(ORDO NEWS) — NASA fixes a malfunctioning spacecraft the same way you fix a problem laptop
Faced with a problem that could lead to the end of a mission with NASA’s 15-year-old Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, engineers put in a lot of effort. -deserved procedure to fix it: they turned it off and then back on.
Success! Now IBEX is fully operational again.
In fact, they ordered the spacecraft to turn off, and the IBEX, which, unlike the famous HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey , obeyed the command and then turned on again.
On February 18, an anomaly occurred at IBEX and the onboard computer rebooted during a scheduled Earth contact. But something went wrong, and IBEX put itself into “contingency mode.”
NASA said that while onboard computer resets had happened before, this time the team lost the ability to control the spacecraft during the subsequent reset recovery.
The team was also unable to regain control capability by resetting the ground systems hardware and software.
All other systems appeared to be functional, but no commands were, in fact, processed. which renders the spacecraft inoperable.
Of course, there is a more “official” term in space for the “power off, back on” cycle reset that we all do with the finicky computer.
This is called a fire code reset, i.e. an external reset of the spacecraft. This was done on March 2nd and done proactively instead of waiting for the spacecraft to perform an autonomous reset and power up, which was scheduled for March 4th.
The engineers decided to take advantage of the favorable communications environment around the IBEX Perigee, the point in the spacecraft’s orbit where it is closest to Earth.
The command worked and IBEX is working fine again.
IBEX has been running virtually flawlessly since launch. in October 2008. Its mission is to map the boundary where winds from the Sun interact with winds from other stars.
IBEX is an exceptionally small spacecraft about the size of a bus tire that does its job by observing the edge of the solar system while in orbit around the Earth.
It has “telescopes” that look at the edge of the solar system, but these telescopes collect particles instead of light.
From IBEX, we have the first map of the entire sky of the heliosphere, which revealed a surprise: the maps are halved. with a bright sinuous ribbon of unknown origin. Scientists are still working with IBEX data to understand this phenomenon.
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