If It Isn't Impossible, It Isn't Worth Trying: Rescuing Deep Space 1

Speaker: Marc Rayman (JPL), In Person and Zoom (https://tinyurl.com/5aczk8vp)

One of the lowest cost planetary missions NASA has ever conducted, Deep Space 1 (DS1) was designed to take risks so subsequent missions would not have to. Following its successful 1998-1999 prime mission to test high-risk technologies, DS1 embarked on an ambitious two-year extended mission dedicated to comet exploration. However, it soon suffered a hardware failure widely considered to be catastrophic, ironically unrelated to the new technologies. The loss of the sole star tracker deprived the spacecraft of three-axis attitude knowledge.

The small JPL operations team then undertook one of the most remarkable deep-space rescue missions in the history of space exploration. It took more than two months just to point the high gain antenna to Earth. After seven months of intensive and stressful work, they uplinked a new system to replace the star tracker. DS1 resumed thrusting with its ion propulsion system shortly after that. The team encountered and overcame further daunting challenges in the subsequent 15 months, and in 2001 they succeeded in acquiring NASA's first close-up images of a comet nucleus and other unique data.