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Scott Manley: Scientists May Have Figured Out Why Spacecraft Were Failing (2018)
- zeristor 5y agoFull title: “Scientists May Have Figured Out Why So Many Spacecraft Were Failing” About the reaction wheels which have been an issue for long space missions.
- zeristor 5y agoPaper referenced in the video: “A NEWLY DISCOVERED BRANCH OF THE FAULT TREE EXPLAINING SYSTEMIC REACTION WHEEL FAILURES AND ANOMALIES” William Bialke and Eric Hansell https://esmats.eu/esmatspapers/pastpapers/pdfs/2017/bialke.pdf https://esmats.eu/esmatspapers/pastpapers/pdfs/2017/bialke.p... The title is in capitals, who am I to change it. I believe the issue was high voltages induced by solar flares, which arced across the bearing races, putting them and leading to gradually increasing friction. I’ll have to go over it again to find out what the solution is. Interesting though early on NASA had JPL do lots of work to resolve the high failure rate of satellites, I believe this being done to electrical connections etc needing to be far more robust for launch.