[meteorite-list] Dawn Journal - July 31, 2014

[Ron Baalke]

http://dawnblog.jpl.nasa.gov/2014/07/31/dawn-journal-july-31/

Dawn Journal 
by Marc Rayman
July 31, 2014

Dear Studawnts and Teachers,

Patient and persistent, silent and alone, Dawn is continuing its 
extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition. Flying through the main asteroid 
belt between Mars and Jupiter, the spacecraft is using its advanced ion 
propulsion system to travel from Vesta, the giant protoplanet it unveiled 
in 2011 and 2012, to Ceres, the dwarf planet it will reach in about eight 
months.

Most of these logs since December have presented previews of the ambitious 
plan for entering orbit and operating at Ceres to discover the secrets 
this alien world has held since the dawn of the solar system. We will 
continue with the previews next month. But now with Dawn three quarters 
of the way from Vesta to Ceres, let's check in on the progress of the 
mission, both on the spacecraft and in mission control at JPL.

The mission is going extremely well. Thank you for asking.

For readers who want more details, read on...

The spacecraft, in what is sometimes misleading called quiet cruise, has 
spent more than 97 percent of the time this year following the carefully 
designed ion thrust flight plan needed to reshape its solar orbit, gradually 
making it more and more like Ceres' orbit around the sun. This is the 
key to how the ship can so elegantly enter into orbit around the massive 
body even with the delicate thrust, never greater than the weight of a 
single sheet of paper.

The probe is equipped with three ion engines, although it only uses one 
at a time. (The locations of the engines were revealed shortly after launch 
when the spacecraft was too far from Earth for the information to be exploited 
for tawdry sensationalism.) Despite the disciplined and rigorous nature 
of operating a spaceship in the main asteroid belt, the team enjoys adding 
a lighthearted touch to their work, so they refer to the engines by the 
zany names #1, #2, and #3.

Darth Vader and his Empire cohorts in Star Wars flew TIE --- twin ion 
engine --- Fighters in their battles against Luke Skywalker and others 
in the Rebel Alliance. Outfitted with three ion engines, Dawn does the 
TIE Fighters one better. We should acknowledge, however, that the design 
of the TIE Fighters did appear to provide greater agility, perhaps at 
the expense of fuel efficiency. Your correspondent would concur that when 
you are trying to destroy your enemy while dodging blasts from his laser 
cannons, economy of propellant consumption probably shouldn't be your 
highest priority.

All three engines on Dawn are healthy, and mission controllers consider 
many criteria in formulating the plan for which one to use. This called 
for switching from thruster #2 to thruster #1 on May 27. Thruster #1 had 
last been used to propel the ship on Jan. 4, 2010. After well over four 
years of inaction in space, it came to life and emitted the famous blue-green 
beam of high velocity xenon ions right on schedule (at 4:19:19 pm PDT, 
should you wish to take yourself back to that moment), gently and reliably 
pushing the spacecraft closer to its appointment with Ceres.

Without the tremendous capability of ion propulsion, a mission to orbit 
either Vesta or Ceres alone would have been unaffordable within NASA's 
Discovery program. A mission to orbit both destinations would be altogether 
impossible. The reason ion propulsion is so much more efficient than conventional 
chemical propulsion is that it can turn electrical energy into thrust. 
Chemical propulsion systems are limited to the energy stored in the propellants.

Thanks to Dawn's huge solar arrays, electrical energy is available in 
abundance, even far from the brilliant sun. To make accurate predictions 
of the efficiency of the solar cells as Dawn continues to recede from 
the sun, engineers occasionally conduct a special calibration. As we described 
in more detail a year ago, they command the robot to rotate its panels 
to receive less sunlight, simulating being at greater solar distances, 
as the ion propulsion system is throttled to lower power levels. Following 
the first such calibration on June 24, 2013, we assured readers (including 
you) that we would repeat the calibration as Dawn continued its solar 
system travels. So you will be relieved to know that it was performed 
again on Oct. 14, Feb. 3, and May 27, and another is scheduled for Sept. 
15. Having high confidence in how much power will be available for ion 
thrusting for the rest of the journey allows navigators to plot the best 
possible course. Dawn is on a real power trip!

