baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke) (01/19/90)
MAGELLAN STATUS REPORT Jan. 17, 1990 Today, the Magellan spacecraft is 113,471,037 miles from Earth, traveling at a speed of 63,409 miles per hour relative to the sun. One way light time is 10 minutes and 12 seconds. The spacecraft has been successfully switched back to its primary command data system computer, and to the high-gain antenna. The data rate is again at 1,200 bits per second. Earlier this month the spacecraft detected an error in its memory and went into a safing mode. It switched to its backup CDS computer and the telemetry link was switched from the high gain to the medium gain antenna and the rate was reduced from 1,200 bits per second to 40 bps. Also, the command link was switched from the high gain to the low gain and the rate was reduced from 62.5 bps to 7.8 bps. On January 12, the spacecraft went into fault protection mode due to a wrong command to the spacecraft from the spacecraft team. After performing a sweep at 300Hz with a tuning rate of 5Hz/sec, two way communications was once again established. A momentum wheel desaturation was done once daily via non- standard commands to the spacecraft. Magellan operations team members said Magellan is back on schedule for the start of Cruise-17 command sequence Ron Baalke | baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov Jet Propulsion Lab M/S 301-355 | baalke@jems.jpl.nasa.gov 4800 Oak Grove Dr. | Pasadena, CA 91109 |
roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (01/19/90)
In <2595@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> baalke@mars.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke) writes: > Today, the Magellan spacecraft is 113,471,037 miles from Earth Arghh! Why do they give the distances to 9 significant figures? Considering that the thing is moving at about 1.5 million miles per day, to quote today's distance to a precision of units of miles is absurd. Do they do this just because it sounds better to the lay public? -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"