[meteorite-list] Team Attempts to Restore Communications With Deep Impact Spacecraft

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:35:13 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201309111935.r8BJZD6m017985_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-275

Team Attempts to Restore Communications
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
September 10, 2013

Deep Impact Mission Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. - Ground controllers have been unable to communicate
with NASA's long-lived Deep Impact spacecraft. Last communication with
the spacecraft was on Aug. 8, 2013. Deep Impact mission controllers will
continue to uplink commands in an attempt to reestablish communications
with the spacecraft.

Mission controllers postulate that there was an anomaly generated by the
spacecraft's software which left the vehicle's computers in a condition
where they are continuously rebooting themselves. If this is the case,
the computers would not continue to command the vehicle's thrusters to
fire and hold attitude. Lack of attitude hold makes attempts to
reestablish communications more difficult because the orientation of the
spacecraft's antennas is unknown. It also brings into question the
vehicle's electrical power status, as the spacecraft derives its power
from a solar array that is fixed, with its cells pointing in one direction.

Deep Impact is history's most traveled deep-space comet hunter. It
successfully completed its original mission and a subsequent extended
mission.

Launched in January 2005, the spacecraft traveled about 268 million
miles (431 million kilometers) to the vicinity of comet Tempel 1. On
July 3, 2005, the spacecraft deployed an impactor, which was essentially
"run over" by the nucleus of Tempel 1 on July 4. Sixteen days after the
comet encounter, the Deep Impact team placed the spacecraft on a
trajectory to fly past Earth in late December 2007. The extended mission
of the Deep Impact spacecraft culminated in the successful flyby of
comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010. In January of 2012, the spacecraft
performed, from a distance, an imaging campaign of comet C/2009 P1
(Garradd), and in 2013, an imaging campaign of comet ISON.

To date, Deep Impact has traveled about 4.7 billion miles (7.58 billion
kilometers) in space.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Deep Impact mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington. The mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The spacecraft
was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

For more information about Deep Impact, visit:
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/deepimpact .

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle at jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

2013-275
Received on Wed 11 Sep 2013 03:35:13 PM PDT