NASASpaceFlight.com Forum
Robotic Spacecraft (Astronomy, Planetary, Earth, Solar/Heliophysics) => Space Science Coverage => Topic started by: jstrotha0975 on 05/12/2023 11:48 pm
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This week, Washington-based company Rhea Space Activity announced that it has been selected to develop the Spitzer Resurrector Mission. The mission would travel to the Spitzer telescope to service and restore it to operations, with plans to launch in 2026.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/proposed-mission-seeks-resurrect-retired-211000331.html
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That’s awesome! James Webb is massively over subscribed. Spitzer has some life left in it.
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What would the new mission do?
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Dig a little deeper. "Rhea Space Activity" received---wait for it---$250,000 to study this. Yeah, that money will go a long way.
And from the Yahoo article:
"The Spitzer Resurrector Mission, in partnership with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Blue Sun Enterprises, and Lockheed Martin, would include a servicing spacecraft traveling over 186 million miles to get to the telescope."
Ah, "in partnership." What exactly does "in partnership" mean? Who, exactly, is going to pay for this mission? Neither the article nor Rhea's press release say anything about NASA paying for it. Lockheed Martin and those other organizations don't spend their own money to do stuff like this, they get money from the government to do something like this. And there's no indication that the government is paying them to do it.
And then there's this:
"Using in-space service assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) techniques developed by the Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Space Force, the spacecraft would repurpose the Spitzer telescope, allowing it to detect and characterize potentially hazardous Near Earth Objects. “The ISAM implications of resurrecting Spitzer are jaw dropping,” Shawn Usman, CEO of Rhea, said in the company’s statement. “This would be the most complex robotic mission ever performed by humanity.”
So NEO observations, not astronomy. Is Spitzer even suitable for that mission?
I have some doubts.
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Spitzer is not resuming observations. This is just a $250K STTR study funded by Space Force, not NASA. Space Force is likely just interested some aspect of the technology or operations involved, not Spitzer per se.
https://www.einpresswire.com/article/632904331/rhea-space-activity-awarded-a-ussf-contract-to-investigate-telerobotic-resurrection-of-the-spitzer-space-telescope
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Spitzer is not resuming observations. This is just a $250K STTR study funded by Space Force, not NASA. Space Force is likely just interested some aspect of the technology or operations involved, not Spitzer per se.
https://www.einpresswire.com/article/632904331/rhea-space-activity-awarded-a-ussf-contract-to-investigate-telerobotic-resurrection-of-the-spitzer-space-telescope
It might be a good way to demonstrate it on a non-classified spacecraft.
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Does the Spitzer just need a refueling or does it require a more hands on aproach?
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Does the Spitzer just need a refueling or does it require a more hands on aproach?
It ran out of liquid Helium for cooling in 2009 which disabled 2 of its instruments, the third was kept in service till 2021 when NASA shut it down and placed it in safe mode, I don't think there is anything WRONG with it other then that (unless they vented the fuel as part of safing). Reaction control system was powered by Nitrogen and 4 reaction control wheels (which I think were all still working)
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It might be a good way to demonstrate it on a non-classified spacecraft.
Spitzer is a decent proxy for NRO scopes. I doubt Spitzer will be touched, but its design could make for a useful study on how to service NRO-type scopes without requiring the clearances needed to actually work with those classified designs.
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Neat idea, but calling this a “servicing” mission is stretching the definition. It’s like calling a bicycle a cargo vehicle. This “telerobotic spacecraft” doesn’t sound much different then almost all other unmanned spacecraft ever launched: they all rely on radioed commands from Earth. I suspect “the most complex robotic mission ever performed by humanity” involves a lot of autonomous maneuvering, and the “resurrection” part will be something like a remote onboard ops center armed with the full data dictionary of SIRTF uplink commands and downlink telemetry. All this to avoid much reliance on NASA’s Deep Space Network. Spritzer is limited, as all deep space probes are, by the onboard data storage and bandwidth of downlink. They will probably propose getting around this by relaying the data using LIDAR. Demonstrations of this have already been done, but it’s going to take a spacecraft with a lot of power. I agree with the above poster: this is just a tiny study contract for a compelling idea, but I seriously doubt it goes anywhere, particularly as bad economic winds blow ever stronger.
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Does the Spitzer just need a refueling or does it require a more hands on aproach?
It ran out of liquid Helium for cooling in 2009 which disabled 2 of its instruments, the third was kept in service till 2021 when NASA shut it down and placed it in safe mode, I don't think there is anything WRONG with it other then that (unless they vented the fuel as part of safing). Reaction control system was powered by Nitrogen and 4 reaction control wheels (which I think were all still working)
Another issue is the distance to and from the spacecraft.
It gets harder to communicate, i.e. lower data rates, the farther away it gets as it drifts in its Earth trailing orbit.
Part of the design life included this limit.
The press release says
The Spitzer Resurrector Mission, ..... would include a servicing spacecraft traveling over 186 million miles to get to the telescope.
"186 million miles" is the distance to the other side of the Earths orbit near the not visible L3 point.
How far away is Spitzer now?
How does a spacecraft shortcut across the solar system quickly to another point on Earth's orbit without needing a huge amout of delta-V ($$$) or time?
Better yet, when does the Earth lap Spitzer and get close like what happened with ISEE-3?
PS Another point at 1 AU from the Sun is not ideal for searching for NEOs.
Now if they could add propulsion and tweak the orbit so that the future Earth flyby put it in a pseudo Earth orbit with a perihelion at or below the orbit of Venus, that would be an advantageous orbit from which to search for NEOs (by our grandchildren ;) )