The reason for going to Ceres, besides it being an incredibly cool thing 
to do, is to use the suite of sophisticated sensors to learn about this 
mysterious dwarf planet. (In December, we will describe what is known 
about Ceres, just in time for it to change with Dawn's observations.) 
Controllers activated and tested the cameras and all the spectrometers 
this summer, verifying that they remain in excellent condition and as 
ready to investigate the uncharted lands ahead as they were for the fascinating 
lands astern. The engineers also installed updated software in the primary 
camera in June and are ready to install it in the backup camera next month 
to enhance some of the devices' functions. All of the scientific instruments 
are normally turned off when Dawn is not orbiting one of its targets. 
They will be powered on again in October for a final health check before 
the approach phase, during which they will provide our first exciting 
new views of Ceres.

To achieve a successful mission at Ceres, in addition to putting the finishing 
touches on the incredibly intricate plans, the operations team works hard 
to take good care of the spacecraft, ensuring it stays healthy and on 
course. In the remote depths of space, the robot has to be able to function 
on its own most of the time, but it does so with periodic guidance and 
oversight by its human handlers on a faraway planet. That means they need 
to stay diligent, keep their skills sharp, and remain watchful for any 
indications of undesirable conditions. On July 22, the team received information 
showing that Dawn was in safe mode, a special configuration invoked by 
onboard software to protect the spacecraft and the mission, preventing 
unexpected situations from getting out of control.

As engineers inspected the trickle of telemetry, they began to discover 
that this was a more dire situation than they had ever seen for the distant 
craft. Among the surprises was an open circuit in one of the pressurized 
cells of the nickel-hydrogen battery, a portion of the reaction control 
system that was so cold that its hydrazine propellant was in danger of 
freezing, temperatures elsewhere on the spacecraft so low that the delicate 
cameras were at risk of being damaged, and a sun sensor with degraded 
vision. To make it still more complicated, waveguide transfer switch #5, 
used to direct the radio signal from the transmitter inside the spacecraft 
to one of its antennas for beaming to Earth, was stuck and so would not 
move when software instructed it to. Other data showed that part of the 
computer memory was compromised by space radiation. As if all that were 
not bad enough, one of the two star trackers, devices that recognize patterns 
of stars just as you might recognize constellations to determine your 
orientation at night without a compass or other aids, was no longer functional. 
Further complicating the effort to get the mission back on track was an 
antenna at the Deep Space Network that needed to be taken out of service 
for emergency repairs. And the entire situation was exacerbated by Dawn 
already being in its lowest altitude orbit around Ceres (the subject of 
next month's log), so for part of every 5.5-hour orbital revolution, it 
was out of contact as the world beneath it blocked the radio signal.

Confronted with an almost bewildering array of complex problems, the team 
of experts spent three days working through them with their usual cool 
professionalism, ultimately finding ways to overcome each obstacle to 
continue the mission. It would be extraordinarily, even unbelievably, 
unlikely for so many separate problems to stack up so quickly, even for 
a ship in the severe conditions of deep space, more than 232 million miles 
(374 million kilometers) from Dawn mission control on the top floor of 
JPL's building 264. However, it easily can happen in an operational readiness 
test (ORT, pronounced letter by letter and not as a word, for those readers 
who want to conduct their own ORTs). The telemetry came from the spacecraft 
simulator, just down the hall from the mission control room, and the problems 
were the fiendishly clever creations of the ORT mastermind. (So now you 
may calm down, reassured that the scenario just described did not actually 
happen.)

The team conducted ORTs (and even an ORTathon) before launch in 2007, 
before Vesta in 2011, and as recently as May 2013. They will hold another 
in August.

While mission controllers exercised their skills in the ORT, the real 
spacecraft continued streaking through the asteroid belt, its interplanetary 
travels bringing it 45 thousand miles (73 thousand kilometers) closer 
to Ceres each day. But it is not only the Dawn team members who are part 
of this adventure. The stalwart explorer is transporting everyone who 
ever gazes in wonder at the night sky, everyone who yearns to know what 
lies beyond the confines of our humble home, and everyone awed by the 
mystery, the grandeur, and the immensity of the cosmos. Fueled by their 
passionate longing, the journey holds the promise of exciting new knowledge 
and thrilling new insights as a strange world, glimpsed only from afar 
for more than two centuries, is soon to be unveiled.

Dawn is 4.2 million miles (6.7 million kilometers) from Ceres. It is also 
2.67 AU (248 million miles, or 399 million kilometers) from Earth, or 
995 times as far as the moon and 2.63 times as far as the sun today. Radio 
signals, traveling at the universal limit of the speed of light, take 
44 minutes to make the round trip.