A po prawie 10 latach 2 listopada 2006 odebrano ostatni sygnał z sondy wkrótce po kolejnym przedłużeniu misji.
Ponad 212 000 zdjęć MGS przesłała na Ziemię.
Yet another two-year mission extension got underway in October 2006, but sadly Global Surveyor’s days were numbered. A month later, just days before the 10th anniversary of its launch, commands were transmitted to maneuver its solar arrays, but the spacecraft reported an error with one of its motors. On-board software transferred to a backup motor controller, but a two-day break in communication occurred on 3-4 November. Contact was re-established briefly on the 5th, during four different orbits, but no data was returned. Global Surveyor had placed itself into “safe mode” and its survival and resumption of operations depended upon restoring normal communications.
However, no further contact was established with the spacecraft, and in January 2007 NASA declared the mission to be at an end. An internal agency review found that Global Surveyor had most likely succumbed to a battery failure, triggered by a complex sequence of events involving its on-board computer memory and ground-issued commands. It was determined that depleted batteries and improper orientation of its antenna probably led to a loss of orientation control and an inability to communicate with Earth. The loss was a disappointing end to a spectacular mission which had operated longer at Mars than any previous spacecraft and which had continued to return valuable scientific data for more than four times longer than intended. (...)
“In some aspects, we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth,” exulted Project Scientist Arden Albee of California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., speaking at the end of the two-year mapping phase in January 2001. By this stage, Global Surveyor had circled Mars 8,505 times and acquired more than 58,000 images, as well as 490 million laser-altimetry readings and 97 million spectral measurements.
http://www.americaspace.com/?p=96138Report Reveals Likely Causes of Mars Spacecraft Loss
April 13, 2007
After studying Mars four times as long as originally planned, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter appears to have succumbed to battery failure caused by a complex sequence of events involving the onboard computer memory and ground commands. (...)
http://mars.nasa.gov/mgs/newsroom/20070413a.htmlhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/dec00_seds/8N7W/index.html
Wątek: Mars Global Surveyor (Przeczytany 3511 razy)