How Engineers Brought The SOHO Spacecraft Back To Life... for 25 Years.
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission has been observing the sun for over 25 years, but early in its life it suffered a major failure and it took a major engineering effort to bring it back to life, and keep it going for 2 more decades of science gathering.
The little spacecraft that could.
My giros are dead and it's getting dark...
Hold my software
OMG I WAS JUST THINKING THAT
Such wholesome!
It knew it could, it knew it could...
Cassini previously received the title, “The little spacecraft that could.”
But since SOHO was launched several years earlier, it appears SOHO is the new titleholder. 👍
Spirit and opportunity would be proud
I just love it when those things exceed their planned operational time in such a way. And I admire the creativity it takes to push them even further against all odds
I wish this could be reality also on top of ground for many things... But no because of capitalism.
extreme creative on the fly engineering from over a million miles away.
Quite an achievement really
@@TeeDee87 It's called no respect for the materials and / or labor that the product is made from. This is what happens when things become disposable, which is the opposite of what sustainability is...
If you look at the way they manufactured stuff before the Industrial Revolution, during and after it, you'd notice how much the quality has deteriorated over the centuries. Some will say that these products were over-engineered, but I believe they were built to last.
"Do it right or don't do it at all."
@@TeeDee87 It is not capitalism that killed it. Capitalism is the drive to provide a better product then a competitor at a price point. The thing that killed this was the shift of consumers who wanted the newest thing cheaper and faster, so the triangle of quality, cost, time got skewed away from quality towards cheap and fast.
The market decides what things want but in order for that you need to volume, its no point 3 people out of 100 saying they want quality when the other 97 will pay for a replacement.
@@tyree9055 You have to keep in mind that only high-quality items from that old age have survived for us to study. Maybe they manufactured gazillion shoddy ones, but we can't possibly know, because they broke down and were thown away a long time ago, and noone bothered to keep records or otherwise document their existence.
For example, Japanese swordmaking is universally considered as a pinnacle of craftmanship, but it was born out of necessity - steel was scarce and expensive, so they had to learn how to use it efficiently. In Europe, steel was much more accessible and swords were considered more or less disposable, so they opted to make many simple blades to equip larger number of soldiers, instead of few complex ones for only small number of expert users. It's the same with spacecraft - when launching is expensive, you tend to make them very high quality to get the most out of limited launch opportunities, when launching becomes cheaper, then it will make sense to use less intricate designs and just replace them when needed.
Amazing demonstration of the power of the idea of a programmable computer. Even 2m km away, and with things failing left, right and centre, the programmers can still reconfigure and adapt the space craft. Imagine if this had worked on hard-wired electro-mechanics, one thing fails and the whole mission is lost. If only the computer pioneers were still around to see the development (and justification) of their ideas. Thanks Scott, yet another brilliant video.
Alan Turing would have been proud, he did predict the incredible power of these machines (with mathematical proof).
Actually, Ada Lovelace was the first _documented_ person who had realized that (Charles Babbage's) computers might be far more powerful than people have though. There are many more names, but I think we should mention those at least.
I mean, yes and no. Spacecrafts have redundancies and in many cases the hand crafted hard-wired logic circuits and memory were incredibly resilient and well made, while nowhere near as reprogrammable. There's a great video by SmarterEveryDay and Linus from LTT where one of the engineers from the Saturn V program explains to them the inner workings of the flight computers and memory. While limited in terms of hardware, they came up with incredibly ingenious solutions to ensure critical mission success, including things like error checking.
perhaps the spacecraft is so reliable precisely because the nearest engineer is billions of meters away.
@@ErikQuanstrom 😂😂
Thanks for this video. That was one of the most exciting space related documentations I watched recently
Bitluni!!
What did you think of those solar flare clips and the comets? How astronomically radical. Amazing that its still working and might be one of the most important satellites humanity has put into space. Definitely up there with the Voyager twins as far as discovering and understanding of the unknown.
