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Space

Black Boxes for Spacecrafts 125

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-many-raunchy-jokes-to-choose-from dept.
karvind writes "NewScientist is running story about NASA's plan to put small, heat-resistant black boxes that will transmit data back to Earth when future space probes break up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. NASA will work with Aerospace Corporation to develop black boxes called Reentry Breakup Recorders (REBRs) weighing just 1 kilogram and spanning less than 30 centimetres."
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Black Boxes for Spacecrafts More

Black Boxes for Spacecrafts

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  • "When" they break up? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shouldn't that be an "if"?

  • Just make sure you don't put Windows on these (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:16AM (#12262268)
    The Blue Screen of Orbit Reentry is not a fun thing to experience.

  • There I was ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:17AM (#12262277) Journal
    There I was, walking down the street, minding my own business, when .... BONK! Black box to the head.

  • Phone Home (Score:5, Interesting)

    by qw(name) ( 718245 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:18AM (#12262278) Journal

    There's got to be a beacon incorporated into the design because if that thing (30 cm.) lands in a very deep spot in the ocean it's going to be hard to find!

    What good is a lost blackbox?

    • Re:Phone Home (Score:2, Insightful)

      by krunk4ever ( 856261 )
      how bout we make it less dense then water so it'd float? or have it release inflate a tube around it upon contact with water?
      • It would be very difficult to make a device that had moving parts like that, yet still manage to survive the reentry breakup and explosions. I think by putting a high-pressure less-dense-than-water canister inside that could vent out into a larger compartment in the box might make it bouyant (sp?) enough to float.

  • Black Box? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 )
    Hmm, I wonder what could be inside....

  • The plural of 'craft' (Score:3, Informative)

    by tagish ( 113544 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:18AM (#12262283) Homepage
    is 'craft', not 'crafts' :)

  • Slightly worrying for bees (Score:5, Funny)

    by mrRay720 ( 874710 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:19AM (#12262290)
    "These things are so light and easy to attach, we would like to have several on everything that flies"

    Try getting back in your hive now, bitch!

  • Linux there too? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChipMonk ( 711367 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:31AM (#12262369) Journal
    I've heard of squeezing Linux into small devices, but a window manager [sourceforge.net] on a space probe is a bit ridiculous, don't you think? TCP just isn't designed to handle that much lag time and network interference.

  • Isn't that a bit heavy/large? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @11:40AM (#12262422)
    Launching an extra kilo into orbit? That's actually pretty expensive isn't it.
  • This will be useless without a functioning omni-directional communication system.

    Keep that in mind.

  • ...but I'd think desinging the spaceships so they don't break up on reentry might be a better idea.
    • This is specifically for unmanned probes that are designed to break up on re-entry.
    • An astronaut is probably more likely to die in the plane ride from Wherever, USA to Florida.

      And even more likely to die from a car accident on his/her commute from the airport to the Kennedy Space Center than from a shuttle reentry.

      Another thing to consider, black boxes are resistant to destruction because they are small (small surface area to be charred or impacted) and compact (little space inside the box for dislodged components to move about and further destroy themselves or other internal compone
      • An astronaut is probably more likely to die in the plane ride from Wherever, USA to Florida.

        And even more likely to die from a car accident on his/her commute from the airport to the Kennedy Space Center than from a shuttle reentry.

        Hmm.. I think space travel is relatively safe for the energy level involved.. but still, a .5-3% chance of fatality per mission is not exactly comparable to air transportation or driving; indeed, it's quite likely the risk from a single mission exceeds your lifetime exposure
    • Yeah, last time that happened [wikipedia.org], the Australian government wasn't too happy about the results.

      Thorough breakup (and better de-orbiting) on re-entry is a much better alternative to multi-ton artificial meteorites.

      p
    • I read somewhere that if you create a negative ion field around the space ship as it re-enters, it lowers the air resistance, therefore causing the ship to 'increase' in speed as it enters the atmosphere but at the same time causing less friction on the whole ship, so a purpose built 'slow-down break' could be deployed or the ion field reduced in strength to control the slow down.

  • Duh. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mtz206 ( 664433 )
    My Honda Civic has a black box to record crash data, but $100 million space craft don't. Um, duh.

  • "Aircrafts," eh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by H_Fisher ( 808597 ) <[h_v_fisher] [at] [yahoo.com]> on Sunday April 17, 2005 @12:05PM (#12262571)
    Obviously, the editorim didn't pay attentions to verb endae during their English classices.

  • I, for one, welcome... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcsiry ( 38594 ) on Sunday April 17, 2005 @12:20PM (#12262679) Homepage
    ...our new era of information saturation.

    As sensors become smaller, lighter, and more networked, it makes sense to put recording devices on ANYTHING remotely mission critical, mainly because at a certain point it becomes negligent not to.

    When I ride over the Queensboro Bridge in NYC, I stare up with apprehension at the thousands of rusting girders that hold that rattletrap together. The only thing forestalling a collapse is having actual dudes crawling over it all the time checking visually for cracks and obvious failures. The smart pebble technology previously mentioned on Slashdot - http://www.betterroads.com/articles/feb03b.htm - would make me feel more comfortable.

    I feel the same way on airplanes- do I trust that a ground tech working for a lowest-bidder maintenance company has adequately checked the airframe? I sure would like real-time fatigue information being beamed to the pilot, so he can decide wether to fly or not based on risking his own skin.

