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thewayneThe Japanese probe, named Akatsuki, has gone dark. Mission control thinks that the craft may have lost its pointing with Earth and are working to reestablish contact.
The probe got off to a slippery start. It launched on a Japanese rocket in 2010, then a burn to lower its orbit fired for only three minutes instead of twelve. This put it in an orbit around the Sun, instead of Venus. After much research and study, they were able to get it into the orbit of Venus by venting a large quantity of fuel oxidizer. The orbiter began "taking data in 2016 about the planet and its atmosphere. In 2018, the mission's lifetime was extended, and it has continued to collect data until this spring."
There are two solar probes that occasionally slingshot around Venus for a gravity assist to boost their orbits, but their scientific gazing is focused on the Sun.
As it happens, a woman on Russet's crew is a specialist and somewhat of a noted expert on Venus and studies it frequently. It's a difficult planet to study as the window that it's above the horizon is very small.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/our-only-mission-at-venus-may-have-just-gone-dark/
The probe got off to a slippery start. It launched on a Japanese rocket in 2010, then a burn to lower its orbit fired for only three minutes instead of twelve. This put it in an orbit around the Sun, instead of Venus. After much research and study, they were able to get it into the orbit of Venus by venting a large quantity of fuel oxidizer. The orbiter began "taking data in 2016 about the planet and its atmosphere. In 2018, the mission's lifetime was extended, and it has continued to collect data until this spring."
There are two solar probes that occasionally slingshot around Venus for a gravity assist to boost their orbits, but their scientific gazing is focused on the Sun.
As it happens, a woman on Russet's crew is a specialist and somewhat of a noted expert on Venus and studies it frequently. It's a difficult planet to study as the window that it's above the horizon is very small.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/our-only-mission-at-venus-may-have-just-gone-dark/
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Date: 2024-05-30 12:03 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2024-05-30 12:16 am (UTC)I think it was Voyager One that developed a problem. The V One and V Two probes were launched like fifty years ago and they're STILL sending data! Anyway, one of the probes developed a fault and the data that it was sending was complete gibberish! The engineers figured out not only that it was a memory corruption problem, but were able to map out where the bad memory was, wrote a program fix to not write and read from the bad areas, and remotely reprogrammed the probe so that it began sending clean data again! FIFTY YEAR OLD PROBE!
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Date: 2024-05-30 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-30 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-30 05:42 am (UTC)One of my uncles, who passed far too young, helped install comm systems at Goldstone Tracking Station. And also installed the backbones of the telephone system throughout Saudi Arabia, as I understand it. I wish I'd known him as I became more knowledgeable about computer networking and such so I could have had a better understanding of what he did, but he was already gone.
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Date: 2024-05-31 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 11:48 pm (UTC)I was listening to a podcast from The Planetary Society talking about looking for carbon monoxide on exoplanets as an indication of water. You can't find water through spectroscopy if the world has a subterranean ocean, but if there is such an ocean, there would be CO in the atmosphere! So trying to identify one thing by looking for something else. I found that interesting. ANYWAY, they were talking about planetary science and studying our planets to help establish baselines and protocols to help study exoplanets for concepts such as this. The particular system this guy was studying was Trapist-I, IIRC.