[meteorite-list] Venus Express Anomaly

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2014 17:12:10 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201412060112.sB61CAYI010267_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2014/12/05/venus-express-anomaly/

Venus Express anomaly
ESA Rocket Science Blog
December 5, 2014

On 28 November 2014, the flight control team at ESOC reported loss of
contact with Venus Express.

It is possible that the remaining fuel on board VEX was exhausted during
the recent periapsis-raising manoeuvres (see blog post here) and that
the spacecraft is no longer in a stable attitude (the spacecraft's high-gain
antenna must be kept pointed toward Earth to ensure reliable radio contact).

Repeated attempts to re-establish contact using ESA and NASA deep-space
tracking stations have been made since then, and there has been some limited
success in the period since 3 December.

Although a stable telemetry link is not available, some telemetry packets
were successfully downlinked. These confirm that the spacecraft is oriented
with its solar arrays pointing toward the Sun, and is rotating slowly.

The operations team is currently attempting to downlink the table of critical
events that is stored in protected memory on board, which may give details
of the sequence of events which occurred over the past few days. The root
cause of the anomaly (fuel situation or otherwise) remains to be established.

We will provide an update as soon as something more concrete is known.

Today, Venus Express is in the eighth year of its fantastic mission --
pretty good for a satellite originally designed for just two years of
orbiting in Venus' challenging conditions.
Received on Fri 05 Dec 2014 08:12:10 PM PST