Doomsday came on May 25 for the payload of a pumpkin-shaped balloon at the edge of space.
But things had not gone as planned. Early in the mission, satellite communications failed and the telescope’s operators could not retrieve data wirelessly. As SuperBIT made a sixth pass over South America, projections showed the solar-powered telescope heading toward gloomy weather and away from another stretch of land to safely alight upon.
Operators decided to terminate the flight early and anticipated a rough landing, so astrophysicist Ellen Sirks and colleagues instructed the aloft apparatus to send its data to Earth via capsules. The team simulated weather conditions to predict where the escape pods would land.
“We sort of envisioned these [drop capsules] as a redundant way of backing up the data,” says Sirks, of the University of Sydney in Australia. But they became important, she says, “because all the worst-case scenarios came true.”
2023-12-05 07:00:00
Link from www.sciencenews.org
rnrn
Doomsday came on May 25 for the payload of a pumpkin-shaped balloon at the edge of space.
But things had not gone as planned. Early in the mission, satellite communications failed and the telescope’s operators could not retrieve data wirelessly. As SuperBIT made a sixth pass over South America, projections showed the solar-powered telescope heading toward gloomy weather and away from another stretch of land to safely alight upon.
Operators decided to terminate the flight early and anticipated a rough landing, so astrophysicist Ellen Sirks and colleagues instructed the aloft apparatus to send its data to Earth via capsules. The team simulated weather conditions to predict where the escape pods would land.
“We sort of envisioned these [drop capsules] as a redundant way of backing up the data,” says Sirks, of the University of Sydney in Australia. But they became important, she says, “because all the worst-case scenarios came true.”
2023-12-05 07:00:00
Link from www.sciencenews.org
rnrn