Rockets, Launches, Satellites, ISS, etc.

[John Thomas8]

[RTH10260]

Voyager 1: NASA's longest-running spacecraft back in touch with Earth after five months of silence
The Voyager probes are in interstellar space but Voyager 1 stopped sending back usable information in November. After months of work, NASA scientists have now heard back from the spacecraft.

By Mickey Carroll, science and technology reporter
Tuesday 23 April 2024 11:45, UK

NASA's longest-running spacecraft Voyager 1 is sending information back to Earth again for the first time since November.

Scientists have managed to fix a problem on the probe, which was launched 46 years ago, after five months of silence.

On 14 November last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data back to Earth, even though scientists could tell it was still receiving their commands and working well otherwise.

It was first launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2. The pair are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space, which is the space between stars.

The Voyager probes send back never-seen-before information about our galaxy. Since they blasted off in 1977, they have revealed details in Saturn's rings, provided the first in-depth images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune and discovered the rings of Jupiter.

Although their cameras are switched off to conserve power and memory, they are still sending back information that would be impossible to get anywhere else.

With all this data stuck onboard and the spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA scientists needed to fix the problem remotely.

The team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed in March that the issue was with one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers. That computer, called the flight data subsystem, is responsible for packaging the data up before it is sent back to Earth.

Engineers have confirmed that corrupted memory aboard my twin #Voyager1 has been causing it to send unreadable data to Earth. It may take months, but our team is optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally again

Within the computer, a single chip containing some of the computer's software code had stopped working. Without that code, the data was unusable.

The engineers couldn't pop over and fix it. Instead, on 18 April, they remotely split the code across different parts of the computer.


https://news.sky.com/story/voyager-1-na ... e-13121317

[John Thomas8]

[keith]

Why don't they use the correct name for this brilliant space craft?

V'GER

[Sam the Centipede]

NASA's JPL has excellent news: NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

Doesn't it put crappy customer service for washing machines, laptops, etc. into perspective? Voyager 1 is nearasdammit 50 years old - half a century - and it's 24 billion kilometres from Earth, so signals take almost a full day to travel between the spacecraft and Earth, it's not communicating properly, but NASA engineers repaired it.

Just WOW!!!

I don't know whether to be more impressed with the folk who designed and built the Voyagers (which have outlasted their design lives by about 4 decades) or by the folk who now keep these old crates ticking over. Well, it's not a competition, I'm impressed with them all.

For those who designed and built Voyager and are still with us on Earth (I don't think any traveled with the spacecraft!), it must be an immense source of well-merited pride that their creations continue whizzing into the void.

[pipistrelle]

Until it turns into Nomad and obliterates planetary systems.

[chancery]

Voyager 1 Just Announced That It Has Detected 300 Unknown Objects Passing By In Space https://youtu.be/yFYPkfFzYaU

I couldn't listen to more than a couple of minutes of this drek. Does anyone have a text version of the punchline? The only Voyager instruments still working are in the particles and fields category, so I'm skeptical that it has detected anything that could be called "objects" in the ordinary sense.

[johnpcapitalist]

NASA's JPL has excellent news: NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

Doesn't it put crappy customer service for washing machines, laptops, etc. into perspective? Voyager 1 is nearasdammit 50 years old - half a century - and it's 24 billion kilometres from Earth, so signals take almost a full day to travel between the spacecraft and Earth, it's not communicating properly, but NASA engineers repaired it.

Just WOW!!!

I'm really surprised that they had the ability to update the software on a machine that was probably designed in the early to mid 1970s (it was launched in 1977).

The more recent Mars rovers have that ability, because they're running a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) real-time operating system, most probably Wind River's VxWorks (they used to brag about this at investor presentations before Intel bought them), and those systems have enough extra memory to be able to stage patch sets before installation so they can recover to a known good state if there's a problem.

[chancery]

The engineers who built and initially operated the Voyager spacecraft were mindful of the need to build as much resilience and redundancy into their systems as possible. They were aware that the mission might continue for decades, even though it was originally only approved for long enough to explore Jupiter and Saturn, about three years.

But the challenges are even more formidable than you might imagine. This article was published in 2015:

Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages
To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know FORTRAN and assembly languages.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/ ... -engineer/

Larry Zottarelli, the last original Voyager engineer still on the project, is retiring after a long and storied history at JPL. While there are still a few hands around who worked on the original project, now the job of keeping this now-interstellar spacecraft going will fall to someone else. And that someone needs to have some very specific skills.

Yes, it's going to require coding, but it won't be in Ruby on Rails or Python. Not C or C++. Go a little further back, to the assembly languages used in early computing. Know Cobol? Can you breeze through Fortran? Remember your Algol? Those fancy new languages from the late 1950s? Then you might be the person for the job.

"It was state of the art in 1975, but that's basically 40 years old if you want to think of it that way," Suzanne Dodd, program manager for the Voyager program, said in a phone interview. "Although, some people can program an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to."

