6 ms·
Juice’s RIME antenna successfully unjammed
- icegreentea2 4y agoDoes anybody know what the intended use of these "non explosive actuator"s were? Are they resettable? Does using them for freeing the antenna degrade another part of the mission?
- cwillu 4y agoI _think_ they're often nitinol, i.e., shape-memory metal. Nitinol can be hot-formed, cooled, then formed a further limited amount. When reheated, they will return to their hot-formed shape.
- somat 4y agoI don't think a shape memory alloy would provide a shock. I suspect they are solenoids(vs explosive bolts) used to detach the vehicle from it's mounting plate on the rocket. and the engineers as they went down the list trying increasingly wild ideas to get the antenna to deploy reached "fire the release solenoids, and hope it shakes the antenna pin in the correct way". It did, so slow clap for the engineers for saving a very expensive science experiment remotely from billions of miles away. well done.
- morelisp 4y ago"Slow clap" likely doesn't have the connotation you want...
- djmips 4y agoThere is that charming eighties movie 'slow clap' that builds to a crescendo of appreciation and/or support.
- abudabi123 4y agoThe French fans of American MMA express their appreciation with golf or tennis claps. A contrast in technique and style between American and French MMA is seen in the Jon Jones vs Cyril Gane heavy weight fight. Back on topic, the release mechanism jams every now and again across the probes sent to deep space. Hope the engineers are given the window of opportunity to solve this category of problem once and for all by business-ops. The release of the JWST antenna while at the moment of sparkly reflections in the sunshine looked real strong.
- moffkalast 4y agoESA going for the old reliable percussive maintenance procedure.
- dylan604 4y agoI'm envisioning a large cartoonish sledge with the letters ACME stamped on it
- onetwentythree 3y agoThe shock typically comes from the release of the preload, not from the NEA itself.
- marsokod 4y agoOr it could be a PCM pin-puller system: basically paraffin is heated and while it liquifies, it will slightly expand and push a pin that will trigger the release.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- serf 4y agothere are lots of different kinds of NEAs. https://cms.nacsemi.com/Images/FeaturedProducts/Eaton_Non-Explosive%20Actuators.pdf https://cms.nacsemi.com/Images/FeaturedProducts/Eaton_Non-Ex...
- amelius 4y agoIsn't just about any actuator of the "non-explosive" kind? I mean, the motor in my DVD drive tray is a non-explosive actuator I suppose.
- jakeinspace 4y agoWell, at least under nominal supply voltage.
- BrentOzar 4y agoThe title sounds bad, like the antenna broke off, but the article explains that the antenna was stuck in its folded position, and they got it to break free and deploy into the correct position.
- gumby 4y agoNext time don’t name a moving device using a word that means “frozen”, eh?
- jalk 4y agoI doubt that ESA believe in numerology, fate or jinxing :) But ofc they could start to give out “jinx” name to see if that impacts failure rate.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoIt is well-known, especially after the film came out, that NASA engineers and staff were consciously tempting fate when they scheduled the Apollo 13 launch for 13 minutes after the hour. Of course, up until that point in history, it was customary to omit the 13th floor in buildings and to omit the 1300 block in city street planning, among other things. So it was a rather "progressive" move for NASA to even suggest that they not skip directly from Apollo 12 to Apollo 14. I do not rightly recall, but I believe that the film portrayed other ways they poked fun at superstition in a really callous and cavalier manner. So is it any surprise that they were rewarded with a disastrous and life-threatening mission? Hmm.
- lazide 4y agoIt would be like scheduling a product release on a Fridays to test 'production readiness'. Lessons were learned, but not the ones expected.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoWell testing on Friday has clear implications, while numerology is dubious at best.
- lazide 4y agoIn my experience real problems from both are not about the specific day or date or numerology, but about the psychology behind the choice - which inevitably causes problems. With Friday pushes, someone is inevitably in a rush to get something out despite the risks and ignoring that most folks are going to be checked out and unavailable regardless of what they say (because most people are working M-F). Which is a recipe for disaster. If the company has a shifted schedule or something going on, the same danger could apply on a Monday, but Friday’s are a problem 99% of the time. With something like ‘the 13th’, it could be someone intentionally picking things that have no obvious rational reason to be a problem but that make some people uneasy and worried for non-rational reasons. While most of the time that isn’t a problem, sometimes there actually is a problem there, we just haven’t been able to figure it out rationally yet, let alone provide a useful counter measure. And people feeling uneasy, even if they aren’t rationally aware of it causes problems on its own. We tend to go where our mind visualizes we will end up. After all, it is generally a bad idea to be walking under ladders or scaffolding without a hard hat for instance, and broken mirrors are dangerous. Just not for 7 years, assuming one has a vacuum and cleans it up well enough after. And if people are uneasy about something, why intentionally aim for it? Why not avoid it? Or at least just ignore it. Assuming there isn’t some huge pressing benefit to doing the thing that is making people uneasy anyway, which I’m struggling to imagine why it would be important to hit all the numerology ‘bad numbers’ in Apollo’s case for instance.
