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After Two Years NASA Loses Contact With Its Briefcase-Sized, Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite – Slashdot

十一月 30, 2019 - MorningStar

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After Two Years NASA Loses Contact With Its Briefcase-Sized, Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite - Slashdot After Two Years NASA Loses Contact With Its Briefcase-Sized, Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite - Slashdot

After Two Years NASA Loses Contact With Its Briefcase-Sized, Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite (bgr.com) 14

Posted by EditorDavid from the not-phoning-home dept.
“NASA has a lot of high-tech hardware cruising around in space right now, but one of the space agency’s pint-sized exoplanet hunters appears to have gone dark,” reports BGR: In a post by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the group explains that its ASTERIA satellite has been failing to return attempts to contact it for about a month now.

ASTERIA is a tiny satellite capable of observing some very big things. The spacecraft was sent into Earth orbit in late 2017, and it spent several months studying nearby stars for changes in their brightness. These brightness dips are the telltale signs that a planet is orbiting those stars. Much of NASA’s exoplanet-hunting hardware is big and beefy, but the ASTERIA mission proved that spotting hints of exoplanets is indeed possible using much smaller devices. CubeSats, which are only about the size of a briefcase, are easier to deploy than their larger counterparts, and ASTERIA showed that CubeSats can make for good planet hunters.

“The ASTERIA project achieved outstanding results during its three -month prime mission and its nearly two-year-long extended mission,” Lorraine Fesq of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. “Although we are disappointed that we lost contact with the spacecraft, we are thrilled with all that we have accomplished with this impressive CubeSat.”
NASA adds that “Attempts to contact it are expected to continue into March 2020.”

After Two Years NASA Loses Contact With Its Briefcase-Sized, Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite

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  • Almost right (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) writes: <bruce@perens.com> on Saturday January 04, 2020 @05:39PM (#59587152) Homepage Journal

    Cubesats are some multiple of a 100mm cube. I seem to remember seeing the prototype for this satellite and it was a 6x2x1 multiple of a 100mm cube. Not quite suitcase-sized.

    Although the headline is sad, this was a total mission success, with the only disappointment being that it didn’t stay around for even more years after the primary and secondary missions.

    • by pjt33 ( 739471 ) writes:

      And if it’s not quite suitcase-sized, it’s nowhere near “pint-sized”, even using British pints (568ml).

    • CubeSats, which are only about the size of a briefcase

      Apparently the author has either never seen a CubeSat, or has never seen a briefcase.

  • With all these tiny satellites I wonder if the end of service life de-orbit has been designed into them?

    • Gravity and friction with the atmosphere will de-orbit satellites. Eventually.

    • With all these tiny satellites I wonder if the end of service life de-orbit has been designed into them?

      They burn up.

      https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multim… [esa.int]

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) writes:

      No matter what you do with them, when they have a close encounter with a ‘shooting star’, they will have a problem and likely cease to function. Plenty and I mean a whole lot of them, of them up there, I bet NASA engineers do not look up into the night sky and make a wish, or perhaps they do, they wish those shooting stars do not too closely interact with their satellites. Not to worry with the new launch method you can put a lot more heavily armoured objects into space and thus a whole lot more durable and

      • Armor is not in general the way to go. Instead, design in shorter satellite lives and launch more often.

    • by dacut ( 243842 ) writes:

      I got a chance to ask the ASTERIA team about this last summer. ASTERIA is in a low earth orbit, so the atmosphere — though extremely thin, it’s not quite absent there — will drag on it and continually slow it down, bringing it into ever lower orbits as it burns up.

    • FCC will not license your radio communications if your satellite does not have a de-orbit strategy. For low-orbit satellites, like your typical cubesat, the orbit decays by itself and they burn up. For higher orbit ones, you need a method to de-orbit them.

  • CubeSats, which are only about the size of a briefcase

    Grandpa, what’s a briefcase?

    Freaking journalists, I swear. And this is one of them that still has a job after the rounds of layoffs!

  • Remember, boys and girls: the surest sign of intelligent life in space is that we don’t know it’s there!

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