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Ulysses odyssey ends: you can watch live today
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After more than 18 years of space adventuring and scientific achievement, Ulysses will end its odyssey today. Unlike the Greek hero, this space probe will have no homecoming. Instead, it will become a ghost ship.
Launched from the payload bay of space shuttle Discovery on Oct. 6, 1990, Ulysses is a joint NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) project. It's lasted more than four times the expected operational life, and only the final waning of its onboard power supplies has led to the end of its misson.
Controllers will turn Ulyssess off today in a brief ceremony. You can watch live at the ESA portal at 11:35 a.m EDT (15:35 UDT).
The Ulysses team wrote the probe's obituary last year, when they expected that the decreasing power would put an end to useful work. To their surprise, Ulysses kept on working and sending data home.
After swinging by Jupiter in the early phases of its journey, Ulysses went on to set space and scientific records. Its contributions include further understanding of space weather. The probe's studies of the solar wind and the sun also contributed to some surprising discoveries about charged solar particles that could present hazards to astronauts and satellites:
Ulysses was the first mission to survey the environment in space above and below the poles of the Sun in the four dimensions of space and time. It showed that the Sun’s magnetic field is carried into the Solar System in a more complicated manner than previously believed. Particles expelled by the Sun from low latitudes can climb up to high latitudes and vice versa, even unexpectedly finding their way down to planets.
This is very important as regions of the Sun not previously considered as possible sources of hazardous particles for astronauts and satellites must now be taken into account and carefully monitored."Ulysses has taught us far more than we ever expected about the Sun and the way it interacts with the space surrounding it," said Richard Marsden, ESA's Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager.
This international team has won awards for their accomplishments. Today, they'll say goodbye to their craft, but not to the science. The information compiled by Ulysses will continue to be a vital part of understanding the sun and the effects of space weather on both Earth and future missions.
ESA manages the mission operations and provided the spacecraft, built by Dornier Systems, Germany (now Astrium). NASA provided the Space Shuttle Discovery for launch and the inertial upper stage and payload-assist module to put Ulysses in its correct orbit. NASA also provided the radioisotope thermoelectric generator which powers the spacecraft and payload.
ESA’s ESTEC and ESOC are now managing the mission with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Ulysses is tracked by NASA’s Deep Space Network. A joint ESA/NASA team at JPL is overseeing spacecraft operations and data management. Teams from universities and research institutes in Europe and the United States provided the nine science instruments.
Image/artist's thematic concept of Ulysses.
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