SPACE WIRE
Power glitch hits Mars Express, but mission should be OK: ESA
PARIS (AFP) Jul 02, 2003
Europe's first solo mission to Mars has been hit by a 30-percent shortfall in power, but this should not affect any of its goals, the European Space Agency (ESA) here said Wednesday.

Ground engineers checking out the Mars Express as it heads towards the Red Planet came across a faulty connection between its solar wings and a unit that distributes the electricity generated by those panels, ESA said in a mission update.

"This means approximately 70 percent of the power generated by the solar arrays is available for the satellite and its payload to use," ESA said.

It stressed: "This anomaly has no effect on the state of the spacecraft and has no impact on the mission during the whole trip to Mars, including the orbit insertion phase once at destination.

"...even with this power shortage, the [scheduled] Mars observation mission will be achievable," it said.

At "certain short periods" of the mission, engineers will have to juggle operations to prevent overloading the satellite's now-reduced power capacity, it said.

Mars Express was launched on June 2, heading a trio of European and US robot missions on a 400-million-kilometer (250-million-miles) trip that will, if things go well, be joined by a Japanese probe at the end of the year.

Attached to the orbiter's belly is a small stationary lander, Beagle-2, which will be sent down to Mars.

Beagle-2 carries instruments that seek to confirm suspicions, drawn from pictures by orbiting American probes, about the presence of water on Mars.

The problem disclosed by ESA is the second to be spotted since launch, but these glitches are common on sensitive interplanetary probes, subjected to extreme shaking and rocking at liftoff.

"Overall, the spacecraft is in good shape. We are simply getting to know its personality," said Mars Express Project Manager Rudolf Schmidt.

The other anomaly was an unexpected response that came when engineers were checking one of Mars Express's computer memory units, the Solid State Mass Memory (SSSM).

"Good progress has been made on this issue in the last few days: a test involving all instruments was completed successfully by recording and recovering the data through the SSMM," ESA said.

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