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...then there's this scientist who apparently worked on scientific instruments on not one, not two, but three failed satellites. http://www.nature.com/news/sof
by yongjik 10y ago
...then there's this scientist who apparently worked on scientific instruments on not one, not two, but three failed satellites.
http://www.nature.com/news/software-error-doomed-japanese-hitomi-spacecraft-1.19835 http://www.nature.com/news/software-error-doomed-japanese-hi...
> Software error doomed Japanese Hitomi spacecraft
> Dan McCammon, an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, helped to design and build Hitomi’s premiere scientific instrument, an X-ray calorimeter that measures the energy of X-ray photons with exquisite precision. He has been working on the technology for more than three decades, flying versions of it on the ASTRO-E mission, which failed on launch in 2000, and the Suzaku spacecraft, in which a helium leak rendered the instrument useless weeks after its 2005 launch.
> McCammon says that it would take about US$50 million from NASA, and another 3–5 years, to build a replacement calorimeter. A version of it is slated to fly on the European Space Agency’s Athena mission, but that is not due to launch until 2028.
- engi_nerd 10y agoDr. McCammon has endured even more failures than this article shows. He has a smaller calorimeter that he launches on NASA's sounding rockets. I was a telemetry engineer on another mission while both of our payloads were at White Sands in launch preparation. Dr. McCammon told me that he had been trying to have a successful launch since 1998, but launch vehicle issues (guidance failure cost one launch, command uplink cost another) and experiment issues ( the calorimeter is relatively fragile) had resulted in four consecutive failures. For all that though, he is an accomplished scientist and still had a positive attitude, which made me admire him greatly.