JPL Has Some Good News (and Some Bad) About Magellan

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on Wednesday reported a little good news, and a little bad news, concerning the Magellan Venus Radar Mapper.

The good news: They have learned a lot about what the spacecraft did during the hours after it mysteriously severed communications with Earth twice earlier this month.

“We are down to a manageable number of unknowns,” Stephen Wall, a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told other NASA centers during a report televised over the space agency’s network.

The bad news: Scientists still don’t know what caused the craft to break communications in the first place.

The two communications lapses--the first for 14 hours on Aug. 16 and the second for 17 hours on Aug. 21--left engineers at JPL holding their breath, but Wall said Wednesday the craft successfully guided itself through a series of steps that allowed ground controllers to reestablish communications. However, no one knows what started the problems.

“So we are beginning to understand how the spacecraft responded to two unknown beginnings,” Wall said.

Tony Spear, Magellan project manager, has organized a team of 40 experts to study the data from Magellan in hopes of pinpointing the cause and nature of the failures and coming up with a solution. The inquiry will delay the spacecraft’s mission for about a month, so the scientific data from the $750-million program will not begin arriving until at least the end of September.