The engineers who work on these things are conditioned to never give up as long as there's money in the budget lol. But honestly, they are trying to fix or at least salvage a broken machine that is many light seconds away, which they can't get their hands on or even get pictures of, based purely on various bits of telemetry data, and more often than not they succeed.
Also a testament to how well some of these spacecraft are built. Having so many redundant or overlapping systems that you can connect other pieces of the system together when the primary method fails to keep it functioning.
@@teknoman117 Plus redundant wiring to route power and data away from failing parts. The power switching components for late 20th century spacecraft are impressive pieces of technology, having to run on almost zero power, yet allowing each independent component (gyro, camera, reaction wheel, rocket engine, radio link etc.) to accept power from multiple switching systems.
@@johndododoe1411 Actually, that would be an interesting topic for a dedicated video
@@teknoman117 thats a expensive toy more than USD 1 billion !
@@steelnerve5683 1 Billion in 1995 money no less.
"I'm Scott Manley, fly safe. And if you can't do that, at least have phenomenal engineering support so you can recover after a failure."
My brain just autocompletes fly safe to. Fly safe. And if you can’t do that. Fly Dangerous!
@@KuK137 yeah, seriously, apart from the fact that you don't like Republicans there isn't a discernable coherent thought here.
@@KuK137 On December 11, 2017, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, which officially called for NASA to begin work on a human exploration program that would return astronauts to the surface of the moon and lay the groundwork for a sustained presence (i.e., a lunar colony). The plan being for these moon missions to utilize the architectures being developed for Mars, such as the next-generation Space Launch System and the Orion deep space crew capsule. Essentially giving tech made with Mars missions in mind practical experience on a more feasible testing ground, the moon.
There are many plans that previous administrations shelved that Trump has either brought back and, or accelerated too. Perhaps educate yourself instead of being so partisan that you spout unhinged nonsense?
There are many conservative leaning individuals who are well versed in space exploration and are prominent members in the space flight community. What bothers me the most is when people like yourself often watch fiction like Star Trek where a group of very different people from various backgrounds all come together to solve complex issues related to space but then when it comes to practicing that behaviour in the real world you scream about someone daring to have different political views in a childish manner. Can't we as a community just focus on what really matters for once, *our political differences won't matter when we're dead but our efforts around space exploration will have a rippling effect for the rest of human history long after we're gone.*
@@KuK137 Much as I despise GOP, this is way off. There are much easier ways to stuff one's owners' pockets than cutting the missions like this short. NASA _does_ have a certain level of independence at this "tactical" level, and their (and contractor's) engineers tend not to take "it cannot be fixed" for an answer.
6:29 The most ambitious crossover event in radar astronomy.
I'm sure Event Horizon Telescope is more ambitious
@@Czeckie The EHT wasn't radar.
@@ComradePhoenix lol, I conflated radar and radio into one word. Not gonna delete it, leaving it as a memento of my stupidity to future generations.
@@Czeckie 😅
@@Czeckie Its all good, we've all been there.
SOHO is one of the most important satellites, IMHO.
I wish your opinion wasnt so honest, Im offended.
Ha
SOHO that’s your opinion...
Do I need to show you the door 😂
@@MrAngenos what if its humble?
OK, actually getting to see comets shooting toward and then getting whipped around the sun was one of the coolest thing I've seen in ages. Sci-fi becomes reality. Scott, you rock!
Hell yeah - amazing!!! Something popped into my head though - "Comets check in...but they don't check out!"
Random person: My son throws tantrums
Me: My sun throws coronal mass ejections
"I could have seen it, but it was cloudy." - Me, crying under a dead Ohio sky.
Same here Ohio has clear skies except when cool stuff happens 😂 I got a chance to see the one meteor shower a few weeks back at like 3AM it cleared out enough and saw a couple good ones. Missed all the other ones 😬
I SO lucked out the one time I got to see that comet this last summer, I headed to the shore of lake Erie to have a dark spot and clear view to the low horizon, and even then I only got lucky enough to not have cloud cover for like 1 of the nights I was actually able to try taking a look at it (had a busy work schedule).
it's OK, the UK understands
Ohioans unite! Where I live we’re lucky to see the sun once a week from October-March, let alone actually clear skies. Maybe that’s why so many of us become astronauts, the clouds are in the way so we just have to go see it for ourselves!
