NASA Universe-Watching Satellite Losing Its Cool 153
coondoggie writes "NASA this week said its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE satellite is heating up — not a good thing when your primary mission instrument needs to be kept cold to work. According to NASA, WISE has two coolant tanks that keep the spacecraft's normal operating temperature at 12 Kelvin (minus 438 degrees Fahrenheit). The outer, secondary tank is now depleted, causing the temperature to increase. One of WISE's infrared detectors, the longest-wavelength band most sensitive to heat, stopped producing useful data once the telescope warmed to 31 Kelvin (minus 404 degrees Fahrenheit)."
What to do (Score:4, Insightful)
The primary tank is still running, and now will do a
It appears, to the uninformed such as myself, that this satellite was meant to have a life of about 2 years. The good news is that it accomplished its primary mission. The bad news is that the NASA boys either didn't plan accordingly to cool it properly for its second run, or it was a hopeful objective.
Re:It's warming up--pretty much on schedule (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying the consumables on board were consumed on schedule, as designed and as expected? STOP THE PRESSES!
NASA's problem is that Spirit and Opportunity lasted so ridiculously long past their stated mission that merely exceeding expectations by a reasonable engineering design factor now looks like newsworthy incompetence.
They should have ended that mission on time by nuking them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Re:So that's like... (Score:2, Insightful)
The entire British Commonwealth uses Celsius.
Language wise, English equals British about as much as Spanish equals Spain.
In other words, lots of countries were subjugated many hundreds of years ago by the two empires. English is simply a footprint from that period of time, as is Spanish. Since most of the countries are now separate entities and disparate, logic would dictate that the ousted countries' activities would hold no bearing on said countries' activities.
Re:It's warming up--pretty much on schedule (Score:5, Insightful)
Dead on. Furthermore, it IS still working on a secondary bonus mission since all but the longest wavelength is still working great. Apparently, NASA is not olny expected to extend it's missions well beyond their designed endpoint, they are expected to do so with no degradation whatsoever.
I guess at this rate, they'll be given a big rubber band, a sack lunch and a scuba tank for their budget and instructed to carry out a manned moon mission.
Re:So that's like... (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, this whole discussion is moot. -404F isn't any more or less informative to most people than -242C. They're both "really really fucking cold".
The only useful unit for temperatures that low is K.
Re:It's warming up--pretty much on schedule (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA's problem is that Spirit and Opportunity lasted so ridiculously long past their stated mission that merely exceeding expectations by a reasonable engineering design factor now looks like newsworthy incompetence.
It's not just the rovers. Despite some genuinely newsworthy fuckups, when NASA gets it right -- which is most of the time -- they usually do a stellar job, pun intended. A fair number of NASA probes have lasted decades beyond their primary mission and continue to produce useful data. Voyager I, for example, is still transmitting thirty-three years after its launch.
Some people have just got to have their government incompetence stories even when the government is being unbelievably competent.
Re:So that's like... (Score:2, Insightful)
So if your server is in Nashville, all text should be in a southern accent, rest of the country be damned?
Newsflash: political boundaries are figments of the imagination.
Re:It's warming up--pretty much on schedule (Score:3, Insightful)
But when you have rovers that end up lasting 30x their expected lifetime, you expect more from a bottle of hydrogen.
Besides, this is in outer space. You would think that keeping things cold would be easy. Guess not.