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from the debugging-from-960-million-kilometers-away dept.
A critical moment in NASA'S Juno mission has been postponed while engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory attempt to sort out a mysterious engine issue. If the problem is not resolved quickly, it could reduce the amount of high-quality data the Jupiter-orbiting probe is able to collect during its scientific mission.
On October 19th, at its point of closest approach to Jupiter (called periapsis), the Juno spacecraft was scheduled to perform its final main engine burn, a "period reduction maneuver" that would narrow its orbit from 53.4 days to 2 weeks. Once in its "science orbit," the spacecraft's main data collection phase will commence.
But on Friday, the space agency decided to delay the burn due to an unexpected issue with a pair of helium valves that are part of the engine's fuel pressurization system. As Juno project manager Rick Nybakken said in a news release, these valves "did not operate as expected during a command sequence that was initiated [Thursday]."
"The valves should have opened in a few seconds, but it took several minutes," Nybakken continued. "We need to better understand this issue before moving forward with a burn of the main engine."
http://gizmodo.com/something-went-wrong-with-the-juno-spacecrafts-engine-1787873807
[Source]: NASA
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 17 2016, @09:08PM
I was gonna poo in your general direction, but honestly, let's just wait until January 2017. Because by then, emdrive may be anointed or broken (a peer-reviewed paper will be published in December).
Then there's this:
http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/second-generation-em-drive-just-around-corner-patent-made-public-friday/ [zmescience.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @09:50PM
The EM Drive again, huh? That's always good for a laugh. Your link is actually related to your first sentence: version 2 is coming out because he's suckered as many as he can get with version 1.
The statements from your link are interesting:
Those are, charitably, misleading, or outright wrong. Churn a lot of thrust? There isn't enough to convince a reasonable person that they are over the noise limit. If real propulsion scientists and engineers can measure thrust, not the C-team at "Eagleworks", but the guys who do it for real, then we can start talking about this as something interesting. Right now it is cold fusion level of science., except that cold fusion at least has a physical basis for it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 17 2016, @10:19PM
Just look at the paper when it comes out in December.
I think some of the findings of the December paper leaked out, but I will wait until its actual release to care. The paper could be revised by then.
The quoted portion is just bad reporting. The original source for the 2.0 article is IB Times UK [ibtimes.co.uk] (and the patent application). Unfortunately, we have to take Roger Shawyer's word for it that governments are actually (still) interested in emdrive. He appears to have "suckered" in a legit company at least:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:05PM
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:00AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @04:40PM
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain