zlacker

>>belter+(OP)
That official statement seems incredibly light on detail, almost as if written for children, or worse, members of congress.

I wonder, is there a technical publication elsewhere that has more substantial coverage for interested people?

>>inopin+hb
What more is there to say? It seems like a pretty clear explanation to me.

>>michae+Ne
Well, congressman, I might be curious what the actual commands were, why they were issued, how it led to the unfavourable outcome, how they detected and measured the degree of misalignment, what a corrected command sequence might’ve been, and then cross-referenced to a hopefully existing article on how the spacecraft will eventually re-align itself, and perhaps some further reading on other commands that are routinely or not-so-routinely issued and how they are received, decoded, and executed on board the spacecraft. Basic stuff, y’know; after all, this isn’t rocket science.

If there is such an archive, or some approximation thereof, it would surely be fascinating to pore over it.

>>inopin+Hh
Why would they owe you such detailed explanations? You're asking for a full-on incident report. These take days to write and there's no reason for the public at large to need it.

>>hfkwer+km
Because I pay for NASA and I can ask for NASA to do a post-mortem.

>>guhida+In
Normally this makes sense, because you're asking why money was wasted. But, in this case if it's permanently bricked you will actually save money, because if Voyager 2 is bricked the team working on it is now redundant. It's not like they had an incentive to be incompetent and waste money - very much the opposite.

>>ajb+ru
You calculation only makes sense if you put zero value on operating a probe that far out in the galaxy - in which case you should be asking why there was a team working on it in the first place.

But that value is not zero, and replacing it costs quite a bit - both money and time. Asking how and why this happened is a valid inquiry.

>>accoun+kW
Under the assumption that it is bricked, the value is indeed now zero. I think where we differ is that you are assuming it will be replaced, but I don't think it will be. It's way past its design life so it was going to expire at some point.

For science, I would want to do an enquiry anyway - I'm just commenting on the financial/accountability aspect.