Try living in the UK
It’s incredible that they were able to send a radar signal from Arecibo, receive the data at a different spot, and know how to interpret it. Amazing
It’s also amazing they can rewrite the code in orbit
How they must do that? As a programmer I would send an increasing frequency signal for a long time, receive at the other end and then substracting the difference in frequency/time between both positions. Is this how the do it?
@@framegrace1 Oh, they just "science the heck out of it".
Its something the military has been doing on the regular since the invention of radar targeting missiles.
@@framegrace1 I think you are over-complicating it. Yes, "chirp" radars are a thing, but I'd expect they just went with a sequence of pings. Delay tells you range, variations in strength will tell you a bit about rotation and you might even get some Doppler and directional data to get position and velocity.
Is there a SOHO successor planned? Now I am worried it'll die before we can send up a replacement and have gaps in our observation history.
SDO is kind of a successor, although the instruments are not identical (no heliospheric images), it provides higher resolution images in multiple wavelengths. Scott even sneaked in some SDO images at 8:20
@@antoineroquentin2297 Yeah I was going to say the SDO is really the successor to the SoHO.
With a spectacular effect during launch :D
SDO destroys a sundog:
ruclips.net/video/u_NkxDXLQUI/видео.html
Goes U will have a coronagraph and Stereo A could act as a SOHO backup. Most importantly is having a coronagraph at the L5 point. ESA are also building a coronagraph and others are in the design phase.
SOHO and WIND. The two solar observatories I used when I was at the University of Athens (1999) to study how a CME interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. 👍
> to study how GME interacts with the Earth's magnetic field.
Wait, what do GameStop stocks have to do with this? 😁
@@gsvick LOL! CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) so... not GME! ;-)
I worked on the TT&C subsystems for WIND and POLAR when I was a baby engineer.
YOU DID IT AGAIN. AAAAMAZING STORY NEVER HEARD IT AND ARECIBO INCLUDED! 12/10
If you believe the lines, it's just 748/750
I've done exactly the same thing with solar panels in KSP before... more than once ;(
I think all KSP players can relate.
That's why I tend to put three rotatable sets of panels on my crafts. Doesn't matter what the orientation of the craft is, the panels are always able to get some sunlight.
@@Kepe Yes, me too once I learned my lesson.
how very kerbal of you. i do just one set. bare minimum to get my craft power
"They revived the dead SOHO satellite".
Me: "Ok, that's cool."
Scott Manley explains how they did it
Me: "They did WHAT?!"
Thanks so very much for this timely and informative review. This just shows what engineers and scientists can do given a mission and money. Not bureaucracy. Why anyone would spend a billion dollars plus on a spacecraft and NOT fund it's maintenance until it dies a permanent death is beyond me.
also budget to carry extra. here more fuel fuel, here new ssd technology.
not budget cuts
I notice several bright objects moving horizontally from right to left. Were these planets (Venus and/or Mercury?
I think so
They move at different speed than the background stars, so yeah, they are planets. But not only Venus and Mercury. All planets except the earth may be visible there.(In fact I saw 4 or 5 planets at the same time or very short to each other multiple times)
@@framegrace1 I only saw planets going from right to left so faster than earth and SOHO, which can only be Mercury of Venus, but was there some going from left to right?
I would love to have Scott explain which is which we can see there
Did anyone also notice the weird 4 lines horizontal to the planets that were also spinning with them?
Polarized light?
I think we can all agree to never take a bet against them engineers. They saw a dead craft and went I can make it live again.
They pulled a Scotty
I suspect it was more like, "If we're going to scrap it anyway, can I try something weird?"
