NASA's Juno Spacecraft Suffered an Alarming Memory Glitch:
The problem was likely caused by a radiation spike produced by Jupiter's tumultuous magnetosphere, according to the space agency.
NASA'S Jupiter mission is back in action after suffering from an acute case of spacecraft amnesia, which caused the Juno spacecraft to temporarily lose access to data stored in its memory.
The NASA spacecraft resumed its regular operations on December 29, the space agency announced on Tuesday. Juno went into safe mode on December 17 due to a memory anomaly that took place following the spacecraft's 47th close flyby of Jupiter and its moon Io.
After completing its flyby on December 14, Juno began the process of sending science data to ground control, but the downlink was disrupted. The solar-powered orbiter had difficulty accessing the memory stored in its onboard computer. The glitch was likely caused by Juno flying through a radiation-heavy area in Jupiter's magnetosphere, causing a radiation spike that messed with its systems, NASA explained in its statement.
NASA's mission control rebooted the spacecraft and put it in safe mode until the issue was resolved. Shortly after, ground control was able to recover the science data collected during the last flyby and successfully downlink it to Earth, with only a tiny bit of data being corrupted by the memory glitch, according to NASA.
"The science data from the solar-powered spacecraft's most recent flyby of Jupiter and its moon Io appears to be intact," NASA wrote in the statement. "Instrument recovery activities are now complete, and the spacecraft is functioning nominally."
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @03:24AM (1 child)
From https://www.electronicproducts.com/super-rad-hard-electronics-aboard-nasas-juno-spacecraft-now-orbiting-jupiter/ [electronicproducts.com]
More details at the link.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @05:50AM
See also: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/40213/why-make-x-ray-shielding-from-titanium-when-lead-is-6-times-lighter [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 17, @03:56AM (2 children)
Has everyone forgotten that "scientific" is a word
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @04:02AM
> Has everyone forgotten that "scientific" is a word
No. But it seems that Juno has forgotten--it has been orbiting for years beyond its expected lifetime and is getting a little senile.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @11:58AM
It is common in the spacecraft community to talk about "science data" and "telemetry data" and other kinds of data, probably because they are often handled as separate subsystems. The spacecraft will generate and put out telemetry independent of what gets mounted to it, so for instance, there could be a separate instrument bus that handles all of the information from the science payload (including its own telemetry). On some older systems at least, they might even be transmitted on their own data streams and part of the ground processing would be to pair up any needed spacecraft telemetry with the science data, if needed.
I think this arises naturally because the science people are spending a lot of time working on their package and testing it and the spacecraft people are spending a lot of time working on the spacecraft and testing it, and they work to an interface spec for both power but also telemetry. It isn't until they two are paired up during integration and test that they are able to check whether everybody is compatible.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 17, @12:48PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI3AKgOCbzk [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]