re keeping spacecraft on after funding cuts in article apr zeus calpoly edu jgreen trumpet calpoly edu james thomas green writes prb access digex com pat pontificated i heard once that the voyagers had a failsafe routine built in that essentially says if you never hear from earth again here s what to do this was a back up in the event a receiver burnt out but the probe could still send data limited but still some data voyager has the unusual luck to be on a stable trajectory out of the solar system all it s doing is collecting fields data and routinely squirting it down one of the mariners is also in stable solar orbit and still providing similiar solar data something in a planetary orbit is subject to much more complex forces comsats in stable geosynch orbits require almost daily stationkeeping operations for the occasional deep space bird like pff after pluto sure it could be left on auto pilot but things like galileo or magellan i d suspect they need enough housekeeping that even untended they d end up unusable after a while the better question should be why not transfer o m of all birds to a separate agency with continous funding to support these kind of ongoing science missions pat when ongoing ops are mentioned it seems to always quote operations and data analysis how much would it cost to collect the data and let it be analyzed whenever kinda like all that landsat data that sat around for years before someone analyzed it for the ozone hole even if you let teh bird drift it may get hosed by some cosmic phenomena since this would be a shutdown that may never be refunded for startup if some type of cosmic bem took out the probe it might not be such a big loss obviously you can t plan for everything but the most obvious things can be considered james t green jgreen oboe calpoly edu i know you believe you understand what it is that you think i said but i am not sure that you realize that what i said is not what i meant
