Last 12 months, NASA launched the Lucy spacecraft designed to discover the Trojan asteroids trapped close to Jupiter’s Lagrange factors. However, an issue arose simply 12 hours after launch — one of many massive photo voltaic arrays designed to generate energy from an more and more distant Sun had failed to completely deploy and latch. Now, NASA has announced {that a} group was in a position to troubleshoot the issue sufficiently for the mission to proceed — due to a number of intelligent methods.
Hours after the issue was first found, NASA pulled collectively an anomaly response group with members from the science mission lead Southwest Research Institute, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the spacecraft’s builder, Northrop Grumman.
Since there is not any digital camera aimed on the photo voltaic arrays, the group had to determine one other solution to discover the issue. To that finish, they fired the spacecraft’s thrusters to measure any anomalous vibrations, and created an in depth mannequin of the array’s motor meeting to find out the array’s rigidness. They lastly discovered {that a} lanyard designed to drag the array open was in all probability snagged on its spool.
The group shortly honed in on two potential options. One was merely to make use of the array because it was, as a result of it was nonetheless producing 90 % of anticipated energy. The different was to aim to drag the lanyard more durable by utilizing the back-up deployment motor in addition to the first motor, hopefully permitting it to wind additional and have interaction the latching mechanism.
Both motors have been by no means designed to work on the similar time, so the group modeled it to check out attainable outcomes and potential ripple results. After months of simulations, they determined to proceed with the two-motor possibility. They ran each the first and backup photo voltaic deployment motors concurrently seven occasions, and succeeded in additional opening and tensioning the array.
Unfortunately, it did not shut sufficient to latch, but it surely’s now “under substantially more tension, making it stable enough for the spacecraft to operate as needed for mission operations,” NASA stated. It’s now “ready and able” to finish its subsequent deadline, getting a lift from Earth’s gravity in October 2022. It’s scheduled to reach at its first asteroid goal in 2025.
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