Spacecraft Set to Reach Milestone, Reports Technical Glitches Options

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Spacecraft Set to Reach Milestone, Reports Technical Glitches
NASA/JPL
February 7, 2007

[tuvas]

Spacecraft Set to Reach Milestone, Reports Technical Glitches
NASA/JPL
February 7, 2007

It's a sad thing, but I can promise you that right now science has not been affected, and the team is doing everything possible to maximize the lifetime of the camera (Referring only to HiRISE).

[stevesliva]

As a chip guy, I'll be interested to hear whether it's the CCDs or the FPGA look-up tables, or perhaps some memory. The chips that we make these days are not only extremely susceptible to soft errors, but have some pretty wacky methods of working differently as time goes by. You can differentiate mean-time-to-failure in large systems at sea level versus Denver...

[mcaplinger]

As a chip guy, I'll be interested to hear whether it's the CCDs or the FPGA look-up tables, or perhaps some memory.

From what little I've heard, the problem is almost certainly analog in nature, if not in the CCD output amplifiers then somewhere in the signal chain before digitization.

[tuvas]

The problem is analog in nature somewhere, if it was digital, well, it'd have affected all of the CCDs. As to exactly what the problem is, well, it's unknown...

Of course, the MCS could be a digital problem, from what I've heard about it...

[mchan]

As a chip guy, I'll be interested to hear whether it's the CCDs or the FPGA look-up tables, or perhaps some memory. The chips that we make these days are not only extremely susceptible to soft errors, but have some pretty wacky methods of working differently as time goes by. You can differentiate mean-time-to-failure in large systems at sea level versus Denver...

I work on boards, and we design for error detection, handling, and recovery at the system level with chip soft errors in mind. In my experience, soft errors from secondary cosmic particle upsets do not increase noticeably over time. Chip degradation over time such as electromigration tend to show up as timing problems as evidenced by increasing sensitivity to supply voltage and temperature variations. Two or more different failure mechanisms.

[stevesliva]

I don't mean to trivialize the attention that they've already put into it. It's just as it's my job, I tend to blame my own stuff first. But yes, I'm not a device physicist, so I am leery of all effects. It just seems that the magnitude of EM, but also the hot carrier and nbti affects on bleeding edge processes wasn't fully realized until after those chips were shipped. What happens to those same chips when you put them in space probably won't be fully realized until they spend 10e5 hours in space...

And yes, none of this has to do with MRO, likely. It's just me forecasting doom.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

It looks like the great galactic ghoul is active in Mars orbit, first MGS ... now MRO

[Guest_Zvezdichko_*]

Well, the problem doesn't impact the quality of the images very much. I think that the main concern is degradation ( according to the article ) ...

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Glitch Disrupts Data Flow to Earth
By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, Space.com
posted: 08 February 2007
04:08 pm ET

While HiRISE is acting up, Zurek observed that the instrument’s three months of science gathering to date has yielded roughly 1,000 images—more than 1.5 terabits (1,500 gigabits) of image data.

I haven't done a precise count, but are there "1,000 images" on the HiROC site? If not, then that was what I was alluding to here.

The images are really good, but in terms of frequency of releases, so far it seems that the "People's Camera" public releases have, on average, been occurring at about the same rate as the MOC daily captioned image releases.

This post has been edited by AlexBlackwell: Feb 9 2007, 01:17 AM

[centsworth_II]

How many more images of the northern plains did you want?

[jamescanvin]

I haven't done a precise count, but are there "1,000 images" on the HiROC site?

<250 by my count

[djellison]

How many more images of the northern plains did you want?

Enough to map every Phoenix landing site target just about in full and any other interesting polar targets before it heads into the dark for the Northern winter.

Doug

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Mars Orbiter Imaging Halved
By Craig Covault/AviationWeek.com
February 8, 2007

[DataMiner]

The images are really good, but in terms of frequency of releases, so far it seems that the "People's Camera" public releases have, on average, been occurring at about the same rate as the MOC daily captioned image releases.

I'll just make a couple of comments about this:

1. The releases that we are doing now are geared towards a NASA requirement that we have to release a small number of captioned images every week. Also keep in mind that these images aren't our standard science products, these are public releases that just happen to have some degree of scientific utility. Note that we have also released a large batch of uncaptioned images as well....
2. Our long term goal is to try and release our standardized science products as quickly as possible, but we are not there yet, and it's difficult to say at this time just exactly what our real turn around time is going to be between acquiring an image and releasing a standardized science product. There are a number of pieces that need to come together before we can make this happen, such as finalizing the format of our standard data products, jpeg2000 issues, and our interface to the Planetary Data System. Once these issues have been addressed, there's a pretty good chance that the release rate will go up, and the quality of the data released will go up as well.