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Space Science

Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by 58

Posted by michael from the license-and-registration-please dept.
Saint Aardvark writes: "All right...Space.com is reporting here that NASA's Deep Space 1 probe successfully made it through Comet Borrelly -- pretty good for a spacecraft using up the last of its fuel, 'way past its expected lifetime, doing something it wasn't designed to do'. About 30 pix are being downloaded right now, and there's a press conference planned for Tuesday. In the meantime, read NASA's press release here. Way to go, DS-1 and NASA!"
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Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by More

Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by

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  • I wonder how close they were planning on getting to the comet?
    It would be sweet for the group if the pictures of the comet were more impresive than the asteroid ds1 was supposed to fly by for the original mission.

    anyways, right on nasa!

    • So johann6 sez:

      "I wonder how close they were planning on getting to the comet?
      It would be sweet for the group if the pictures of the comet were more impresive than the asteroid ds1 was supposed to fly by for the original mission. "

      To quote Steve Collins, a member of the DS1 team at JPL:

      ---Begin Text---
      Even in these very early images, you can see the jet forming
      along one side. This is going to be just stunning.
      There is nice soft contour. It looks a lot like an asteroid
      at this resolution, but with a plume of material on the
      sunward side.

      Their thinking 14 or 15 km across for nucleus size.

      The next snip makes us scream and clap for minutes.
      It shows stunning detail across the whole nucleus.
      There is detail in shadow areas, presumably because of
      light coming back from the coma.

      The scientists are saying stuff like "these early nav snips are
      10 times better than the only other comet pictures that exist,
      the Giotto pictures of Halley.
      ---End Text---

      And these are just the images that the DS1 navigation software used to guide itself. The hires scinece images will be even better!

      "anyways, right on nasa! "

      Roger that, johann6!

  • A much more ambitious comet flyby mission, CONTOUR, will be launched by NASA less than a year from now. CONTOUR will approach 2 or 3 comets to within ~100km of the nucleus.

    I must finish with a shameless plug for the exciting computer animation I created to illustrate CONTOUR's mission, available at the CONTOUR website [contour2002.org]



  • Here's an interesting thought..

    Maybe the comet is giving off truckloads of Xenon gas..the ion engine aboard this spacecraft (or any spacecraft with a similar ion engine) could "draft" the comet, conserve its own fuel, and ride along with the comet to a particular destination before pulling off and resuming its travel... Sorta like gravitational assist without the gravity part. :)

    Cheers, and yes, we're open for business,
    • The article says pictures due in a couple of days...

      As for the "drafting" of the comet, Deep space 1 passed by the comet at a speed of 65,000 km/h, and would need way too much fuel to re-align it's trajectory.

      JPL expected less from this machine, and it is appropriate to let it go on a high note.

      From earlier press, JPL was concerned that the navigation would be a real problem, to such an extent, that they were unsure they would even make a close enough pass to the nucleus to take a photo. Read Slashdot here [slashdot.org].

      gus

    • Apparently the fuel problem isn't the ion engines. As long as the craft gets solar power, they can run indefinitely. The problem is that they used conventional hydrazine fuel engines for attitude control, and that's the fuel they were low on. So DS-1 can still do a great job of going in a straight line; it just can't turn around to aim itself in the right direction.
    • Xenon gas is a very heavy element, and if Big Bang theory is correct, then there should be very little Xenon gas around, much less a big concentrated source of it from something around at the beginning of the solar system that probably began its life in the outer reaches of the gas disk that became our solar system.

      Even if there was, since the Xenon isn't passing through the engine core I bet whatever is doing the ionizing can't ionize the Xenon gas.

  • Lovely quote (Score:2, Funny)

    by ronys ( 166557 )
    "As expected, there were lots of surprises."

    (Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

    So if there wouldn't have been any surprises, would that have been a surprise?

  • woohoo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tetrapod ( 24200 )
    The is fscking ace. Real science is waaaay better than sci-fi. Check out yesterday's astro pic of the day for a sexy photo of deep space 1 at
    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010922.html.

    The bit I like about this mission is that they didn't really expect success, but decided to go the whole hog anyway as ds1 is almost dead.
  • Earlier this year, I was somehow under the impression that this space vehicle was out of our solar system. I was wrong.
    Here [nasa.gov] is a nice view of where DS9 actually is in relation to our solar system planets.

  • From the article:

    By late November, if the craft is still operating, NASA will cease communications with it.

    Does all this work and they just abandon it ;-)

    • Oh, no. It's getting a nice severence package, including a small, but helpful, pension, stocks and it can keep that little beach place in the Bahamas if it likes. Except there was this clause about having to show up in person to claim the stocks and checks.
    • It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money :-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.
  • Geez after this beer-brewing [slashdot.org] article I thought NASA had lost all the people who had some sense in them (no not technical). But I was wrong. Woohoo.. Rock on NASA
  • This is great for NASA and science in general! Its good to see probes being tested beyond their design goals; Space is full of risks and perils and it is good we are pushing the envelope. Hopefully they'll keep DS-1 around a while because just because its old, doesn't mean you throw it away.

