Well after 17 years of great scientific information Solar Probe Ulysses is dying by freezing to death. Farewell to one of the great probes to have extended to boundaries of our knowledge.
WASHINGTON - The Ulysses solar probe, after 17 years of studying the sun and solar system, is about to die by freezing to death, NASA and the European Space Agency said Friday.
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The satellite had long outlasted the five-year mission it began in 1990, but it continued to transmit useful data on solar winds.
More recently, its plutonium power source had slowly weakened and its fuel was freezing as the probe made a wide circle of the sun, traveling as far as Jupiter.
In January, engineers tried a longshot maneuver to heat up the fuel. Instead, their effort backfired and hastened Ulysses' death by several months.
The $250 million probe was a joint European-NASA project. After being released from orbit by astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery in October 1990, Ulysses made nearly three full wide circles of the sun from above and below its poles. It also circled over Jupiter's poles, logging about 6 billion miles overall.
When the satellite recently started to fail, the probe had just finished examining the sun's north pole for a third time.
"This mission has rewritten textbooks," said Arik Posner, NASA's Ulysses program scientist.
What made Ulysses unique and crucial to scientists was its orbit and perspective. It provided astronomers with a three-dimensional look at the sun and the rest of the solar system. Most of the planets line up along the same geometric plane generally around the middle of the sun and that's where most of the space probes orbit, too.
But Ulysses made long wide circles of the sun's poles, essentially gazing down at the sun and solar system from above and below instead of around the middle.
That three-dimensional data from Ulysses — not devised to take pictures — was important for scientists trying to figure out the solar wind. These winds blast away from the sun at 1 million miles per hour in all directions, said David McComas, a Ulysses scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
The solar wind is crucial because it protects Earth from deadly cosmic radiation, causes geomagnetic storms on Earth, and is responsible for the aurora borealis.
"We understand it now, we didn't understand it before," McComas said.
As the fuel began to freeze in recent months, engineers shut off its radio transmitter to divert what little power was left to its heaters. The effort failed and the radio transmitter could not be turned back on.
"It was rather uncertain it would work; it's so harsh and cold out there," Posner said. "It was our only option."
Had it worked, engineers figured they would have gotten an extra two years of life from Ulysses. The final transmitter will probably quit in the next few weeks, according to the European Space Agency.
Well thank goodness I'm not the only one that feels sad when 400 kilograms of components goes offline millions of kilometres from here. Job well done, Ulysses.
When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln
People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House
Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)
"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'
They sure build them tough, the ones that work anyways. The Voyagers are still operational, Spirit and Opportunity are still operational, and I'm sure I'm missing a few.
Vendetta wrote:Richard Gatling was a pioneer in US national healthcare. On discovering that most soldiers during the American Civil War were dying of disease rather than gunshots, he turned his mind to, rather than providing better sanitary conditions and medical care for troops, creating a machine to make sure they got shot faster.
Both of the Voyager probes are projected to keep operating until 2020, when they lose electrical power. Data is still being retrieved from both probes. Voyager Weekly Reports.
As well, in the late 90's, Pioneer 10 was still sending out signals, and was used for training flight controllers at the Deep Space Network.
Original Warsie ++ Smartass! ~ Picker ~ Grinner ~ Lover ~ Sinner ++ "There's no time for later now"
