News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente NASA finds work-arounds to keep planetary spacecraft on target, despite shutdown 7 October 2013 (LPAC)—Although more than 90% of NASA’s civil service and contract personnel are temporarily out of work, recognizing that the Solar System is not sympathetic to sabotage, NASA has succeeded in finding ways to keep from having its planetary missions wrecked. The agency reported today that mission controllers responsible for the recently-launched Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environment (LADEE) spacecraft were given an exemption from layoffs, in order to fire the spacecraft’s engines to position it for a science orbit around the Moon. Were the controllers not able to fire the engines and slow down the spacecraft, it would not have been able to be captured by the Moon’s gravity, making the mission senseless. Two more engine burns, on Oct. 9th and 12th, will adjust its orbit for its scientific observations. NASA has also found a ruse of sorts, to prevent its next Mars mission, MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN), from being sabotaged. The spacecraft has a launch window between Nov. 18 and Dec. 7. If the launch were delayed more than a week, or if it were delayed to the next 26-month launch opportunity in 2016, the spacecraft would not have enough fuel on board to carry out its mission. Scientists have found a way to allow the mission an "emergency exception," by stressing that MAVEN is required as a communications relay to forward data from the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on Mars. Their data is presently relayed by the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, launched in 2001 and 2005, respectively, so MAVEN is described as "protecting the existing assets that are at Mars today," in the event that the two old orbiters fail. Although this work-around does not propose that the exception is being done for the science of the mission, Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky told Science Magazine that "the science of MAVEN will clearly benefit." [mgf]