Hasta La Gadget!

NASA announced at a meeting in Washington that it will continue to pursue sending a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, as well as plan another mission to Saturn to visit Titan and Enceladus.

NASA said that the Europa Jupiter System Mission will focus on a Europa Orbiter to explore that icy moon of Jupiter and its subsurface water ocean. Although much of the talk about possible life elsewhere in our solar system centers around Mars, astronomers have long maintained that Europa, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, could also harbor life. The mission would launch probes in 2020 and followup orbiters in 2026.

The Titan Saturn System Mission, meanwhile, would center around an orbiter, a lander, and a research balloon; its launch date is so far unspecified. In a statement, the agency called the proposed missions “grand endeavors that set the stage for future planetary science research.”

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is doing better this month after a Martian wind blew away some of the dust that has accumulated on its solar panels, increasing their electrical output, according to NASA. Spirit’s daily energy supply has risen by about 30 watt-hours—defined as the amount of energy used to power a 30 watt light bulb for one hour—from 210 watt-hours to 240. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, the report said, so the increase doubles the power available for driving and using instruments to perform science.

“We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving,” said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. “Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half.” Both rovers are still operating on the planet after five years. Spirit was the same rover that experienced a temporary glitch a few weeks ago. (Via Slashdot)

A US Iridium satellite has hit a defunct Russian satellite in an unprecedented space collision. The crash occurred some 790km (491 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, according to NASA, and produced a “massive” cloud of debris. About 600 pieces are being tracked from the debris field in hopes of understanding the risk they present to other satellites and the international space station. The Russian craft was identified as the 950kg (2,094 pound) Cosmos 2251, a communications relay station launched in 1993 and believed to have been non-operational for the last 10 years or so. The Iridium telecommunications satellite was estimated to weigh about 560kg (1,234 pounds). Unsurprisingly, its loss is expected to have “minimal impact on Iridium’s service,” according to a statement made by the company. When asked who was at fault, NASA responded dryly:

“They ran into each other. Nothing has the right of way up there. We don’t have an air traffic controller in space. There is no universal way of knowing what’s coming in your direction.”

Gulp.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

US and Russian satellites collide in ‘unprecedented’ accident originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spirit, one of NASA’s two Mars Rovers currently exploring the red planet, is doing fine after last week’s momentary glitch that caused it to temporarily lose its memory, the New York Times reports.

“Spirit is doing pretty good, as a matter of fact,” said R. William Nelson, the chief of the engineering team for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in the article.

The report said that the best guess for what happened is that Spirit somehow entered “cripple mode,” in which the rover avoids using flash memory and instead writes to so-called random access memory. As a result, NASA may have lost the data when the rover fell asleep after trying to execute a set of instructions. “It’s all very mysterious at this point, and we may never find out what happened,” Mr. Nelson said in the article.

Mars Rover mission managers over at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. reported that the Spirit rover blanked out and became disoriented, according to the New York Times.

On Sunday, Spirit’s 1,800th day on the Mars surface, the rover acknowledged receiving instructions from Earth but then didn’t move. Later that day, it appeared to completely forget what it had done earlier that morning; usually, the rover records everything in non-volatile memory. “It’s almost as if the rover had a bout of amnesia,” said John Callas, the project manager for the rovers, in the article.

Another system in the rover recorded that power was being drained from the batteries for about 90 minutes, so something was going on, although before and after photos showed that the rover went absolutely nowhere, the report said. On Monday, an order to photograph the sun came out different than expected; the rover took the photo out of position. The article said that one hypothesis is a cosmic ray hit the electronics and scrambled the rover’s memory, but just that one time.

Now, everything is back to normal; the rover is responding to commands and appears to be operating just fine. (Artwork credit: NASA)