Uplink 59: How to save a spacecraft: INTEGRAL's near-death experience
Join us on Thursday 28th October for Uplink episode 59 when we’ll be joined by Spacecraft Operations Manager Richard Southworth and Astrophysicist Erik Kuulkers from the European Space Agency to discuss how they saved their high-energy space observatory INTEGRAL when an on-board emergency was triggered by a cosmic ray last month.
Tracking violent events across the Universe, INTEGRAL is ESA's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory mission, built with additional contributions from various ESA member states, and in cooperation with Roscosmos, IKI, and NASA. Launched in 2002 into a highly-elliptical orbit around Earth, it studies explosions, radiation, formation of elements, black holes, and other exotic objects.
Around midday on 22 September, the spacecraft went into emergency “Safe Mode”. One of the spacecraft’s three active ‘reaction wheels’ had turned off without warning and stopped spinning, causing a ripple effect that meant the satellite itself began to tumble. If not brought quickly under control, it could have spelled the end of the mission.
The INTEGRAL Flight Control Team, together with Flight Dynamics and Ground Station Teams at ESA's ESOC mission control in Germany and teams at ESAC in Spain and at Airbus Defence & Space, set to work. With quick thinking and ingenious solutions, they found the problem and rescued the mission.
Although designed for a lifetime of just five years, INTEGRAL is now in its 19th year of in-orbit operations, but has recently suffered a number of failures which have forced the operations teams to fundamentally reassess how to operate the observatory.
Richard Southworth has been working at ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany since 1988. He started work on INTEGRAL in 1998, initially involved in the definition and testing of ground systems and setting up the routine operations concept. Since 2009, he has been INTEGRAL Spacecraft Operations Manager responsible for implementation of the mission operations and in particular fulfilling the science return requirements to the ESA director of science.
After his PhD in astrophysics in Amsterdam in 1995, Erik Kuulkers went from being a Research Fellow at ESA/ESTEC to a post-doc at Oxford University. He returned to The Netherlands as a post-doc at Utrecht University. A few months before ESA’s gamma-ray observatory INTEGRAL was launched in October 2002, he joined the science operations team first as a contractor in The Netherlands and later as a staff member when the team moved to ESA’s ESAC site in Spain. Since 2013, Erik has been the Project Scientist for INTEGRAL; in 2018 he also became the Project Scientist for ESA’s mission of opportunity Einstein Probe. Erik’s main research interests are in the realm of transient and explosive X-ray phenomena in the universe. One such event was seen by Apollo 15 and he now is obsessed with the Apollo programme, its scientific (X-ray) exploration, and the early history of X-ray astronomy.
We’ll be live from 8pm (BST) / 9pm (CEST) / 3pm (EDT). Set yourself a reminder at https://youtu.be/CTJk3DcYS90
