So the way I see it is fundamentally there was an issue with receiving signals on the spacecraft and that caused issues. I'd really like to know more about that. They mention doppler shift but that's bidirectional so even without the spacecraft knowing how fast it's going, they should be able to account for it based on the received signal. Common issues could be reduced receive sensitivity, interference, oscillator drift or instability, or plenty of other things but there's no mention of even one that I've been able to find.
Didn’t they say the initial issue was some compatibility issue with the base station they were working with? Although throughout the article it sounds like they had a ton of software problems and maybe the spacecraft wasn’t quite as baked as they thought at the time of launch.
Yeah but that's kind of a meaningless description. Unless they literally had 0 planning on how they'd talk to the base station, presumably they tested this to some capacity or had some assumption it would work that was misguided for a specific reason. As is this could vary from "we pointed an AM radio station transmitter at it but it turns out it only listens to 20 GHz unconverted WiFi" to "we needed to adjust the transmit frequency by 1ppm due to vibration during launch shifting our oscillator." One is moronic, the other is a plausible oversight.
Comments
So the way I see it is fundamentally there was an issue with receiving signals on the spacecraft and that caused issues. I'd really like to know more about that. They mention doppler shift but that's bidirectional so even without the spacecraft knowing how fast it's going, they should be able to account for it based on the received signal. Common issues could be reduced receive sensitivity, interference, oscillator drift or instability, or plenty of other things but there's no mention of even one that I've been able to find.
Didn’t they say the initial issue was some compatibility issue with the base station they were working with? Although throughout the article it sounds like they had a ton of software problems and maybe the spacecraft wasn’t quite as baked as they thought at the time of launch.
Yeah but that's kind of a meaningless description. Unless they literally had 0 planning on how they'd talk to the base station, presumably they tested this to some capacity or had some assumption it would work that was misguided for a specific reason. As is this could vary from "we pointed an AM radio station transmitter at it but it turns out it only listens to 20 GHz unconverted WiFi" to "we needed to adjust the transmit frequency by 1ppm due to vibration during launch shifting our oscillator." One is moronic, the other is a plausible oversight.