365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Europe's veteran gamma-ray space telescope nearly killed by charged particle strike - Space.com

Europe's veteran gamma-ray space telescope nearly killed by charged particle strike - Space.com

Europe's veteran gamma-ray space telescope nearly killed by charged particle strike - Space.com
Oct 19, 2021 2 mins, 1 sec

The European Space Agency (ESA) nearly lost a veteran space telescope last month when a charged particle disabled one of the reaction wheels that keep its solar arrays pointed at the sun. .

The incident led to a race against the clock as ground controllers had only three hours of battery time to find a solution before the spacecraft completely lost power, ESA revealed in a statement issued on Monday (Oct. 18).

Since 2002, the gamma-ray space telescope Integral has been scouring the sky for sources of high-energy X-rays and gamma rays: the most energetic type of radiation in the universe produced by dense and still little understood objects such as pulsars and neutron stars.

"The data coming down from Integral was choppy, coming in for short periods due to it spinning," Richard Southworth, operations manager of the Integral mission, said in the statement.

The team soon determined that the choppy data delivery from the spinning spacecraft was due to the loss of one of Integral's three reaction wheels.

Reaction wheels control the attitude of a satellite by spinning against the forces that affect the spacecraft in orbit: gravity, atmospheric drag, solar wind pressure and uneven cooling.

With one of its three reaction wheels suddenly out of order, Integral started spinning and its solar panels lost illumination.

The 19-year-old Integral, ESA's longest-serving space telescope, has already experienced its share of technical problems, which meant the original back-up systems designed to kick in under such circumstances didn't work. .

The ground team attempted to reset the affected wheel's function, but the Integral spacecraft kept wobbling and spinning every 21 minutes, five times faster than its operational maximum. .

The space agency said the failure was caused by what engineers call a Single Event Upset, which happens when a charged particle strikes a sensitive electrical component.

"This strike happened on a day when no relevant space weather activity was observed," Juha-Pekka Luntama, ESA's head of space weather, said in the statement.

She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED