How To Hack A Spacecraft To Die Gracefully
Last week, the Rosetta spacecraft crashed into comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after orbiting it since 2014. It was supposed to do that: the mission was at an end, and the mission designers wanted to end it by getting a close look at the surface of the comet. But this raises an interesting problem: how do you get a device that is designed to never stop to actually stop?
A spacecraft like Rosetta is built from the ground up to keep going, to reboot and go into a backup mode, phone home and wait for instructions if it encounters a problem. This is …read more
