Ulysses Space Mission Finally Coming To an End

Dusty writes "After several false alarms, the Ulysses Mission is finally ending. According to the Spacecraft Operations Manager's latest status report, the last track will be on 30th June 2009 from 15:25 until 20:20 UTC. 'We've tried to bolster our dwindling tracking allocation with some success by grabbing antenna time released on short notice (mostly by the Spitzer Project). However, weekly data return figures are now typically 10% or less. And soon, even 512 bps from 70m antennas will be a thing of the past.' Further details about Ulysses' 18-year mission are available from NASA and the ESA. We discussed the failing spacecraft last summer when it looked like its fuel was going to freeze, but through clever engineering, experts managed to squeeze out another year.

Re:Not satisfied with polluting Earth

[bencoder]

Do you know how fracking big the universe is? Even just our little solar system. This thing is orbiting the sun, like a planet. A planet the size of a small car. There's a lot of space around it. Even if we mined the whole planet and sent up as many of them as we could, we couldn't send up more than the mass of the earth. There would be a tiny tiny miniscule chance of them hitting each other.

Please, have some respect for the scale here. I take it when you're visiting people's houses, you don't leave behind any flakes of your skin, or any molecules or crumbs of any part of you behind? Hypocrite.

Going against the flow

[Anonymous Coward]

Missions like these are what space exploration should be about, at least in this stage.

Humans do have a future in space, but unfortunately not a present. There are still so many things we don't know about our neighborhood (Solar system) and getting people up there is so expensive that to me at least, robotic exploration and hard science make more sense for now.

A mission like GOCE for example, designed to map out the gravity of our Earth seems a million times more inspiring than any Constellation simply because of the long term results it will deliver. Getting cheap access through the Interplanetary Transport Network (Google it) to ANY point in our solar system seems more impressive to me than a footprint on Mars

one last attempt possible?

[hcdejong]

Playing with this Java applet [esa.int] that shows Ulysses' position relative to Earth, Ulysses will be a lot closer to Earth in 2013. It'd be interesting to see if the shorter distance will make up for 3 more years of decay of the RTG.