Double trouble for NASA with two spacecraft on the fritz • The Register

NASA is scrambling to repair glitches affecting its Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Floor Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) missions.

Launched in 2008, the IBEX spacecraft orbits Earth trying outward to detect energetic impartial atoms and research how photo voltaic wind interacts with matter and radiation on the farthest reaches of the Photo voltaic System.

NASA has reset its flight pc many instances over its 15-year life, however mission management has did not regain communications after its newest try. The system entered contingency mode on February 18, and though the spacecraft’s flight software program appears to be operational, further software program instructions despatched by mission management have been ignored.

Officers consider alerts are reaching the satellite tv for pc but it surely is not responding. “If the mission crew’s efforts to seek out and treatment the lack of command functionality stay unsuccessful, IBEX will carry out an autonomous reset and energy cycle on March 4,” NASA said.

The satellite tv for pc carries a hexagonal array of photo voltaic panels, and carries two massive aperture imagers to seize energetic impartial atoms created when the interstellar medium interacts with photo voltaic wind. These particles can take wherever from a month to 11 years to journey to Earth.

In 2009, IBEX found a large ribbon stretching throughout the Solar’s heliosphere – a protecting bubble fashioned by the photo voltaic wind encasing all of the planets and different astronomical our bodies throughout the Photo voltaic System, the place energetic impartial atoms are significantly concentrated.

“It is a stunning new end result,” principal investigator Dave McComas said on the time. “We had no thought this ribbon existed – or what has created it. Our earlier concepts concerning the outer heliosphere are going to must be revised.”

In the meantime, NASA engineers are additionally making an attempt to determine what’s flawed with the SWOT satellite tv for pc. Collectively developed with the Centre Nationwide D’Etudes Spatiales in France, the Canadian Area Company (CSA) and UK Area Company, the floor water mapping spacecraft was launched in December 2022.

Certainly one of its devices was knocked offline earlier than the satellite tv for pc had formally begun amassing scientific knowledge. The Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) – used to measure water floor heights – was turned on in mid-January earlier than considered one of its high-powered amplifier subsystems randomly shut down.

Area businesses are working collectively to determine find out how to get it again up and working. NASA stated it’s testing parts simulating the KaRIn instrument. “The mission will proceed with its commissioning and calibration actions – deliberate March by means of June – to make sure knowledge accuracy in preparation for the start of science operations in July 2023,” it confirmed in a press release. ®