Carl Sagan’s dream of a ship able to pull only by collecting solar particles with large candles have problems. The first prototype orbited by The Planetary Society I was left hanging by a software failure and can not transmit data to Earth.
As explained in The Planetary Society , the fault could not be more mundane. The lightsail ship consists of several CubeSat. These small satellites carry a motherboard that works with a variant of Linux. One of the functions of the software is to send a data packet every 15 seconds. As it does, the board writes the packet data in a .CSV file (similar to a simplified data base) called beacon.csv.
The problem is that in the old version of the software, follows the plate beacon.csv overwriting the file and the size of this increase. When it reaches 32MB, the system can no longer handle it and hangs. The manufacturer of the CubeSat updated version of Linux with a patch to fix this bug, but the patch was never installed on lightsail. Last Friday the mission technicians realized the problem and prepared a remote update to fix it, but it was too late. The base lightsail plate had reached the limit and the system stopped transmitting.
If the same problem happens with a team on the ground, the solution is as simple as pressing the reset button. The system itself is responsible for cleaning the file and researchers would have about two days to climb the patch before the CSV file from becoming too large. Unfortunately, and as noted by the disseminator and CEO of The Planetary Society Bill Nye: “no one is in orbit now to press the button”
The solution, paradoxically, could reach the hands of a special collision. The sun emits charged that the Earth’s magnetic field to deflect charged particles. In space, however, these particles strike against the instruments in orbit and it is not uncommon to cause a spontaneous reboot when playing against overloading circuits. In fact, such incidents are very common in the CubeSat, especially in the first weeks of activity.
If one of these charged solar wind particles impact achieved at the right point, the lightsail would restart by itself. For now, the technical mission can only wait for that to happen and prepare a software solution to send to the lightsail as retransmit data. The lightsail mission was scheduled to last 28 days, so there is still much room to cross your fingers and hope for a lucky break. Meanwhile, researchers from The Planetary Society try different solutions if possible restart the ship otherwise.
Despite the problems, the promoters of the mission are optimistic that there is a good chance that successfully lightsail can resume his reading. The objective of this mission was precisely to gather all the data that could (the ship has been broadcasting for two days), and polishing all possible errors that may arise for the launch of 2017. Better than the failure is discovered now. [The Planetary Society via Engadget]
Photos: The Planetary Society
***
Psst! You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Google+:)
<- core-decorated ->
No comments:
Post a Comment