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Galileo was supposed to have a powerful high-bandwidth link back to Earth. When the antenna failed to deploy, NASA engineers had to get creative to find a solution, as Janelle explains in her talk. Credit: talk slides<\/p>\nIf you\u2019re in motorsport, or maritime, or mining fields, you can always call on a technician to come down and fix something when it\u2019s broken. You can lay hands on the parts, reconfigure things, make repairs, and get something working again. In space, that\u2019s seldom possible. If you\u2019re lucky enough to have a manned mission, you might be able to make some running repairs; if you\u2019re working with an unmanned robot, probe, or satellite, your potions are altogether more limited. If you can\u2019t find a fix, it\u2019s game over\u2014a particularly brutal result when huge budgets and years of work are on the line.<\/p>\n
Janelle Wellons came down to Hackaday Europe to talk about space. More particularly, the engineering and debugging operations that keep all sorts of space programs alive. Her talk dives into some of the creative solutions engineers have had to come up with to save million-dollar missions from becoming unrecoverable boondoggles.<\/p>\n
Janelle came down to Hackaday Europe to talk about space, because she lives and breathes it. An experienced aerospace engineer, she\u2019s worked at NASA JPL and iSpace, contributing to the success of missions taking place far from our humble globe. She drew on that experience to talk through what it takes to keep a mission on the rails when things go a little sideways, which happens in space, just as it does anywhere else.<\/p>\n
Galileo was supposed to have a powerful high-bandwidth link back to Earth. When the antenna failed to deploy, NASA engineers had to get creative to find a solution, as Janelle explains in her talk. Credit: talk slides<\/p>\n
A fantastic example of that, retold in her talk, is the Galileo mission. It was built to travel far across the solar system, eventually winding up at Jupiter to study the Red Giant and its moons.\u00a0 The probe was engineered with a pair of communication systems\u2014a low-gain antenna for vital signs and management, and a high-gain antenna for sending science data and images back to Earth. The high-gain antenna was key to the mission, capable of offering 10,000 times the bandwidth of the low-gain antenna.<\/p>\n
Tragically, though, the high-gain antenna never got to play its starring role. It didn\u2019t deploy properly after launch, and that left NASA with a probe capable of capturing all this fantastic science data, but no way to send it home at a reasonable data rate. Janelle steps through the multiple hacks that make the most of the communication link with the low-gain antenna. NASA engineers whipped up compression algorithms for images and science data, and figured out how to array several Deep Space Network antennas for better signal. This netted an effective data transfer rate of 1,000 bits\/second with the low gain antenna. It was still a far cry from the 134 kilobits per second that should have been possible with the high-gain antenna, but a huge leap forward from the 8-16 bits originally possible with the low-gain rig. Ultimately, it saved the mission, allowing the capture of mountains of scientific data on the largest planet in the solar system.<\/p>\n
\u201cNASA Astronaut Christina Cook is also working through troubleshooting steps of the waste management system that\u2019s aboard the Integrity spacecraft.\u201d \u2013 Ground control, Artemis II mission, 2026<\/p>\n
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Left\u2014the Artemis II toilet, a leap forward in space-based waste management technology. When it\u2019s working, anyway. Right\u2014the collapsible contingency urinals (CCU) used to capture and store liquid waste when the Artemis II\u2019s main toilet was out of order. Credit: talk slides<\/p>\n
Another great story told by Janelle concerned the Artemis II mission. The lunar flyby was part of NASA\u2019s efforts to eventually return to the Moon itself, and was notable for debuting some special new hardware\u2014the toilet. Unlike previous visits to the moon as part of the Apollo program, Artemis astronauts travel in luxury, with a proper commode built to handle the specific requirements of the zero-gravity space environment. Unfortunately, though, this new hardware had plenty of teething problems.<\/p>\n
Early attempts to repair the system involved attempting to reprime the toilet\u2019s pump by adding water to the system. It wasn\u2019t long before the toilet threw another error, though. On the short-duration Artemis II mission, the toilet was set up to vent urine to space. Only, venting wasn\u2019t working\u2014with the suspicion being that the vent pipes had frozen over. The trick to solve this was simple\u2014turning the spacecraft to face the vents towards the sun, so as to heat them enough to melt the blockage. Janelle also notes that during the multiple periods the toilet was down, the astronauts had to rely on alternative means of passing waste\u2014showing a slide of the \u201ccollapsible contingency urinals\u201d that did the job.<\/p>\n
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Janelle\u2019s selfie, taken with the Perseverance twin rover at NASA JPL. Credit: Talk slides<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a great look at Perseverance\u2019s twin, which lives here on Earth. Janelle has been down to the Mars yard at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where engineers, in her words\u2014\u201dtest before you do.\u201d The problem is, when you\u2019re driving a robot on a foreign planet, you can\u2019t just send someone over to repair a broken wheel or flip it back up if it tips over. Thus, many maneuvers and operations are rehearsed in the Mars yard with the twin of Perseverance, running it over recreated obstacles to determine a safe plan of attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re in motorsport, or maritime, or mining fields, you can always call on a technician to come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-625051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}