Well the sun did it... The "warm it and revamp controls" part came after the spacecraft already had risen from the dead on its own with the help of the sun.
I wonder what SOHO's last message will be? "My battery is low, and it's getting light"?
"I can't see the sun"
"My panels have degraded and that flash looks bright"
"The expanding sun is consuming my body"
"I'm.. spinning around..."
"So long, and thanks for all the fshhhhh..."
"Fly safe" -- thanks, I'll be sure not to crash into the SOHO.
In the early 2000s, you could get a screensaver that would download highlight videos from SOHO every night. It was neat to see comets diving into the sun on some of those random highlight reels.
Never knew anything about this mission and am now highly invested in sun watching. Fingers and toes crossed for Parker obvs but also really keen for more missions like this =]
“The fuel tanks were frozen”
“So they started thawing the tanks” 😧
Me: HOW, SCOTT
The forethought on these engineers astounds me every time
So, the engineers were MacGuyvering the crap out of SOHO into a better performing spacecraft. Can't ask for any more than that.
Shame the engineers didn’t realize the probe has been pointing at Seymour’s kitchen the whole time
Aurora Borealis is solar particles entering Earth's atmosphere, it is not the Sun itself.
Am I sthewpid for not knowing who is Seymour and why his/her kitchen... the way it is?
@@janosskublics7438 Hope you're ready for an unforgettable luncheon.
Are we talking about Cyanna's Seymour? Or a different Seymour...cuz I don't remember that one
@@janosskublics7438 no idea what they're talking about.
I love these stories so much =). What is the much more noisy region in the bottom left?
“The 7 o'clock position is where the pylon that holds the occulting disk appears in the image…The occulting disk and arm is similiar to what a person does when they want to look at something close to the sun; they hold up their hand and block the disk of the sun.”
lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=content/faq#Question7
I believe it's the rod arm that's holding the sun blocker thing that allows you to see the corona.
@@HydrusGemini ah, ok, i thought it might be something like that
Funny how these science vehicles tend to exceed expectations. Maybe a shout out to the engineers and technicians who build them, and help maintain them would be in order.
It's one thing to say "we need these instruments in orbit to see things we need to see," and quite another to say "no problem bro, i got this." And make it work.
Patching the software of spacecraft to recover them from hardware failures always fascinates me. Here on Earth we throw away things for the slightest failure. In space, it's much more expensive to replace anything. It shows that if we really want to, we can make lasting electronics and we can take good care of them.
Traditional spacecraft are extremely expensive because of this focus on quality and redundancy. Newer cubesats often use off-the-shelve hardware and are little different from smartphones (okay, I’m exaggerating here), making them much cheaper. Oh and by the way: There are a ton of workarounds in firmware for hardware issues in lots of devices. It doesn’t make sense to do it for a single 100€ device but when you’ve already produced a hundred thousand of them it very much does. Just look into the errata sheet of any microcontroller.
Space never ceases to amaze me, and so do the people who study it.
I’m totally with you on this one! 🚀
Real ROCKET Science at work. They went from a failed system to a better then original system via work arounds.
Would love to see a well-informed James Webb mission update.
An acquaintance of mine worked on Soho. It was amazing to hear his stories on how they recovered the spacecraft.
9:20 - Stealth comet!
Edit: Not so stealth, apparently!
15:07 - The Parker solar probe actually points at the Moon.
Sorry, Matt, but someone had to say it.
Who is Matt?
A friend of mine worked on SOHO. I've sent a link to this video to him.
He was the lead electronics engineer on the Attitude Control Unit
I feel accomplished as a space nerd now. I knew they'd call up Arecibo the moment Scott said "radar" :D
OMG 25 years of Use that sure payed for its Self thank Scott that was really Interesting
when you talked about the probe waking up after some times, my mind went to Opportunity... how much we all wanted that beast to ping back after the huge storms!
Human will go to Mars to bring Oppy home.
