What's Up With Ulysses?, alive? dead? cancelled soon? |
What's Up With Ulysses?, alive? dead? cancelled soon? |
Sep 22 2008, 04:06 PM
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#61
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Special Cookie Group: Members Posts: 2168 Joined: 6-April 05 From: Sintra | Portugal Member No.: 228 |
I'm starting to get the chills...Can it be related to this?...
-------------------- "Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied, "If you seek for Eldorado!"
Edgar Alan Poe |
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Sep 22 2008, 10:32 PM
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#62
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Member Group: Members Posts: 213 Joined: 21-January 07 From: Wigan, England Member No.: 1638 |
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Sep 23 2008, 05:47 PM
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#63
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Member Group: Members Posts: 213 Joined: 21-January 07 From: Wigan, England Member No.: 1638 |
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. |
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Sep 23 2008, 06:21 PM
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#64
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 30 Joined: 5-September 07 From: High Bridge, New Jersey, USA Member No.: 3669 |
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. 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_* |
Sep 24 2008, 07:11 AM
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#65
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Guests |
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Sep 24 2008, 09:27 AM
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#66
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Member Group: Members Posts: 646 Joined: 23-December 05 From: Forest of Dean Member No.: 617 |
Climatology's been ruled off-topic for UMSF I'm afraid. For alternative forums, you may find this search of interest (or not )
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Viva software libre! |
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Jan 4 2009, 11:06 AM
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#67
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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 |
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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Mar 17 2009, 04:54 PM
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#68
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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 |
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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Mar 17 2009, 06:44 PM
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#69
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
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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Mar 18 2009, 01:34 PM
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#70
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4404 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
I would love it if it picked up one last comet tail!
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Jun 24 2009, 04:15 AM
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#71
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Newbie Group: Members Posts: 1 Joined: 23-June 09 Member No.: 4833 |
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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Jun 27 2009, 06:53 PM
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#72
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 55 Joined: 1-May 06 From: Cincinnati, Ohio Member No.: 758 |
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Jun 29 2009, 11:33 PM
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#73
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Member Group: Members Posts: 340 Joined: 11-April 08 From: Sydney, Australia Member No.: 4093 |
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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Jun 29 2009, 11:36 PM
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#74
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Member Group: Members Posts: 340 Joined: 11-April 08 From: Sydney, Australia Member No.: 4093 |
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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Jun 30 2009, 06:58 AM
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#75
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Senior Member Group: Admin Posts: 3108 Joined: 21-December 05 From: Canberra, Australia Member No.: 615 |
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) So long Ulysses and thanks for all the data! |
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