[HN Gopher] Juice's RIME antenna successfully unjammed
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Juice's RIME antenna successfully unjammed
Author : zdw
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-05-14 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| BrentOzar wrote:
| The 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.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've unjammed it in the title above. Thanks!
| jms703 wrote:
| Agree. Title reads like a failure occurred.
| sgt wrote:
| It made us click. I'd say the title was partly very
| successful.
| bombcar wrote:
| Error: Situation failure: success.
| [deleted]
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| 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?
| serf wrote:
| there are lots of different kinds of NEAs.
|
| https://cms.nacsemi.com/Images/FeaturedProducts/Eaton_Non-Ex...
| amelius wrote:
| Isn'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.
| [deleted]
| cwillu wrote:
| 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.
| marsokod wrote:
| 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.
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| ESA going for the old reliable percussive maintenance
| procedure.
| morelisp wrote:
| "Slow clap" likely doesn't have the connotation you want...
| abudabi123 wrote:
| The 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.
| djmips wrote:
| There is that charming eighties movie 'slow clap' that
| builds to a crescendo of appreciation and/or support.
| mjevans wrote:
| 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.
| bad_alloc wrote:
| 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.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Or just a very cute, scene-stealing astromech droid.
| gumby wrote:
| Next time don't name a moving device using a word that means
| "frozen", eh?
| jalk wrote:
| I 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.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| You have to admit that until they broke this one free it felt
| like there might be a curse on any antenna we send to
| Jupiter.
| gumby wrote:
| We should call for A/B testing of this hypothesis.
|
| If it results in more robot probes, all the better!
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| It would be like scheduling a product release on a Fridays
| to test 'production readiness'.
|
| Lessons were learned, but not the ones expected.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well testing on Friday has clear implications, while
| numerology is dubious at best.
| blantonl wrote:
| 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.
|
| Nightmare fuel.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
|
| Software engineers are just lucky ...
| consumer451 wrote:
| I had an honest-to-goodness bad dream about this issue last
| night.
|
| So happy to hear it is resolved!
| hm-nah wrote:
| Are 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?
| cfraenkel wrote:
| What'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 wrote:
| I'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.
| Me1000 wrote:
| The JUICE mission has nothing to do with finding habitable
| planets.
| boxed wrote:
| Read the wikipedia articles on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn
| and make up your own mind if you want to live there :P
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Both. 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".
| quercusa wrote:
| Wish we could see the control center video of the team when this
| was confirmed.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| 1 day ago: Stuck antenna freed on Jupiter-bound spacecraft
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35924758
| gibolt wrote:
| This sounds like the non-clickbait version. No wonder it has
| less comments
| [deleted]
| tomrod wrote:
| Well done, engineering crew!
|
| On a side note, we need tiny spider drones!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Update: 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 wrote:
| Amazing news! Aside: what is the white dot which tracks across
| the first animation, from southeast to northwest?
| willcipriano wrote:
| > 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.
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(page generated 2023-05-14 23:00 UTC)