@@julienrooknizan5711 maybe elon will go and dust off its panels
@@Steph.98114 the panels are probably relatively clear, the problem is the batteries. As I understand the software, priority is given to battery condition. One Martian day isn't long enough to get the batteries warm and charged enough to stay warm through the next Martian night. Every day the rover tries to wake up, but it just can't. That is the heartbreaking part.
@@moconnell663 ik, I was just joking
What's the diagonal 8 o'clock line going to the middle of the screen on the corona instrument?
That's basically a big stick to keep the sun shield in place. The sun shield is just a disc held in front of the camera to block out the sun itself to prevent extremely bright sunlight getting directly into the camera, so it can see the comparatively less bright solar corona.
@@dylantowers9367 like those spray masks for the o's and number 0
I hope all the brilliant engineering fixes are remembered and passed on to future space craft engineers Just amazing what can be done to fix and improve an instrument millions of kilometers distant.
11:12 "Look at those protons"
Love it
Classic KSP tactic: Oops my solar panels are facing the wrong way and the spacecraft is out of power. No problem, I'll just wait a few months!
I love seeing the planets passing by in the background
"Kreutz sungrazer group" is some solid band name material right there. 13:27
It would be interesting to hear more stories related to control engineering in space exploration. For example maybe a bit more details on how they used the sun to stabilize the Kepler telescope after too many reaction wheels failed. Though, those details might lie too far outside your area of expertise.
Why don't governments give medals to engineers... Some of them are true heroes... Keeping on where others would've gave up...
Imagine wanting to be assigned status by government.
The Montgomery Scott Medal for Tenacious Engineering ?
The engineers who built that little thing must be seriously proud of their work.
Tim Dodd, Everyday Astronaut often shouts out to Scott Manley for the more technical explanations of space exploration. 🚀
13:35 thank you Sol you are saving us from a mass extinction level event
When there’s a screw up or a wrench thrown in. It is a huge problem. But bringing it back online is a massive achievement.
Yep, SOHO, the Little Spacecraft That Could.
Great videos Scott. Thanks for using your time to make them. You are helping stoke the next generation of space scientists. ...my son included.
Still amazes me how you're so altruistic to not have advertising. And, besides, running one of the best YT channels out there. You have my like sir.
SOHO could be nick named Lazarus for its ability to return from the dead, but it could also be nicknamed Methuselah based on its long life.
"Icey dirtballs." You've met the men in my family?
Great story no one would know without Scotty boy!
I was like"oh 25 years old, that must have launched in the 70's"
Yeah i hate that
11:50 - "...most powerful solar flare observed by spacecraft in space."
...As opposed to spacecraft not in space? :-P
Yes, you know, like SLS.
@@scottmanley oof
@@scottmanley they test run JWST and accidentally record the WOW signal or something
Scott I think I went to Armagh Observatory in 1998 for a school trip; our paths could have crossed. I visited it again three years ago on my honeymoon!lol All the best sir! I’m Scott Smith, fly safe!
I got to see the 2002 aurora event while still living near Chicago. There was a huge curtain of red with fringes of green at the bottom that took up much of the north-northwestern sky. I also saw thin green streamers seemingly running rapidly east/west across the zenith, which was probably the bottom of another curtain that I was seeing edge-on. Being a novice astrophotographer at the time, I even managed to get a handful of decent pictures of it all.
Couldn't help but notice the constant shower of high-energy particles showing on the time lapse footage. It boggles my mind how it could survive this radioactive nightmare for so long. Kudos to the engineers 👏🏼
Why does the SOHO video go all staticky for a day or so in mid-July 2000?
11:15 - ...Oh, that's why.
What is that glitched narrow sector / slice /spike on the SOHO sensor? At around the 7 o'clock on the screen
I was waiting for you to explain that the entire video but you never mentioned it.
4:01 And to think, people we're worried about Y2K around this time.
Is your CRT monitor Y2K ready sir?
@@tweetyericsson Or your microwave oven ... LOL
@oH well,lord!
