[X] My Assistant

[briv1016]

Assuming that there are no MGS type anomalies and funding holds out (according to NASA's FY09 budget, the current extension ends in September); how much longer can Odyssey remain operational with the fuel onboard?

(I know you guys are strict about starting new threads, but I couldn't find any other thread related to this topic.)

[nprev]

Yeah...but then again, similar sorts of things could happen to any spacecraft, anytime. Gonna repeat the mantra again: 'redundancy, redundancy, redundancy...'

[tedstryk]

My point is that it didn't have anything to do with age.

[rlorenz]

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...

[djellison]

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.