What can't it do?
I love this kind of thing: ingenuity overcoming limitations and such.
A crooked radar antenna aboard Europe's Mars Express spacecraft has straightened out after being exposed to sunlight for several minutes. The fix gives fresh hope that a second boom will be deployed, allowing the experiment to begin scouting for underground water on Mars.
Mission officials in Darmstadt, Germany, commanded the first of two 20-metre-long fibreglass booms on the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) experiment to pop out of its storage box on 4 May. It had been folded there since before the mission's launch in June 2003.
But engineers studying data from the spacecraft's gyroscopes, which measure its rotation, noticed on 7 May that one of the boom's 13 folded segments had apparently not locked into a straight position as planned. The problem appeared to arise from an outer segment, most likely the tenth.
On Tuesday, Mars Express team members began tests to straighten the boom. They rotated the spacecraft so that the kinked segment was facing the Sun for about 5 minutes, then moved it back into darkness.
On Wednesday, they received telemetry from the gyros showing the action was a success. "The boom is now straight," announced Fred Jansen, the spacecraft's mission manager. "It's a great relief."
Kinks and wrinkles
Jansen says a wrinkle in the fibreglass tube may have hardened into a kink during the nearly two years the craft has spent in the cold vacuum of space. When exposed to heat from the Sun, the wrinkled fibreglass would have expanded, making it more elastic. Then the spacecraft's rotation may have snapped the segment into its correct position...
A crooked radar antenna aboard Europe's Mars Express spacecraft has straightened out after being exposed to sunlight for several minutes. The fix gives fresh hope that a second boom will be deployed, allowing the experiment to begin scouting for underground water on Mars.
Mission officials in Darmstadt, Germany, commanded the first of two 20-metre-long fibreglass booms on the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) experiment to pop out of its storage box on 4 May. It had been folded there since before the mission's launch in June 2003.
But engineers studying data from the spacecraft's gyroscopes, which measure its rotation, noticed on 7 May that one of the boom's 13 folded segments had apparently not locked into a straight position as planned. The problem appeared to arise from an outer segment, most likely the tenth.
On Tuesday, Mars Express team members began tests to straighten the boom. They rotated the spacecraft so that the kinked segment was facing the Sun for about 5 minutes, then moved it back into darkness.
On Wednesday, they received telemetry from the gyros showing the action was a success. "The boom is now straight," announced Fred Jansen, the spacecraft's mission manager. "It's a great relief."
Kinks and wrinkles
Jansen says a wrinkle in the fibreglass tube may have hardened into a kink during the nearly two years the craft has spent in the cold vacuum of space. When exposed to heat from the Sun, the wrinkled fibreglass would have expanded, making it more elastic. Then the spacecraft's rotation may have snapped the segment into its correct position...
posted by razorsmile at 5/12/2005 08:53:00 AM
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