    The most amazing thing about our age of astounding engineering is still the amount of ignorance we maintain about our constructions (Bucky Fuller's famous, and unanswered question to an architect: How much does your building weigh?). Thus, safety margins, inspections, building codes, all serving as bandaids to a fundamental ignorance that bites back BIG when a failure does occurr (sure, the WTC can absorb the impact, but can it survive the potential energy bundled in a plane, including the BTUs in the fuel? Nope).

    Privacy wonks will worry about networked sensors in their toilets watching them take a crap, but really, if anyone wants to see mine, they're more than welcome to it- I just don't want to hear about it (eeewwww).

    • How much does that weigh?

      Well, the answer is obvious:

      HAM!
    • I wouldn't classify the WTC falling after being hit by a fueled jetliner as a "failure" -- it almost certaintly wasn't contemplated as a requirement, nor would that have been a practical requirement to include unless you had advance knowledge of the attack by a couple of decades. Its like faulting a car maker for failing to include enough armor on the side to stop sniper-fired sabot rounds designed to punch through tanks -- thats not a "failure", that is a project which was well-designed for its intended u
  • NewScientist is running story about NASA's plan to put small, heat-resistant black boxes that will transmit data back to Earth when future space probes break up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere.

    Why don't they make the whole damn space craft out of that heat resistant material.

  • Really, if you can make something that will survive falling from space, shouldn't you just build that around the astronauts so that they can survive too? Hell, I'd like my car built like one as well.

    porp
    • Well, the key to "black boxes" is not solely the box.
      Of course the box should be built to remain intact after e.g. falling through the athmosphere without external heatshielding, then impacting on the ocean with Mach-2. But the components inside must be built robust enough to survice an Mach-2 impact as well. And I don't think today's astronauts can really take that...
    • Really, if you can make something that will survive falling from space, shouldn't you just build that around the astronauts so that they can survive too?

      I'm not sure how serious you meant this comment to be, but here goes:

      The first problem is that electronics can be designed to survive much greater accelerations than can the human body. Remember: Only the small pieces of silicon containing the data need survive the impact for the data to be recoved, but a brief 65g-75g acceleration will scramble on
      • The second problem is that, even if you assume that your "black box" design can reduce the accleration of its contents to something survivable, you still have to find a way to make a large-enough black-box to contain the crew without the black-box being too heavy or too big to be launched into space.

        It's called a 'capsule'. They built a bunch of them in the 60's, worked quite well. There were a few minor system failures on the capsules, example, a hatch blew on one, causing it to sink after impact. A

        • Parachutes were a nice touch to reduce final impact loads, but as long as astronauts were properly seated in thier accelleration couches, the impact without parachutes would be surviveable

          Someone forgot to tell Komarov.
          http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/q/qsoy1crs.jp g [astronautix.com]

          A parachute failure in any of the manned capsules would have likely been fatal.

          In all, four astronauts have died in capsules during or after rentry, but none because of the reentry itself. Komarov crashed without a parachute, the
          • You are confusing a soyuz landing on terra-firma with an apollo capsule splashing into the ocean. The impact with the ground is abrupt, resulting in a shock load of many thousands of g's, for a very very short period of time. The water impact will be hard, but, it will spread the energy dissipation over a short period of time as the capsule submerges. There is a world of difference between the forces involved in the hard landing where energy is dissipated virtually instantaneously, vs those involved in a
    • Why not just ride the train or a bus? You have a very, very small chance of injury relative to a car. Trains are even safer than airplanes (although not with Amtrak's funding down to $300 million/year when they need $2B to survive).
    • This is like that joke, if the black box is indestructable, why not make the whole plane out of black box. It's really stupid, as black box materials weigh a whole lot more than the materials that aircraft and spacecraft are made of. Douglas Adams wrote an article about becoming disilusioned about comedy and cited that joke as an example of what's wrong. Ignorant people laughing at those who know more than them.
  • The plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
    • is it our fault our english language is the biggest POS patched crap ever?

      Its not like it has defined rules and thats it, it has 200000 extensions, much like the 8086 set ;)

      I say do away with all wierdo extensions, and keep it simple and ruly, who cares if some words begin to sound strange, like cactuss. Just because some peoples brains are too rigid to accept unusuall looking words they had to add new rules.

  • Don't make the damn things black! There's enough dark matter out there as it is! Didn't science fiction teach these people anything? You're supposed to put colorful panels and flickering lights on it!

    What's next, powering it with dark energy??
  • I saw a commercial for one of those beds that have the matress that's made out of foam developed at NASA.

    I thought, yeah, that's just what I need. A bed that comes apart in orbit and burns up on re-entry.

  • The name includes the "The".

    The Aerospace Corporation is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), located in lovely El Segundo, California. El Segundo is also home to Los Angeles' Hyperion sewage processing plant, a Chevron refinery, the Los Angeles Air Force Base, and numerous other aerospace-themed venues that hearken back to the good ol' days (The Proud Bird, The Wild Goose, etc.).

  • But I really think that it should be called the Neon Box.

    Ok the Black Box rolls off the tounge which is the leet part of lingo, but besides that.. Make it Neon or they deserve to loose it.
  • Haha, originally just the words 'black' and 'space', 'black' and 'box', and 'future' and 'space' stuck out at at me. (plz pick apart the grammar of that last sentence. Spacecrafts.) So I thought we were gonna put black boxes in spaceships, then fly them into black holes. That'd be awesome.
  • is this where the aerospace union corporation originated from?

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