It could be a real problem for actuarial programs using 2 digit year data. Devices like microwave ovens that people were concerned about could not be impacted as they only dealt with time not dates. I used Windows 95 & 98 at that time and when the hysteria about the crashing of operating systems hit the media I backed up my computers and reset the time to 11:45 PM December 31/ 1999 and let them roll over into Jan 01/2000 ... Nothing happened. Ran the programs I used on a daily basis and some I didn't use often ... Nothing happened. I'm sure it was an issue for some OSs and programs, but for most it was a non-issue, just media hype fueled by a poor understanding of basic computer hardware and software.
Damn, when engineers are good they are very good.
I remember the 2003 aurora as a child, I never had enough vision to see them myself but my family were awestruck.
Wasn't there another video from Scott talking about this spacecraft and others with failing gyros? Something about metal balls in the gyro ruining them with small arcs of electricity.
The attitude issue that lead to poor solar panel orientation should've been prevented with software, but future designs should also consider adding smaller solar panels in other angles, to get just enough power for emergency communications in order to be able to send commands to satellites. It's extra mass, although probably not too much only for emergency comms.
Just a reminder. Perseverance lands (fingers crossed) in 5 days folks. Get ready.
What do Scott Manley and SOHO have in common?
They both just keep on giving great data!
Alright, I'm not gonna pretend like I don't want to know what the strange radial artefact down and left of the sun is.
It's the pole holding up the umbrella
Universe: Your time has come.
SOHO: _I DIDN'T HEAR NO BELL_
What's wrong with your audio? Did you put a filter? For some reason it's really irritating this time...
EDIT: still a great video, thanks Scott!
Also noticed, it's the compressor overloading, but i think pointing it out is a good thing✌🏻
Hey Scott could you do a review of the minidoc apollo 11: quarantine its a sequel to the apollo 11 doc we got in 2019
SOHO: WE DON'T NEED GYROSCOPES WHERE WE'RE GOING
Could these kinds of spacecraft use retractable solar sails to change rotation without using fuel or reaction wheel momentum?
i wonder how this older mission with SC up in L1 still not dead from radiation but mars rovers and other younger SC died already
You're not likely to run into Martian dust storms at the Earth-Sun L1 point.
dust mate.
@@ElectroNeutrino i was talking about radiation.it killed a lot of computers even in softer conditions
Great Stuff! Tons of good research in all your videos and all the info clearly put together.
closed captions in vietnamita...
é basicamente isso aqui, você não entende.
Love the material. But your Mic audio is too tinny and really turns me off. Thanks
Some very clever people at NASA earned their wages on that project and no mistake.
SOHO has been amazing. That sungrazer simulation was pretty danged cool too :)
Your audio processing has changed for this one. It feels like the compressor is responding to a much more bass-heavy signal than we hear, leaving obvious ducking without apparent cause. It's distracting. Great research, though, as always.
Noticed the same thing, got this agressive pumping. Also commented on it, but claiming too much gain into compressor, and to hard ratio. To me it feels like "sucking" around the ears, i literally feel it in my eardrums🙈🤓
I hope for the second one to orbit about 100 million miles from earth in the Lagrange point. This would allow creating stereo imagery to track the flares in 3D. And switch thrusters over to ion drive.
There were two spacecraft designed for this - STEREO A & B
The de-saturation of the reaction wheels is also called wheel off-loading.
Built in star tracker. Yes, keep pointing at that big bright thingy.
great story! love how arecibo was vital for recovering it and amazing that they managed to upgrade the software to work without gyros AND it became more accurate :-D thanks for making this video. those visualizations were also great, that Kreutz sungrazer based on real data was mingblowing.
2:54 - Why not mount the reaction wheels in a gimballed frame so that, when they get to be spinning really really fast, you can flip them over so that now they're spinning in the other direction and the external torque on the spacecraft acts to slow them down?
If they act anything like a toy gyroscope, it would probably require quite a bit of energy to execute that flip.
