On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 12:15:30 -0700, Randall Clague <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>That's *a* question, and it's trivial. Another question is, what will >this gadget be doing? And to answer my own question, it looks like the flight in September will have the flight computer doing what SmartFlight would call a Tier 1 experiment. It will operate the recovery system. It has a backup. Its primary job is apparently sending IMU and GPS data to the ground over 802.11b. One interesting aspect from a failure analysis perspective is that the recovery system pyros can be commanded from the ground. On one hand, you want to eliminate RFI and intermittent shorts so the pyros don't fire during boost. On the other hand, if they're a backup to the backup, you reeeally want them to fire when you tell them to. Everyone I know who has looked at ground-commanded backup recovery has concluded that it introduces more failure modes than it covers. -R -- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
