“I think the team has really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission.”
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After 11 years at Mars, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft went out with a whisper
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I wonder if it uses small maneuvering jets to maintain its orbit and one misfired? Kinda strange but 11 years is a Good Run, Thanks for the Article.
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I feel a bit sad reading this. Just checked, we are still in contact with the voyagers. 
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That high-latency networking is amazing.
Man...11 years of caring for the same instrument. The drama of distance. The loss must have been palpable.
Best wishes.
Man...11 years of caring for the same instrument. The drama of distance. The loss must have been palpable.
Best wishes.
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Nobody likes being spied on and the martians had enough.
Jokes apart, could the higher rotation be from an impact with orbital debris, even though there's not much up there
Jokes apart, could the higher rotation be from an impact with orbital debris, even though there's not much up there
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Don't you mean V'GER ?I feel a bit sad reading this. Just checked, we are still in contact with the voyagers.
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It is worth noting that MAVEN's planned mission was two years. That it lasted eleven years is a testimony to the engineers that designed it and the team that kept it running.
If we lived in a just universe, there would be a replacement probe already on its way. Since we don't all we can hope for is that a replacement makes its way to the top of the list at the next decadal survey.
If we lived in a just universe, there would be a replacement probe already on its way. Since we don't all we can hope for is that a replacement makes its way to the top of the list at the next decadal survey.
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It's interesting that they're able to use so many different orbiters to do this relay function. Interesting and resilient! It's great that it can handle dropouts like MAVEN. As the system gets upgraded, I hope they keep all this inter-operability to handle the next failure. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the main link these days, and it's now 20 years old, almost twice the age of MAVEN.
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Mom would let me stay up and even drink coffee while we watched the original series. Good times.
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The MRO was planned for a primary mission of eight years, so it is on its third life right now.
MAVEN was planned for a primary mission of two years, so it was on its fifth life when it died.
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The note about the orbit artistic representation not being "to scale" made me laugh hard. =)
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Concerning the replacement, MTN:
“It will be built on the lessons from MAVEN, from the other orbiters, from every mission operating in this environment, including the current rovers, and from some of our growing endeavors around the Moon.”
I find that statement a little rich considering that the Big Beautiful Bill arbitrarily narrowed the field of bidders down to mostly space companies that have never built payloads like this.
“It will be built on the lessons from MAVEN, from the other orbiters, from every mission operating in this environment, including the current rovers, and from some of our growing endeavors around the Moon.”
I find that statement a little rich considering that the Big Beautiful Bill arbitrarily narrowed the field of bidders down to mostly space companies that have never built payloads like this.
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Yep It's Me
Ars Praetorian
Ugghh, I was reading the MTN RFP requirements document and came to this (emphasis mine):
I then searched for a few terms like replacement, spare, etc and came up empty.
Hopefully they're going to plan for some redundancy that lets it go longer than 5 years.
I then searched for a few terms like replacement, spare, etc and came up empty.
Hopefully they're going to plan for some redundancy that lets it go longer than 5 years.
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Not just NASA orbiters either - ESA's TGO returns more relay data than any other spacecraft.
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Here's a chart showing just how conservative NASA engineers are in their designs. The extended mission is given as a percent of the total mission.
Why do extended missions tend to take up such a large percent of the entire mission? Because the engineers want to ensure that the primary mission happens, so they design the probe to be extremely robust, which leads to the probe lasting longer than it had to. And since most of the money in a NASA mission is just building the probe and getting it in place, extending the mission costs very little (maybe $10M on a $150M primary mission). And so, unless one is an idiot of the first water, the obvious choice is to extend the mission until the probe finally dies of its own accord.
TL;DR: Primary missions are what sell the probe. But extended missions do the vast majority of the science.
Why do extended missions tend to take up such a large percent of the entire mission? Because the engineers want to ensure that the primary mission happens, so they design the probe to be extremely robust, which leads to the probe lasting longer than it had to. And since most of the money in a NASA mission is just building the probe and getting it in place, extending the mission costs very little (maybe $10M on a $150M primary mission). And so, unless one is an idiot of the first water, the obvious choice is to extend the mission until the probe finally dies of its own accord.
TL;DR: Primary missions are what sell the probe. But extended missions do the vast majority of the science.
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C: \Users\Goblinski> ping maven.poor.thing
Pinging maven.poor.thing with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1423857ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=987642ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1756341ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1312987ms TTL=32
Ping statistics for maven.poor.thing:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 987642ms, Maximum = 1756341ms, Average = 1370206ms
The non-sleepy ones among us would notice that the variation in ping times above is an indication of either we were pinging from a household with a Frontier subscription, or pings were months or years apart.
Pinging maven.poor.thing with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1423857ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=987642ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1756341ms TTL=32
Reply from maven.poor.thing: bytes=32 time=1312987ms TTL=32
Ping statistics for maven.poor.thing:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 987642ms, Maximum = 1756341ms, Average = 1370206ms
The non-sleepy ones among us would notice that the variation in ping times above is an indication of either we were pinging from a household with a Frontier subscription, or pings were months or years apart.
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Best way to guarantee it works for 2 years is to design it to probably last 10 years.
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Yes, but I am too lazy to put them up right now. In general, they are about the same as those for Mars.
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It's been a while since Mars has claimed a space probe sacrifice. 11 years is still a good run. Much better than the many missions to Mars that died upon arrival. The Mars planet shall be appeased!
