Juice’s RIME antenna successfully unjammed
esa.int
esa.int
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.
Software engineers are just lucky ...
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.
One of the cool things about writing drivers and firmware, is you can do real-world damage. I’ve blown up $40,000 RF scanners (in 1980s dollars), because I accidentally reversed the position of a switch.
Also, if you think hardware systems are simpler than software, I invite you to open up a modern DSLR (not mirrorless) camera. I worked for a major camera manufacturer for many years, and saw some crazy complex stuff.
But nothing I ever did can hold a candle to the OP.
So rather than take this thread away from the amazing job done by the Juice team, I’ll just say great job and how amazing it all is.
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?
The first rover planner also consults with a surface properties scientist during development of the drive command sequence.
So, if things go wrong it's never really any single person's fault. But still, that first rover planner drafting the initial version of the command sequence bears a fair amount of responsibility.
We do set limits on suspension angles and tilt of the rover. So we'll say "stop driving if you are tilted more than 20 degrees," "stop driving if your differential angle goes above 7 degrees," etc.
It did, so slow clap for the engineers for saving a very expensive science experiment remotely from billions of miles away. well done.
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.
https://cms.nacsemi.com/Images/FeaturedProducts/Eaton_Non-Ex...
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.
Lessons were learned, but not the ones expected.
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.
Letting superstition impact decision making of a billion dollar project would be criminal incompetence.
What I mean is, if you start saying "what could go wrong?" to numerology, maybe you start saying it about other things.
I'm not saying that I think anyone did anything wrong. But psychology is weird sometimes, and unintended consequences abound...
If it results in more robot probes, all the better!
So happy to hear it is resolved!
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!
> 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.
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?
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.
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".