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Earth Science

JPL Says SMAP Radar Failure = Normal Operations

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
September 2, 2015
Filed under ,
JPL Says SMAP Radar Failure = Normal Operations

SMAP Radar Fails But Mission Continues
“Mission managers for NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory have determined that its radar, one of the satellite’s two science instruments, can no longer return data. … The SMAP spacecraft continues normal operations and the first data release of soil moisture products is expected in late September. “Although some of the planned applications of SMAP data will be impacted by the loss of the radar, the SMAP mission will continue to produce valuable science for important Earth system studies,” said Dara Entekhabi, SMAP Science Team lead at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. On July 7, SMAP’s radar stopped transmitting due to an anomaly involving the radar’s high-power amplifier (HPA).”
Keith’s note: Wow. JPL is sure spinning this bad news on this $915 million mission. That’s almost a billion dollars. The radar was at the core of SMAP’s mission i.e. “one of the satellite’s two science instruments”. It failed. Sure, other stuff still works but that radar broke after only a few months. But JPL PAO wants you to think that “The SMAP spacecraft continues normal operations.” So, I guess radar failure is considered “normal”?

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24 responses to “JPL Says SMAP Radar Failure = Normal Operations”

  1. Rich_Palermo says:
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    I believe the current euphemism is “Oh, SMAP!”.

    I guess the radar wasn’t all that important.

  2. Jeff2Space says:
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    They weren’t Just Plain Lucky this time, were they?

  3. John Thomas says:
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    I’m surprised that there wasn’t a redundant HPA. Typically these are high failure items.

  4. Spectreman75 says:
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    The question remains, If your mission can lose half it’s instruments and continue “normal” operations, why did we spend so much money on those instruments in the first place? I smell spin here.

  5. dbooker says:
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    Interesting. It cost NASA a lot more than the recent SpaceX ISS resupply failure. Is congress calling for a “Oversight Committee” to determine the root cause?

  6. dbooker says:
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    Reminds me of the disintegrating wheels on Curiosity. Wonder if they will outlast the nuclear power supply. Does anyone know if JPL is replacing the wheels on the 2020 rover?

    • EtOH says:
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      Curiosity’s wheels are functioning exactly as expected. What wasn’t anticipated was the caltrops of wind-sharpened bedrock which riddle Gale crater. There’s only so much you can do to design for an unknown environment. But LEO is hardly unexplored.

      • dbooker says:
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        I think if you paid a billion dollars for some jeep you would be pretty passed off if your wheels ended up with holes in them. It was poor engineering and testing. Are you really telling me the JPL rocket scientists couldn’t see from the MER photos that there were sharp rocks on Mars that a 1 ton rover would have to roll over?

        • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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          It was known long before the mission ever launched that the wheels would develop holes in them. At least one test wheel was driven to complete destruction.
          http://planetary.s3.amazona

          Curiosity’s wheels aren’t anywhere near being destroyed or even having significantly reduced functionality.

          The problem wasn’t just sharp rocks, the problem is those sharp rocks were stuck in very hard ground. They have been likened to “shark’s teeth embedded in concrete” and this terrain type had never been seen on Mars before.

        • EtOH says:
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          Rocks they expected, some of them pointy. What they didn’t expect was that some of them would be sharpened pyramids coming directly out of the bedrock (so they don’t push down into the soil when you drive over them). This wasn’t expected because none of the other missions had seen it before, and because that’s not the sort of feature you can identify in even HIRISE pictures. The wheels themselves were subject to some pretty severe engineering constraints related to gear deployment, so they didn’t have the option of overengineering them.

  7. stonemoma says:
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    This is the normal useage of the term spacecraft, which does not include payload. So the MER rovers worked normal long after the first instruments and mechanisms died.

  8. Jeff2Space says:
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    The radiometer still works, so they’ll get some data from this mission. But I don’t know enough about the data returned by the two instruments to decide how much this degrades the science returned.

    • Rich_Palermo says:
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      The active (radar) part was important enough to be on the name of the mission. So, I think it is far more than an adjunct or good-to-have. The mission analyses must have shown that the radar was required for the science objectives or why else would it have been approved and funded?

      • kcowing says:
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        Exactly. And if the spacecraft is still operating normally then they still have power allocated and sent to the radar subsystem (which is switched on) and have allocated/set aside downlink bandwidth for its data. But wait – the radar failed, so they are not doing that – right? Therefore they must be operating in some sort of “contingency mode”. That’s not the same as “normal”.

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      I read elsewhere the failure of the radar reduces the resolution of the data from approximately 9 km / pixel to about 40 km / pixel.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Since we’re talking area that’s 81 square km per pixel versus 1600 square km per pixel. So, they’re only going to get back roughly 5% of the data originally planned.

        So, 95% mission failure.

        • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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          They’re still getting good data, just not at the resolution they wanted. I don’t think the percentage of area equals the percentage of failure 🙂 funny, though!

          • wwheaton says:
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            Not too funny, in my opinion. I think we have to baseline (in the absence of other information) value of any certain set of data is roughly equal to information content, ~ number of bits sent. (Of course data should normally be compressed, to squeeze out redundancy.) So number of independent pixels is important.

            WHY IS IT NOT STANDARD TO DESIGN S/C IN LEO TO BE SERVICEABLE, BY HUMAN OR ROBOT !?!?

            Even a human servicing mission on a Dragon2 should be far cheaper than loss-of-mission, which is basically what we are faced with here. Has HST taught us nothing ?!

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            We’re still getting the same amount of data, just at a lower resolution.

            Why are they not designing satellites to be serviced? Mostly because there’s a lot of places in LEO people can’t or won’t go (such as highly inclined orbits, near known orbiting debris, or those near / above / passing through the radiation belts), and there are (as yet) no robots sophisticated enough to service satellites.

            Plus it costs money to design things to be serviceable in the first place, and it costs money to service them. So even when we DO have robots capable of servicing some satellites, there will still be those who chose to reduce costs by not designing their satellites to be serviceable.

            This isn’t a loss of mission, and Hubble taught us that each servicing mission cost as much as Hubble did to launch in the first place.

  9. Steve Pemberton says:
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    They now need to rename the satellite JASM (Just Another Soil Moisture) observatory

  10. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Either this mission was necessary or it wasn’t. If it was necessary then we need to find another way to get the data.

    Possibly these elements (radar and radiometer) could be added to the ISS by transport on normal logistic flights? Some loss of polar coverage but a 6m antenna could easily be made deployable and attached to the truss.

    In other settings I have suggested adding scientific instruments to the ISS for extended operations before shifting to free flyers, if necessary, for polar coverage. I hope this episode demonstrates that easy access for maintenance is an asset.

  11. fcrary says:
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    One of the many problems with this sort of spin is that it makes proposing a re-flight very difficult. Since JPL seems to be proclaiming SMAP to be a success, then it’s hard for anyone to claim there is a need to fly a similar mission with a working radar.