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Wondering where you got these percentages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(rover)
"The rover completed its planned 90-sol mission (slightly less than 92.5 Earth days). Aided by cleaning events that resulted in more energy from its solar panels, Spirit went on to function effectively over twenty times longer than NASA planners expected. Spirit also logged 7.73 km (4.8 mi) of driving instead of the planned 600 m (0.4 mi),[6] allowing more extensive geological analysis of Martian rocks and planetary surface features. Initial scientific results from the first phase of the mission (the 90-sol prime mission) were published in a special issue of the journal Science."
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Curious...what impact did the JPL layoff's last Fall have on the Maven team? Were the experienced engineers on the project dismissed ? Did new DOGE management at JPL specific that MAVEN orbitel maintenance would be handled by AI?
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From your reference:
"Mission duration: Planned: 90 sols (~92 days) Actual: 2,208 sols (2,269 days)"
Thus, Spirit's primary mission lasted 92 days (1/4/2004 - 4/5/2004); the extended mission lasted 2,177 days (4/6/2004 - 3/23/2010).
So, the primary mission was (92/2269) 4% of the total mission and the extended mission was an amazing (2177/2269) 96%.
If we go by distance, then the primary mission would have been 0.6 km and the extended mission 7.13 km, giving 8% and 92% respectively.
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Well, Wikipedia is not noted for the consistency of their formatting, so it is understandable.
And I have been known to make boneheaded math mistakes, so it is always good to double-check.
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I had to do a similar double-take, because my brain expected a percentage beyond primary mission, which would be about 2200% for Spirit.
That would be a much more impressive format for the graph.
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Sad but still amazing run.
NASA paid $180M to launch MAVEN on a Atlas V 401 that pushes 5 tons to GTO (using to compare deep space payload performance). A Falcon 9 to NASA specs probably is less than $120M and pushes 8 tons to GTO, the difference in cost is mostly negligible for a $600M probe, but over 60% more mass combined with better electronics available today means they could replace it for same price with a much more capable orbiter.
Or even better, they could book a Falcon Heavy or New Glenn for maybe $200M, New Glenn has at least 13 tons to GTO and over 20 tons for FH and probably the NG 9/4 version. So somewhere between 3x and 5x the mass, meaning you could add huge amounts of capabilities, maybe reduce build cost using cheaper heavier materials and rely on greater redundancies of cheaper components or send multiple satellites to also include a constellation like repeater network along with more sensors to not only capture much more data but return it faster.
What I'm trying to say is we should do it again, we got an immense amount of science for a total cost of $50M/year and for a similar cost we can get substantially more.
NASA paid $180M to launch MAVEN on a Atlas V 401 that pushes 5 tons to GTO (using to compare deep space payload performance). A Falcon 9 to NASA specs probably is less than $120M and pushes 8 tons to GTO, the difference in cost is mostly negligible for a $600M probe, but over 60% more mass combined with better electronics available today means they could replace it for same price with a much more capable orbiter.
Or even better, they could book a Falcon Heavy or New Glenn for maybe $200M, New Glenn has at least 13 tons to GTO and over 20 tons for FH and probably the NG 9/4 version. So somewhere between 3x and 5x the mass, meaning you could add huge amounts of capabilities, maybe reduce build cost using cheaper heavier materials and rely on greater redundancies of cheaper components or send multiple satellites to also include a constellation like repeater network along with more sensors to not only capture much more data but return it faster.
What I'm trying to say is we should do it again, we got an immense amount of science for a total cost of $50M/year and for a similar cost we can get substantially more.
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That’s because most of them (at least those launched after 2005) fly the JPL developed Electra software defined radio (they’re manufactured by L3, but the hardware design and the software is JPL). The landers also use Electra radios (or Electra Lite). MER was the first Mars lander to use relay ops with an orbiter to return data, and after a week or two, it had returned more data through the relay link than all previous Mars missions combined. It’s that effective (compared to basic X-band Direct to Earth at 8 kbps)
And as far as interoperability goes, that’s part of the Prox-1 standard from the Consultative Committee on Space Data Standards (ccsds.org) - most people flying a relay payload use it (as will the new Mars Telecom Network, and similar spacecraft planned for the Moon). 400 MHz UHF at Mars for now, but S-band is coming, as is Ka-band.
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I did but only because I knew my understanding and the reality couldn't possibly match those numbers lol.
Don't love it as a way to show that information personally.
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And if doing NASA space missions triple-check, quadruple-check...then send it to your arch rival two doors down to see if s/he[/] can find any flaws. That is how you get missions that last decades beyond the initial requirements...
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Redundancy tends to be built into many things not easily repairable, even on Earth, just most people don't notice it. In space, a certain amount of redundancy is pretty much a given. Even Starlink's devices are redundant in that there's thousands of them to take over from each other when a few go belly up... or belly down as the case may be. Space communications networks tend to have that resiliency even on the ground. DSN has many different dishes for communicating with their science missions in space at each station including a single 70m ear (dish) at each, one at Goldstone, one at Madrid, and one at Canberra for the weakest signals.
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You can not just use Starlinks as they are.
- No protection by Earth's magnetic field.
- No long distance communication back home.
- Less solar power due to the higher distance.
- Not sure how the lack of GPS and ground stations would affect Starlink in addition.
- Sending mass to LEO is easy and inexpensive compared to sending it to Mars and inserting it into a orbit there.
- Likely no compatible communication to the rovers and other probes.
- Likely many other small details I miss here.
=> You need to design and build a new type of communication network for Mars, you can not just reuse what we have around Earth.
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