These 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.
Indeed. I'm a rover driver & arm operator on Curiosity and there have been a few sandy patches where things were a little ... touch and go. I often think: what if I made a bad call, and my drive ended the mission? Even with a mission that's been operating for more than 10 years, it would be awful: there are hundreds of people involved, including scientists who have been planning investigations for the rover to conduct along our journey over the next few years. I would feel terrible if it was my fault that we never got to their research site of interest.
But then I remember: I'm not an airline pilot. I'm not a surgeon. Yes, my decisions matter, but this is not the highest-stakes job out there, not by a long shot.
Does it actually include touch and go like driving with the driver as decision maker? I expected that every move would be scrutinized by a team of specialists?
Everyone 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.
Does 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?
I _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.
I 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.
Or 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.
This 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.
Yes, 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.
It 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.
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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.
But then I remember: I'm not an airline pilot. I'm not a surgeon. Yes, my decisions matter, but this is not the highest-stakes job out there, not by a long shot.
Does it actually include touch and go like driving with the driver as decision maker? I expected that every move would be scrutinized by a team of specialists?
Software engineers are just lucky ...
It did, so slow clap for the engineers for saving a very expensive science experiment remotely from billions of miles away. well done.
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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.
If it results in more robot probes, all the better!
So happy to hear it is resolved!
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On a side note, we need tiny spider drones!
But genuinely it’s far far simpler to make a reliable antenna release mechanism than it is to make some spacecraft traversing spider robot!