JP Aerospace Blog

You always find things in the full “plugs out” test that never show up any other time. We had one glitch that we chased for a good part of the day and well into the night. When the GPS telemetry system transmits the balloon release system triggered. Now these systems are not connected or even touching each other. In fact they are not even on the same deck. After much very deliberate, one electron at a time troubleshooting the trail of events were revealed. The antenna cable was close to the still camera array bus cable. Power would induct, (yes, from a shielded cable) from one to the other cable and travel to the other side of the vehicle where the where it would induct into the balloon release cable. It would induct through the positive line of the camera cable and the negative line of the release cable. It only happens when the camera system is off and the main controller resets. The antenna was moved and all is well. We’re going to redo the test during the week to make sure.

We loaded at the antennas and stands on the mission control van and did some maintenance on the generator. When the antennas get loaded the mission really starts to feel close.

After pulling the sensor on the laser experiment we found some contamination. We cleaned it up and put it back. We put it through a two hour test run and it worked fine, however it failed during the full systems test. I’ll need to replace it after all. It’s going to be a very busy week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.