- mjevans 4y agoThis points to an ability to shake, like biological entities can shake to throw off unwanted things or stretch out body parts, as a feature that should be designed into future devices.
- bad_alloc 4y agoYes, especially since these machines need to resist vibration anyways at launch. A vibration motor might be a good inclusion, although it could be the required rotating mass busts some mass budgets. A more complex second option could be a small cubesat which tags along and can bump into or poke at some components.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoOr just a very cute, scene-stealing astromech droid.
- consumer451 4y agoI had an honest-to-goodness bad dream about this issue last night. So happy to hear it is resolved!
- willcipriano 4y ago> To try to shift the pin, they shook Juice using its thrusters, then they warmed Juice with sunlight. Every day the RIME antenna was showing signs of movement, but no full release. > On 12 May RIME was finally jolted into life when the flight control team fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA), located in the jammed bracket. This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold. TLDR: They finally pressed the unstick the antenna button.
- quercusa 4y agoWish we could see the control center video of the team when this was confirmed.
- downvotetruth 4y ago1 day ago: Stuck antenna freed on Jupiter-bound spacecraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35924758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35924758
- gibolt 4y agoThis sounds like the non-clickbait version. No wonder it has less comments
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hm-nah 4y agoAre these efforts scientifically-driven or necessity-driven? Are we taking it as a given that humanity will not last here on earth, thus we NEED to find other habitable planets? Is it because it’s already too late here? Is it because humanity has embedded into itself, a socio-economic pattern that is completely unsustainable and we are fundamentally unable to reach consensus on how to pull ourselves out of the nosedive?
- Me1000 4y agoThe JUICE mission has nothing to do with finding habitable planets.
- boxed 4y agoRead the wikipedia articles on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and make up your own mind if you want to live there :P
- cfraenkel 4y agoWhat's with everyone feeling a need to shoehorn every possible issue into an either this or that frame? The world is not made of binary yes/no questions - it feels like it says something about the limitations of the person asking the question.
- akira2501 4y agoI'm a human and I'm part of humanity, but I'm under no obligation to take orders from it, or operate with it as part of a forced consensus. What you seem to be arguing for is a complete tyranny of human creativity and experimentation to be lorded over by economists and lawyers. We're doing it because it's cool and we might learn something. If that's not good enough, then I'm not sure what type of world you'd actually like to live in.
- GuB-42 4y agoBoth. It is scientifically driven, but scientific exploration itself is a necessity. Not necessarily because we will all die if we don't do it (though there is a bit of that), but because curiosity is what makes us human. It is as necessary as heroin is for an addict, except that unlike heroin, it is an addiction that lead us to great things. If we stopped doing that, I wouldn't even want to call the resulting species "human".
- tomrod 4y agoWell done, engineering crew! On a side note, we need tiny spider drones!
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoUpdate: a tiny spider drone has malfunctioned and jammed the release mechanism of a critical spacecraft component. But genuinely it’s far far simpler to make a reliable antenna release mechanism than it is to make some spacecraft traversing spider robot!
- gorgoiler 4y agoAmazing news! Aside: what is the white dot which tracks across the first animation, from southeast to northwest?
- blantonl 4y agoThese folks that design and run these experiments must have nerves of steel. You know that feeling when you have a file server that is half way around the world and all the sudden it's gone unresponsive? Then you have to start a recovery process with on-site people, etc? The dread? The uncertainty? Now think of a principle scientist that quite possibly has devoted their entire life's academic work to one of these experiments, and something like this happens. From concept to funding to launch to all the billions of dollars to all the math and luck and other stuff that must go right. I don't know if I could do it. And then it comes down to one damn tiny pin or something and all could be lost. It would be like spending 20 years configuring a server just right in a specific manner, deploying it, and it's taken out for ever because of a typo in code somewhere - and it's all gone. Poof. Nightmare fuel.
- amelius 4y agoEveryone who ships hardware products has this problem. You don't want to recall thousands of items because you forgot to add a capacitor in your circuit. Software engineers are just lucky ...
- CoastalCoder 4y agoMany are. Some of us write very high-stakes software.
- doctor_eval 4y agoAnd there are a lot more parts to a software system.
- aetherspawn 4y agoI disagree, I do both, and a modern ECU hardware can be extremely complex .. more so than its software. This is because the hardware needs to meet a stack of conflicting specifications and standards for EMC, robustness, etc. Things need to work at a wide range of temperatures -40degC to 150degC. Optimising for one standard or parameter causes all your other calibration to go out of whack. Adding a protection element to the circuit can itself fail and be the reason that the circuit fails. At times it can be like the Jenga tower ready to topple over. Modern standards like ISO 26262 make it even more complicated because now we have to calculate and add up the failure probabilities of every single resistor and capacitor to find the whole-circuit failure probability, and in some applications we would need to prove less than 10 FIT (10 per trillion hours). Usually this can’t be reached without adding redundant components, and then maintaining the document trail to explain why they exist and can't be removed. And suppose you need to change a component in the design .. you have to find something to do with the 10,000 units of the old component that you bought a year ago before the design was finished because it was on back order for 100 weeks.