On days, when the never-ending news cycle wears us down, on days when the constant threat to our Democracy from the MAGA crowd depresses us, on days when political pundits tell us that trump is ahead in the polls, let’s draw inspiration from these examples of Perseverance and Ingenuity. Among all the tools we have to fight, to win the race and to save Democracy, Perseverance and Ingenuity have a special place. We shall never give up and we shall remain smarter and more strategic that the other side.
Mars rover Perseverance and Mars helicopter Ingenuity
Mars rover Perseverance and Mars helicopter Ingenuity have been scouting and studying Mars for over 3 years now. In spite of obstacles and failures, they and the engineers behind them have persevered and deployed clever solutions to fulfill the mission.
Ingenuity was just a 30-day tech. demo. mission to test powered, controlled flight on another world, with 5 test flights. Almost 3 years later, Ingenuity completed 72 flights. In 3 years, it suffered power failures, part failures, had to hunker down during winter — but NASA engineers never gave up; they found solutions and kept it flying. Ingenuity would have trudged on if not for the unfortunate rotor damage during flight 72 on Jan 18, 2024, which ended its flying days.
Ingenuity will no longer be able to communicate with earth as Mars rover Perseverance will move on west for exploration of the Jezero crater rim. But it will continue to act as a stationary science station collecting data, which could be retrieved by a future robotic or crewed mission.
A week ago, on April 16, Ingenuity sent its last transmission (it communicates via Perseverance) which was monitored by engineers in a control room at JPL. It was bitter-sweet moment for everyone who worked on the mission. The transmission included the names of people who worked on the mission; mission controllers at JPL had sent the list to Ingenuity the day before.
Perseverance has had its own set of problems and failures in the harsh environment of Mars, the latest being the dust cover of its SHERLOC Raman Spectroscopy instrument which got stuck in a half-open position due to a failed motor. They managed to open it further and are planning to operate the instrument with the cover permanently in this position without the auto-focus feature (which shares the failed motor with the cover). Perseverance and its team are certainly living up to its name!
Voyager 1
JPL announced this week that engineering data was successfully received from the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Saturday April 20 after the latest set of commands and uploads to fix the software in its onboard computer, which has stopped working due to the failure of a memory chip.
Since, Nov 2023, the venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft was stuck sending a 0101 bit pattern in its transmission.
Many science writers were preparing obituaries for Voyager 1. But the tenacious folks at JPL never gave up.
They persevered for months, figuring out clever ways to read back Voyager’s memory. After success on March 1, they invented some ingenious solutions to rearrange the code around the faulty chip on the computer, and their efforts were rewarded on April 20, when the transmission from Voyager cleared up and contained real data.
This code surgery was done on a computer that was running code on a spacecraft that was launched more than 46 years ago, is 24.3 billion km away from earth and it takes light and comm. signals 22.5 hours to travel this distance one-way.
Only engineering data (spacecraft health data) is being received. Successful reception of science data (data from its instruments) will require additional code relocation in the tight sparse free memory areas in the FDS computer.
The Voyager spacecraft have lasted 46 years due to the Perseverance and Ingenuity of its designers and engineers.
There are more details about Voyager 1 in this recent diary — Voyager 1 calls home!
The JAXA SLIM lunar lander
The Japanese JAXA SLIM lunar lander landed on the moon on January 19, just south of the equator. Unfortunately, it lost an engine nozzle during landing, because of which it rotated after touchdown and ended up in an upside down orientation instead of lying on its side. The solar panels faced SW instead of up. It still managed to deploy two small rovers and take images and make scientific measurements until the end of the lunar day.
SLIM was not designed to survive the brutal 14-earth-day long lunar night; only landers equipped with Radioisotope thermoelectric generators can do that. And yet, the SLIM lander woke up the next lunar morning (afternoon really when sunlight reached its SW facing solar panels), and the next one and a third time yesterday!
It’s the lander that simply won’t give up! And neither will the engineers and scientists who designed it and are operating it.
Hubble
Today is the 34th Birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched on April 24,1990, with Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-31 mission.
Soon after launch, it was discovered that due to a flaw in its primary mirror, Hubble had blurry vision. It looked like a hopeless situation, but NASA engineers worked diligently for 3 years to figure out ingenious solutions to fix Hubble without bringing it down to earth and without replacing its large primary mirror. What followed was a daring mission to repair Hubble in space using a set of small mirrors that corrected the optical aberration.
This was the net result — Hubble’s vision improved sharply.
In its 34 years of operation, a total of 5 servicing missions have been executed, and most of the original instruments have been replaced by more modern versions. Since the last servicing mission, parts have failed, computers have shut down, its orbit is decaying, but Hubble engineers have always managed to find solutions to keep Hubble humming.
Hubble is still going strong, unfolding the mysteries of the Universe from its perch 540 km above earth. Here is Hubble’s 34th anniversary image released this week —
The President
Our indefatigable President never gives up. He keeps persevering and running circles around the anti-science party. He even managed to get the speaker of the rabid party to defy trump and to pass the national security bills.
It’s a tough slog to save our Democracy when facing a party that has no principles and no respect for laws and norms, but our President never gives up. And neither should we. Let’s keep marching ahead with Perseverance and Ingenuity to return Biden to the White House, to win a majority in the House and the Senate and to elect Democrats in state and local elections.