nov 1996 - 2nd Nov 2006 ) so fingers crossed that Mars Odyssey will go to 2010 |
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Dec 25 2008, 03:15 PM
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#17
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
Great that made my sol Remember Mars Global Surveyor worked for 10 years ( 7th Nov 1996 - 2nd Nov 2006 ) so fingers crossed that Mars Odyssey will go to 2010 Not to mention that MGS was killed by a software error - it could still be chugging along. -------------------- |
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Dec 25 2008, 10:24 PM
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#18
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8789 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Yeah...but then again, similar sorts of things could happen to any spacecraft, anytime. Gonna repeat the mantra again: 'redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...'
-------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Dec 26 2008, 05:01 AM
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#19
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4405 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
My point is that it didn't have anything to do with age.
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Dec 26 2008, 04:33 PM
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#20
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Member Group: Members Posts: 613 Joined: 23-February 07 From: Occasionally in Columbia, MD Member No.: 1764 |
My point is that it didn't have anything to do with age. Of the hardware, no. But a project is more than that. There is continuing pressure to cut costs of an ongoing mission to open up a funding wedge to buy the next big mission. So you pay for fewer man-hours, have fewer pairs of eyes double-checking things, maybe hire cheaper/less experienced people (indeed, even if you can pay for old hands to stay on, some talented/ambitious engineers may see starting on a new project as better for their careers than staying on an 8-year old project that could croak at any time.) So I'd venture there is a 'project aging' effect independent of the space hardware segment. It would be interesting to see statistics on commanding errors as a function of mission age. I am sure the absolute rate may fall, since things become routine, but I wonder what the errors-per-new-thing-tried is... |
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Dec 26 2008, 06:47 PM
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#21
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14448 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
So I'd venture there is a 'project aging' effect independent of the space hardware segment. MGS was a particularly bad case of this, iirc. VERY old avionics compared to Mars Odyssey - (the very very inaccurate and brief version is....) and the guy who'd happily uplinked to MGS for years, retired, and his replacement didn't know the avionics inside out - hence the wrongly uplinked parameter that only got picked up during the solar array motor induced safing event. |
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Dec 26 2008, 09:36 PM
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#22
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8789 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Hmm. There are a lot of ways to think about this. Systems engineering models can't catch every critical dependency, of course, but it sure seems like you could define a point in a system's life-cycle where the total entropy (using the term very loosely) makes a fatal event almost inevitable. Heck, if you plotted entropy vs. time I bet it's some sort of exponential function that takes off right near the end of the curve.
-------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Dec 27 2008, 03:09 PM
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#23
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Member Group: Members Posts: 688 Joined: 20-April 05 From: Sweden Member No.: 273 |
In my experience the critical resource in keeping old systems running is almost always people. It takes a long time to understand a complex system really well. You just try to go in to your boss and say "I'm retiring in 5 years, it's time to hire someone to take over after me". This is especially true if the system you're running is scheduled to be phased out in, say, 4 years. I know a system that has been a year or two away from phase-out for 15 years now, while the planned replacements have repeatedly failed spectacularily and expensively.
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Dec 16 2010, 06:53 AM
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#24
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Member Group: Members Posts: 754 Joined: 9-February 07 Member No.: 1700 |
"The Odyssey mission is in excellent health, with none of its avionics redundancy yet exercised. With 37 kg of fuel remaining and fuel use at a level of less than 1 kg/year, it is possible that Odyssey could continue to provide relay services well into the next decade."
Since the article was published in 2006, two years of fuel should be substracted for current estimations. Looking forward to many more years of Odyssey! |
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Sep 17 2012, 10:52 AM
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#25
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Member Group: Members Posts: 559 Joined: 1-May 06 From: Scotland (Ecosse, Escocia) Member No.: 759 |
Hard to know quite where to put this post, but "fuel" seems appropriate somehow.
The Houston Brewing Company in Houston, Renfrewshire, Scotland (the original place of that name), is producing monthly space-themed beers, and the September one is a reddish ale called Mars Odyssey. I had some last night - rather pleasant. Mars Odyssey beer |
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