Joe Palka
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Lunar Trailblazer launched successfully on February 26th last year.
But shortly after launch, it was clear something was wrong with the power system.
The NASA review found a glaring error.
Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft's solar panels towards the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun.
The panel said other software flaws made it impossible to recover from the pointing error.
The review cited management deficiencies at both Lockheed Martin, the company that built the spacecraft, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for failing to catch the problems before launch.
Lockheed and NASA both said they had learned lessons and would do better in future.
The probe is called MAVEN, an acronym for Mars Atmospheric and Volatile Evolution.
Its mission is to help scientists understand the climate history of Mars.
It's been orbiting the red planet for more than a decade, where it not only studied the Martian atmosphere, it also relayed signals from the rovers operating on the Martian surface.
Ground controllers don't know why the probes stopped transmitting.
Efforts to regain contact had to be suspended late last year because for two weeks, the orbits of Earth and Mars positioned them on opposite sides of the sun, making radio transmission impossible.
Engineers are still studying the last signals from MAVEN, trying to figure out what went wrong.
If the orbit of the Earth around the Sun were a perfect circle, then the two bodies would always be the same distance apart.
But Earth's orbit is elliptical, a very slightly squashed circle, meaning every year there's a single time when it's closest and another when it's furthest away.