The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

ESA launches Mars Express investigation

Why is the broken bit broken?

See what The Register's experts have to say on application security

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched an investigation into the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) onboard the Mars Express orbiter.

Fred Jansen, the Mars Express mission manager at ESA told us: "The problem manifests itself as a failure in properly executing its initialisation sequence. If this is not successfully executed the instrument cannot do any measurements."

If we are reading this correctly, he means that they can't switch it on, so they can't do any science with it.

The PFS had been working perfectly, and had produced plenty of data on the composition and movement of the Martian atmosphere, until it developed its inexplicable problem a couple of months ago.

Team engineers have suggested that vibration effects from recent spacecraft activity - possibly the unfurling of the MARSIS radar booms - might be to blame, but nothing has been positively identified as being the cause of the trouble.

The investigation board will include experts from ESA, industry, and from ASI, the Italian space agency. ®

See what The Register's experts have to say on application security

Don’t Miss

Win a Samsung C6625!

Reg Lucky Draw Windows Mobile handsets up for grabs

Palm_Pre_001_SMIs your cameraphone an oxymoron?

Pic Review iPhone 3G v iPhone 3GS v Palm Pre

Reg black vulture logoReg Mobile and Wireless newsletter is go! go! go!

Site news Email-tasm

Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter

Narrowcasting for the email classes