The last true software overhaul was in 1990, after the 1989 Neptune encounter and at the beginning of the interstellar mission. "The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it," Dodd said. "It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months."

That's when it's time to turn back to old documents to figure out the logic behind some of the engineering decisions. Dodd says it's easy to find the engineering decisions, but harder to find the reasoning. This means combing through secondary documents and correspondence hoping to find the solution, trying to get in another engineer's head.

The last resort is picking those engineers' brains directly. Many are retired, and are working on 40-year-old memories. Still, the small team working on Voyager today has a list of engineers and others on-hand to call in emergencies. Dodd herself has worked on the spacecraft off and on since 1984, just before the Uranus flyby.

"People's memories 40 years later aren't always accurate," Dodd says. "It's good to have that data point, but you can't guarantee 100% that that was the correct rationale when somebody's trying to recall it."

The New York Times picked up the saga two years later, when Zottarelli finally retired, with an excellent long-form article (gift link).

The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe
As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers
of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/maga ... =url-share

Unlike the astrophysicists who devise experiments for Voyager and who interpret the results, the core flight-team members don’t have the luxury of being able to work simultaneously on other missions. Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft.

And a wonderful low-key documentary on the team was released in 2022, It's Quieter in the Twilight, which you can stream from Amazon or on PBS.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

You'll find your room gets a little dusty if you watch it.

[northland10]

I'm really surprised that they had the ability to update the software on a machine that was probably designed in the early to mid 1970s (it was launched in 1977).

They're not Microsoft and other tech companies who scheduled EOL to be 2 days after you installed the update.

They also did not annoy Voyager by trying to daily force it to a new version that has more bugs than an Indiana Jones movie (hint.. MS.. I don't want to use Teams 2023 until you fix the damn thing).

[Sam the Centipede]

I think JohnP is saying that building hardware and software that could be updated remotely over a radio signal seems very advanced for the 1970s.

I don't know anything about communications and surveillance satellites but perhaps they were doing similar things back then? It's obviously not ideal if a simple glitch in a bit of code causes an expensive piece of equipment to lose some significant capabilities.

Moving the code away from damaged memory areas working blind from at 22 Tm (22 terametres) is monstrous cool.

And the foresight in building Voyager so it had robust algorithms for what to do if it can't find home, terrific.

[John Thomas8]

[RTH10260]

China’s Chang’e-6 probe lands on far side of the moon aiming to return first samples to Earth
Spacecraft to collect samples from rarely explored area before attempting unprecedented liftoff from ‘dark side’ for trip home

Agence France-Presse
Sun 2 Jun 2024 03.25 CEST

China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe has successfully landed on the far side of the moon to collect samples, state media reported on Sunday.

The lander set down in the immense South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system, Xinhua news agency said, citing the China National Space Administration.

It marks the first ever attempt to collect samples from the rarely explored area of the moon, according to the agency.

The Chang’e-6 is on a technically complex 53-day mission that began when it took off on 3 May.

The probe will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and rocks, and carry out other experiments.

That process should be complete within two days, Xinhua said. The probe would use two methods of collection: a drill to collect samples under the surface and a robotic arm to grab specimens from the surface.

Then it must attempt an unprecedented launch from the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth.

Scientists say the moon’s “dark side” – so-called because it is not visible from Earth, not because it never catches the sun’s rays – holds great promise for research because its craters are less covered by ancient lava flows than the near side.

Material collected from the dark side may better shed light on how the moon formed.

Plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive under its president, Xi Jinping.



https://www.theguardian.com/world/artic ... f-the-moon

[RTH10260]

Landing video of Chang'e 6 on the far side of the moon.

CNSA Watcher - Archives
2 Jun 2024

Accelerated version of Chang'e 6 landing on the lunar surface! Video: China's aerospace China Aerospace's Weibo video

Source: https://m.weibo.cn/status/Oh6PJDsjX

[RTH10260]

Boeing launches long-delayed astronaut capsule

1 day ago
Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent,

The American Boeing company has launched its Starliner capsule towards the International Space Station (ISS) with two Nasa astronauts aboard.

It's the first time the vehicle has been entrusted to carry people after coming through a long and tortuous development programme.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be testing the capsule on a mission that's expected to last just over a week.

Starliner is scheduled to dock with the space station on Thursday.

The capsule went up from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, riding a United Launch Alliance Atlas rocket.

The 12-minute powered ascent looked flawless.

Moments before lift-off, Commander Wilmore called out to thank all those who had worked to make the mission possible. Alluding to past difficulties, he said: "When the going gets tough - and it often does - the tough get going, and you have."

Starliner's pilot Suni Williams chimed in: "Go 'Calypso'! (the name of the capsule). Take us to space and back."

Starliner now has to raise itself to the orbit of the ISS, which circles the Earth at an altitude of roughly 400km (250 miles).

