Status Report archive

Search Results:

This is the last SMART-1 operations report. The SMART-1 lunar impact will take place on 3 September 2006.

The Operations during July have been nominal. All spacecraft subsystems are working well and it is expected not to have any problem until the moon impact. The Star Trackers have behaved well after the anomaly reported in July.

The main activity during the reporting period has been the perilune raising manoeuvres using the attitude thrusters. The manoeuvres started as planned on 19 June. Due to the spacecraft's good performance, the necessary delta-V to boost SMART-1's orbit was achieved earlier than planned, and the period during which the manoeuvres were carried out ended on 2 July as opposed to the expected end date of 7 July.

The work during this reporting period has been focused on continuation of push-broom operations and the preparation of the manoeuvres as part of the SMART-1 operations during the last months of the mission until Moon impact. Pushbroom operations have continued during the entire reporting period. The last pushbroom pointing finished on 16 June.

This is the final operational report for the SMART-1 mission and covers all the activities up to the end of the mission and a controlled impact with the lunar surface.

SMART-1 was launched on 27 September 2003 and took 14 months to reach the Moon using a Solar Electric Propulsion system. Lunar orbit was achieved on 15 November 2004 and since then a number of orbit optimisations have been carried to maximise the science return from the mission.

The completion of the thermal analysis being done as part of the preparation for the SMART-1 Moon impact gave the Flight Control Team a surprise. The expected increase of temperatures during May due to the Sun/Earth/Moon alignment was going to be higher than six months ago.

SMART-1 operations have been nominal during this period. The only noticeable event was another double EDAC error on 3 April 2006. The error occurred in page 0 causing the invalidation of the Timetag Queue. Fortunately the FD vector had a validity of about 3 hours at the time of occurrence and it happened during visibility, so it could be recovered without operational impact.

SMART-1 operations have been nominal during this period. It has been found that after an eclipse occurred on 28 October, there was a drop in the solar array +Y current of about 1.1 Amps (~52 Watts). The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), SMART-1's industrial prime contractor, has suggested that the most probable cause is the loss of one subsection of the solar array at the +Y panel. The small reduction in power is not causing any problem for the spacecraft's day-to-day operation.

Smart-1 suffered another Double EDAC error on 19 of January. SSC requested ESOC to compile all addresses that have been subject of double EDAC errors and sent them to SSC to check for a possible correlation with a specific chip malfunction. This time ESOC tried a new procedure that prevents loosing any data, this was done on 20 January and proved to be successful.

SMART-1 operation has been nominal during the Christmas period. The push-broom operations were terminated just before Christmas giving the pace for resuming routine payload operations. The only noticeable event was a glitch in the star tracker software that did not have any impact on operations.

Smart-1 push-broom operations have continued throughout the reporting period without interruptions. The illumination of the +Y face of the S/C in last period of push broom operations resulted in the highest peak temperatures ever measured in the star tracker cameras. All payload data could be dumped to earth except from a few megabytes that were lost due to two double EDAC re-occurrences that forced the reset of part of the payload stores memory.

Scientific operations have continued without interruptions. The pointing constraints for Push-broom operations were reviewed in order to relax them and have additional opportunities. They were implemented during the reporting period without affecting on-going operations.

The nominal science mission of SMART -1 was completed end of July. On 2 August the orbit re-boost activities started to bring the spacecraft to the agreed orbit for the Extended Mission, which will provide good to excellent observing conditions for the payload complement.

Scientific operations were resumed as planned on 1 October aiming at the conduction of push-broom operations from 20 October to 19 December when the Sun will be within 30° of the orbit plane.

SMART-1 has completed one of the last milestones of the mission: the Electric Propulsion operations have been terminated. During the past few weeks ESA and industry have worked together pushing the technology of SMART-1's engine to the limit. As a result the flight control team successfully operated the engine until almost the last drop of fuel was consumed.

Report for Period 18 July to 14 August

Overall Status: After 5 months of Electric Propulsion pause, SMART-1's ion engine was nominally restarted as planned on 2 August. The EP power is being set to 1325W due to the Sun distance seasonal effect.

Overall Status

During the period 20 June to 17 July 2005, SMART-1 ground activities focused on planning and preparing for the upcoming firing of the ion drive.

It is planned to exhaust all the Xenon available in the tank going beyond the design limit of 2 kg. This has required special simulations and the development of new procedures.