India's Space Agency Says Its Mars Orbiter Craft Has Lost Communication, Confirms Mission Over (livemint.com) 18
Local newspaper Mint reports: The Indian Space Research Organisation on 3 October confirmed that the Mars Orbiter craft has lost communication with ground station, it's non-recoverable and with this the Mangalyaan mission has attained end-of-life. Giving an update on the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), ISRO was celebrating the completion of its eight years in the Martian orbit and commemorate MOM. Despite being designed for a life-span of six months as a technology demonstrator, the MOM lived for about eight years in the Martian orbit with a gamut of significant scientific results on Mars as well as on the Solar corona.
Though it has lost communication with the ground station, due to a long eclipse in April 2022, ISRO said. ISRO deliberated that the propellant must have been exhausted, and therefore, the "desired altitude pointing" could not be achieved for sustained power generation. "It was declared that the spacecraft is non-recoverable, and attained its end-of-life", an ISRO statement said, adding, "The mission will be ever-regarded as a remarkable technological and scientific feat in the history of planetary exploration."
Though it has lost communication with the ground station, due to a long eclipse in April 2022, ISRO said. ISRO deliberated that the propellant must have been exhausted, and therefore, the "desired altitude pointing" could not be achieved for sustained power generation. "It was declared that the spacecraft is non-recoverable, and attained its end-of-life", an ISRO statement said, adding, "The mission will be ever-regarded as a remarkable technological and scientific feat in the history of planetary exploration."
Congrats on a long lived mission! (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like in a lot of other contexts over-engineering is not desirable from a cost standpoint, but I have been really happy that so many over-engineered space projects seem to have had lives way, way beyond what you would think was reasonable even with designing for margins of error...
They must have had an awful lot more fuel onboard than they needed to keep orientation correct for this toast eight years compared to the original six months!
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Re:Congrats on a long lived mission! (Score:5, Interesting)
For a related example, just look at JWST. NASA and ESA have plenty of experience with designing, building, launching, and operating spacecraft. And yet it wasn't until well into the cruise towards L2 that they had a good estimate of what the actual operational lifetime of JWST would be. They had a certain fuel budget for adjusting the Earth-leaving trajectory, to make up for imprecision in the Ariane V launch. But the Ariane did a fantastic job, so that course-adjustment budget could be moved over to the spacecraft's operational budget. Result: the expected operational lifetime of JWST got extended from its baseline of 10 years out to 20 years, all because Ariane did better than advertised on its launch.
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One mission: Voyager 1 & 2
Launched: 1977
Primary Mission Ended: 1980
Extended Mission: 1980 - *Present*
Little F*ck'ers are still going - 45 years later.
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It's also generally designed around "worst-case" conditions, which might mean a failed thruster, and 3-sigma low ISP, worst case disturbance torque for the orbit injection burn, stuff like that. Once you get it in orbit, the required propellant is extremely small, so a 50 lb "better than worst case" condition for injection might mean another 5 years.
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to keep orientation correct for this toast eight years
it kept orientation for the last eight years. It's now just starting out on it's toast eight years.
Oh well (Score:1)
I do feel a little bad for not catching the hypo but pretty sure most people figured out what the real word is just as you did.
P.S. Yes I left in another typo just for you to find! Correct the Autocorrect is a fun game to play.
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its
yep, fun game :)
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its
Sadly I couldn't read the rest of what you wrote because in my head a giant foot dropped down and squashed it all. :-)
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Auto correct is everyone's worst enema.
Space junk (Score:1)
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It's okay, there's 1,000,000,000,000,000 spare planets.
Built to last (Score:2)
The fact it stretched its original mission from 6 months 8 years.... that's engineering flexing.
Respect.
Did they try? (Score:4, Funny)
Did they try calling their offshore tech support?
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They even turned it off and on again. Or tried to.
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Bad news, but (Score:1)