[FPSPACE] New Dawn Journal for March 29, 2009

[LARRY KLAES]

Dawn Journal
 
March 29, 2009
 
Dear Dawntpanics,
 
Dawn continues to coast quietly and calmly in its orbit around the Sun, keeping its main antenna pointed to faraway Earth. The mission control team has given the spacecraft relatively few assignments in recent weeks, providing time to prepare for a busier future. To ensure the distant craft remains healthy and safe, operators transmitted instructions for conducting routine maintenance, activities that are familiar to the probe now that it has been on its deep-space journey for more than 1.5 years. Perhaps what is most noteworthy and satisfying since the last log is not what Dawn did, but rather what it did not do.
 
At some unknown time in the past, at some unknown location in space, under specific conditions and processes we can only speculate about (albeit under the influence of physical laws that are well understood), a high energy particle embarked on its own deep-space journey. On March 21 at 1:32 am PDT, its path and Dawn’s intersected. The particle penetrated the spacecraft and reached an electronics unit inside. The energy that had been given to it elsewhere in time and space was transferred then and there to a miniature electronic component in a circuit within that unit. 
 
The circumstances of this event were very much like those that occurred on January 14, 2008. As a reminder for the reader who has not memorized the log describing that incident (you know who you are, and we do as well, but your secret remains safe under the terms of our readers privacy agreement), the chain of events led to the spacecraft entering “safe mode.”

 

Full article here:

 

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journal_3_29_09.asp

 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.friends-partners.org/pipermail/fpspace/attachments/20090331/b2a744cd/attachment.html