An exceptionally heavy interplanetary probe is on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, utilizing the gravity of Earth and Venus to propel it on its path towards the gasoline large. Simply weeks earlier than its scheduled flyby of Venus, the European House Company’s JUICE mission went silent, threatening its potential to carry out the planetary encounter.
Unable to speak with the spacecraft, groups of engineers started working on determining the issue below a good schedule, hoping their efforts would attain JUICE because it cruises thousands and thousands of miles away.
JUICE, or JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, is presently on its method to Venus to carry out a gravity help maneuver on August 31, following the decision of a pesky software program glitch that had weakened the spacecraft’s sign. Mission management managed to reestablish communication with the spacecraft simply in time to arrange it for its upcoming flyby, pulling off a formidable restoration of the mission because it heads towards its goal.
Ready not an possibility
The crew detected the anomaly on July 16 as JUICE was flying above a floor station in Cebreros, Spain. ESA’s deep house antenna was unable to ascertain contact with the spacecraft, elevating issues that JUICE was in a dreaded survival mode triggered by a number of onboard system failures.
“Shedding contact with a spacecraft is among the most severe situations we are able to face,” Angela Dietz, JUICE spacecraft operations supervisor, mentioned in a assertion. “With no telemetry, it’s far more troublesome to diagnose and resolve the basis explanation for a problem.”
The spacecraft would routinely reset in 14 days, however the crew couldn’t wait that lengthy and danger lacking JUICE’s scheduled encounter with Venus. “Ready was not an possibility. We needed to act quick.” Dietz added. “Ready two weeks for the reset would have meant delaying necessary preparations for the Venus flyby.”
As a substitute, the crew of engineers behind the mission started to blindly ship instructions towards JUICE’s presumed location in house. That proved to be difficult, because the spacecraft is presently situated 124 million miles (200 million kilometers) away on the opposite facet of the Solar. Every rescue sign would take 11 minutes to achieve the spacecraft, and the crew would then have to attend one other 11 minutes to listen to again from JUICE.
The dreaded software program timing bug
Almost 20 hours later, a command sign lastly reached the spacecraft, triggering a response. Fortunately, the crew discovered JUICE in good situation, and no system failures had been detected.
Because it seems, a software program timing bug brought on JUICE’s sign to turn out to be too weak to detect from Earth. JUICE has built-in software program that switches its sign amplifier on and off utilizing an inner timer. The timer restarts from zero as soon as each 16 months, but when the software program occurs to be utilizing the timer on the similar second it restarts, then the sign amplifier stays switched off, silencing JUICE’s calls to Earth.
The crew was capable of resolve the problem and is now devising methods to make sure JUICE’s sign is all the time heard throughout deep house. “Now we have recognized numerous potential methods to make sure that this doesn’t occur once more, and we at the moment are deciding which answer could be the most effective to implement,” Dietz mentioned.
JUICE launched on April 14, 2023, carrying a set of distant sensing, geophysical, and in situ devices to discover Jupiter and its three ocean-bearing moons—Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. The 13,227-pound (6,000-kilogram) spacecraft is predicted to reach on the gasoline large system in 2031, utilizing a sequence of gravity assists to select up pace. This week’s Venus flyby is the second of 4 deliberate gravity help maneuvers.
JUICE may even use Earth to achieve its required switch velocity via an upcoming flyby in September 2026 and one other one deliberate for January 2029.