  • This is a VGT (Very Good Thing) (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What do you know, I can't log into slashdot, DOH! This'll have to be an AC:


    While we in the technology industry have never really doubted NASA's ability, this shines good on NASA in the public forum. To me, many in the general public view NASA as something that once had a purpose, but now is struggling to get their missions to work right, etc. (which is far from the truth). But something like this tells the world "Hey, so we forgot to convert back to metric... everyone makes mistakes... look at this!". NASA is still very much an important entity. Look at all of the advances made because of the space program. If anything, hopefully this will serve to deter (if only a little bit) the budget cuts NASA has been facing as of late.


    Just a thought...

    • This is at least the second time NASA has done something like this: the last one was the landing of the NEAR-Shoemaker probe on the asteroid Eros [cnn.com].

      So the obvious conclusion is, stop paying NASA to do stuff! Things clearly work better when they're retasking existing equipment to do something else, preferably involving a crash landing. From now on, we should forbid NASA to build anything other than Earth-orbit satellites.

      But once the satellites are in orbit, heck, anything goes! Put people on 'em and send 'em to Mars! Or maybe skim the solar atmosphere! How about sending them to the nearest star at 0.9c? Or why not the galactic nucleus? There may be no limits to the potential of this new "non-funding" technology!!

  • NASA now have a policy of destroying their equipment at the end of missions. Otherwise they find that the budget for the mission gets extended and takes away from the other missions they want to fund. I got the impression that this was another 'let's see if we can kill this thing' mission.

    Of course the operators usually try to arrange it that the thing makes it through somehow...
    • With the International Space Station (ISS) running continiously over budget, NASA is more or less forced to shut down a lot of science missions. In other words, saving 5-10 mil on science data analysis in order to raise the 5 billion a year they need to build, launch and maintain the orbital tin cans that is the ISS. The ironry is that there will be insuficient money or crew in the ISS in order to do much significant science there anyway for the next five years, at least. But, those congrisional districts and big comapanies that make and launch the stuff will be happy. Those have a bigger lobby group than 20 or 30 scientists who dedicate their life to analysisng the data.
      NASA has already pushed out the Mars exploration program by another two years this week. The trouble is, they do that every two years.

      In fairness though, saying goodby to DS9 in these circumstances is acceptable. Running out of funding may be sad, but running out of fuel, which it has, is not something you can fix. Only for the fact that they overfilled it at launce got it this far.

  • Using Sun (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ankou ( 261125 )
    What I thought was interesting when I saw the great episode on DS1 on "The Discovery Channel" was the navigation system. Aparently DS1 does most of the decision processes by iteself, and I might add that is quite a task when you think about it. After all there are no real landmarks or other solid navigational aids in space so it uses picture comparision on where it is and where to go next. This AI allows minimal amounts of people required to keep her running and if I remember right they only had about 7-10 guys in this room watching and codeing on Sun workstations. Sun?! No wonder all the manuvers they made were "risky" and no wonder they ran out of funds to keep her going. I wonder why they didn't use linux, or if they plan to in the future.
    • DS1's AI ran on more than "just" Suns. The probe itself runs VxWorks on a rad-hardened RS6000 (PowerPC) at the awesome speed of 25 MHz (see here [ghs.com]).

      Development of the planning/scheduling was done on Suns and Power Macs, using two different vendors' Common Lisp implementations (see here [tu-graz.ac.at] for a message from one of the implementors). During development, NASA management decided there were too many programming languages flying in DS1, so they decided to drop one of C, C++, or Lisp. C++ lost, but is being wedged back in for political reasons.

      The planner was only given 10% of the CPU, which meant DS1 was doing real-world AI at 2 MHz (!).
  • NASA has a few bits of eye candy detailing the position of DSA relative to Borrley [nasa.gov], the position of DS1 relative to the sun [nasa.gov], and two viwes of the position of Borrlley (1 [nasa.gov], 2 [nasa.gov]). The image page is here [nasa.gov]; the DS1 page is here [nasa.gov].
  • This is about the 3rd or 4th mission I've now heard of that goes off and does something beyond its "expected mission" or "expected lifetime". Remember the landing on Eros? The probe that rammed the moon? Sure they have screw-ups like the Martian lander, but you got to give them credit for all these extra missions they are accomplishing, especially considering their ever decreasing budget.
  • What were the management and group/responsibility structure changes that were implemented to make this project succeed in such a wildly unpredictable way.
    • I know a few people with connections to JPL and IIRC this project was planned for failure--delays, cheap material, constant "redesigns", etc. But the engineers who worked on it were very resourceful and somehow managed to get the thing up (think Macguyver and crazy workarounds). Now NASA is exploiting DS1.

      Kudos to the engineers who fought the good fight.

      Jinushaun
  • And sensors that monitor the ion propulsion were reprogrammed to listen for magnetic fields and plasma waves in and around the comet.

    OK, that part is definitely cool. Whoever came up with that one deserves some credit.
    • If you want to read some really cool shit head over to JPL and read the event log for the entire mission. Those boys down there are really impressive. Of particular interest to me was when they used the planetary telescope as a starfinder when the DS1's dedicated starfinder busted a nut. Crazy shit them NASA engineers. All of the mission logs are great reads though.

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