Saturday, May 17, 2003
CASSINI HICCUPS
Here's a report on a recent glitch on the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft. Cassini is the last of the great 20th century deep space probes, headed to an orbital rendezvous with Saturn in July of 2004. Cassini will (hopefully) deploy a probe into the atmosphere of Saturn's mysterious moon, Titan (but not on the originally planned schedule, due to a communication issue between the Titan probe, called Huygens -- which was built by the ESA, and the main Cassini spacecraft, a NASA/JPL creation).
This report is interesting simply because it offers a glimpse into how this complex machine and the even more complex Earth-side support systems, operate -- even when something goes wrong. Here, what looks like a purely software glitch in the spacecraft's main "background sequence" (i.e. its primary operational program) caused the spacecraft to go into "safe mode," i.e. stop all uneccessary activity and revert to a simple program that maintains communication with Earth. Pretty cool, huh?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:38 PM