Hey Scottie, could you tell us about reaction wheels vs. control momentum gyroscopes ? That would be really interesting =)
#MoarTechnicalQuestions
13:30 I used to play bass in The Kreutz Sungrazer Group.
And then you all split and burned out?
@@scottmanley I just faded away, which is not the better option, I've heard...
This is so amazing! Just the fact that they connected, charged and then reheated part by part to get it going again, is really amazing!
My ears got tired from the compression settings on the audio of this great video. I guess it's something new, never heard it before. A kind of "vaccum" sound, og pumping, usually a result of too much gain into compressor, combined with high ratio, making the compression agressive. Hope this feedback is well recieved, coz your channel is epic, your videos and insights equally epic, and i've learned so much from this channel, and it constantly teases and feeds my ever seeking curious brain. Thanks! Keep on doing your thing🙌🏻✨
I upgraded from Izotope’s Nectar 2 to v3 and it just isn’t the same
Yes, that explains it. I checked iZotope's site, and sadly, presets from v2 is not compatible with v3, at least for now;
support.izotope.com/hc/en-us/articles/360058709013-Transferring-plug-in-settings-to-a-new-version-Preset-Transfer-
Maybe their support can recommend a preset similar to the one you used, unless it was custom, then you can dial it in manually perhaps. Most likely there already is a suiting one included. I'm not using Nectar so i might be wrong about this.
I don't want to be picky, but noticed more comments on the audio, and it can make a huge difference for shure. For many radio stations such settings are even well guarded secrets, as their sound is concidered a trademark, and also affects fm-range, so for continued safe flyings sake i hope you find a solution you're happy with✨🤓
Was anyone else trying to figure out which planets were going by in the background based on how fast they were going?
i wonder wath is that "crack"( 1:41 )in the bottom left. is that some sort of damage? or just some sort of connection?
I believe it's the pole holding the collector out the front. I'm not expert but I'm guessing it's like a satellite dish where it has an arm holding a smaller device out in front of a parabolic dish. That's probably also why there's a small blank circle in the centre, that's probably the shadow of the receiver.
Cool (pun intended of course). However though, this was an informative and entertaining video. Thank you.
how about having solar sail fins at the back of the craft like an arrow that creates resistance when it starts to deviate from pointing at the sun? you wouldn't need so much use of the reaction wheels
My guess is: additional mass, space - they would either be heavy or delicate. Which would make it harder to operate or susceptible to Sun storms like the one it observed. So if parts were ripped off by that it would make it less stable.
What also comes to mind is a bit weird and probably doesn't apply here, but you'd have to check on which axis to install them, balance it and remember the weird effect that causes objects to rotate 180 degrees if they are in rotation that is not the lowest energy state (I forgot how it's called - there is Veritasium video about it - it was Discovered by Soviet Astronauts and kept secret).
that might work but the thermal radiation they give off will impart a tiny force too, my guess would be it would take a huge amount of simulations, calculations and testing to make it work --- and i dont think the force would be worth it really not without a huge mass cost (and probably incredibly delicate structure) to make it big enough
they prefer using tested machines. at that point solar sails were not researched or tested. also even for smallest thrust they have to be very big. so it might just be that changing sail position would give more momentum then wind)
One of your most in-depth videos in recent memory. Great work, Scott.
That's why I always put a little solar panel in the direction of the main solar panels' edge in KSP.
Nice countermeasure, but doesn't a battery serve the same job of maintaining temporary power during solar panel alignment recovery. Plus you would need 2 extra solar panels to get power in any 3D misalignment.
To be clear this is an ESA spacecraft, built in Europe with some NASA payloads onboard
ESA spacecraft with NASA stuff and launched on a NASA rocket. With SpaceX now, we will most likely see SOHO's successor be launched either on the Falcon Heavy or on the Vulcan 6 out of French Guiana as the ULA's Vulcan rocket is most-likely going to be slated for NRO and NASA missions.
I'm shocked how little I know about SOHO, and yet claim is one of my fav satellites!