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NASA's Mars Antenna Offline After Mechanical Failure
The 70-meter Mars Antenna at Goldstone over-rotated, damaging critical systems and halting communications with deep space missions, with no clear repair timeline announced.
- On Nov. 10, JPL confirmed DSS-14 has been offline since Sept. 16, with no return date, as `the antenna remains offline as the board members, engineers, and technicians evaluate the structure and make recommendations and repairs`.
- Engineers say an over-rotation on Sept. 16 strained cabling and piping at DSS-14, the 70-meter Mars Antenna, damaging fire suppression hoses and causing quickly mitigated flooding.
- As the only antenna able to reach Voyager 2, DSS-14 also 'pings' near-Earth asteroids and has detected over 200 since Arecibo's collapse.
- The outage has disrupted spacecraft communications, stalling near-Earth asteroid studies for nearly two months and forcing the James Webb Space Telescope to adjust operations.
- The NASA Office of Inspector General warned the Deep Space Network is oversubscribed, and with an unclear repair timeline, the outage complicates Artemis II preparations, recalling Artemis I’s need for more than 900 hours of support.
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V Narayanan reveals image of unfurled NISAR antenna
New Delhi: At the Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation Conclave (ESTIC) at Bharat Mandapam here, ISRO Chairman V Narayanan revealed an image of the fully deployed 12-metre-wide giant radar reflector antenna on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite. This antenna was stowed away for the launch on 30 July by the GSLV-F16 flight, and then deployed in orbit along with the boom, which is nine metres in length. An image of th…
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Bias Distribution
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50% Center
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C 50%
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