In the 24 hours this will take, Wilmore and Williams plan to put the vehicle through its paces, including taking manual control of the flight systems.


https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cl4481nz4x6o

[RTH10260]

Boeing Starliner capsule docks with space station despite helium leaks
Successful maneuver means two US-built crewed spacecraft are anchored to ISS simultaneously for first time

Edward Helmore and Richard Luscombe
Thu 6 Jun 2024 20.10 CEST

Boeing’s pioneering Starliner capsule and its two astronauts overcame a technical hiccup to finally dock with the international space station on Thursday, as Nasa continued to monitor two separate helium leaks that have concerned mission managers.

A first attempt at the rendezvous was called off when engineers at the US space agency detected a problem with reaction control thrusters essential to the high-precision docking maneuver.

But a “hotfire” test reactivated at least four of the thrusters, enabling Starliner to make an autonomous historic first docking with the ISS at 12.34pm CT.

With SpaceX’s Dragon capsule attached to a port on the opposite side, it was the first time two US-built crewed spacecraft were simultaneously anchored to the orbiting outpost.

Earlier, two helium leaks were detected as the craft approached, Nasa said. The inert gas is used to power thrusters in the capsule that was carried atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday on the giant rocket’s first piloted test flight.

Engineers had discovered a small-but-persistent helium leak before launch that was deemed acceptable. Nasa said the two latest leaks were new and had been discovered after the spacecraft arrived in orbit.



https://www.theguardian.com/science/art ... lium-leaks

[RVInit]

Here is a video of the astronauts entering the ISS from Starliner.

[RTH10260]

Nasa says no emergency on board ISS after ‘disturbing’ medical drill accidentally airs
A Nasa livestream from the International Space Station inadvertently aired an ongoing simulation, briefly sparking concern for the crew

Jonathan Yerushalmy
Thu 13 Jun 2024 05.06 CEST

Nasa has been forced to deny that there was an emergency situation on board the International Space Station (ISS), after an official livestream accidentally aired a medical drill which simulated a crew member in extreme medical distress, prompting alarm on social media.

“There is no emergency situation going on aboard the International Space Station,” Nasa’s ISS account posted on X. “Audio was inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space.”


https://www.theguardian.com/science/art ... ce-station

[John Thomas8]

https://www.trtworld.com/science-and-te ... s-18173687

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched into space in 1977, resumed its scientific operations after a technical issue that occurred in November 2023, the US space agency has said.

According to NASA, they partially resolved the issue in April when they prompted the spacecraft to begin returning engineering data, and “on May 19, the mission team executed the second step of that repair process and beamed a command to the spacecraft to begin returning science data.”

This marks the spacecraft's return to full data collection activities after a six-month interruption.

[RTH10260]

Launched at a time when Intel was just about to launch their first 8080 microcontroller ...

[neonzx]

Impressive!!

And consider the original team is gone, younger ones stepped in to keep the mission going.

[chancery]

Impressive!!

And consider the original team is gone, younger ones stepped in to keep the mission going.

Sorry (not sorry) for repeating myself:

And a wonderful low-key documentary on the team was released in 2022, It's Quieter in the Twilight, which you can stream from Amazon or on PBS.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

You'll find your room gets a little dusty if you watch it.

Go to my original post for links to two excellent articles about the last years of the original team and the transition to the people (themselves no longer young) who have taken over.

[Reality Check]

Nasa says no emergency on board ISS after ‘disturbing’ medical drill accidentally airs
A Nasa livestream from the International Space Station inadvertently aired an ongoing simulation, briefly sparking concern for the crew

Jonathan Yerushalmy
Thu 13 Jun 2024 05.06 CEST

Nasa has been forced to deny that there was an emergency situation on board the International Space Station (ISS), after an official livestream accidentally aired a medical drill which simulated a crew member in extreme medical distress, prompting alarm on social media.

“There is no emergency situation going on aboard the International Space Station,” Nasa’s ISS account posted on X. “Audio was inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space.”


https://www.theguardian.com/science/art ... ce-station

I follow several YouTube channels that broadcast launches and mission videos. One of these is the Launch Pad. I happen to see in my feed a live Launch Pad video about an emergency on the ISS. Natural this caught my attention. It contained a link back to the NASA channel with an audio of a doctor en route to Mission Control talking to the astronauts on the ISS about a "Commander" who had suffered a decompression event. She advised putting him in his space suit and on oxygen. It was odd that the audio only had her voice instead of the entire conversation. Regardless it sounded very real and very serious.

I almost posted a link to the Launch Pad video here but I checked for confirmation on all the major outlets and found nothing. It took a good 15 or 20 minutes but finally people in the comment stream began quoting someone else who follows NASA very closely and said it was a drill.

Someone in NASA certainly made a major goof by putting at least part of this out on the official ISS YouTube feed.

[chancery]

Someone in NASA certainly made a major goof by putting at least part of this out on the official ISS YouTube feed.

Yes, but in a way it's reassuring to know that they are constantly drilling for serious emergencies.

[Reality Check]

Yes, but in a way it's reassuring to know that they are constantly drilling for serious emergencies.

Well we know they were doing this particular drill. It would be stupefying if they were not preparing for emergencies.