NASA has been working on a mission to repair a malfunctioned instrument in the international space. Trending news from November 28th indicates that they have since abandoned the mission and they will not be repairing the instrument anymore. Experts believe that this is a setback for the agency because it is supposed to take good care of the outer space and make sure that it is not littered. According to the official news that was released from NASA headquarters, they decided to terminate the failed ISS Rapid Scatterometer due to the complexities involved its resurgence.
RaidScat was launched to the station in 2014. It continued operating in god condition until this year when it failed. It was designed to collect direction data and wind speed. The machine was also equipped with the ability to measure scattering of radar waves that it was transmitting and those that it was sending. The powerful machine is believed to have lost power sometimes in August this year after an electrical power allotment system known as Columbus malfunctioned. The Columbus module is believed to have affected the operations of RapidScatt hence totally affecting its functions. Efforts from station controllers to save RapidScat proved futile as other instruments were also affected due to an untimely electrical overload. According to the report, control experts worked hard and finally managed to restore power in other instruments but RapitScat issue remained unsolved.
Experts believe that the instruments started to develop mechanical problems earlier than the power interruption issue. In August 2015, it failed to operate normally leading to a momentous drop of power levels of reflected signals. Its initial anomaly was the root cause of its final death at the beginning of the year. Scientists state that they have been trying to save the machine but they did not get a final solution. In several occasions, it complicated scientist’s efforts to measure ocean winds. This is a blow to NASA because the sudden death of this instrument comes at a time when scientists have been fighting hard to get real data that can help control the untimely ocean waves and wind speed.
According to NASA, RapidScat was a reliable instrument that developed a complicated operation failure making their work difficult. News from the station indicates that they are not ready to replace RapidScat with any other instrument. They are in fact looking forward to relying on data sent from an Indian spacecraft referred to as the ScatSat1. This instrument uses a comparable scatterometer as RapidScat.