Scientists Tried to Kill Spacecraft But It Was So Tough That It Refused to Die

While it was getting ready to power down its Gaia spacecraft, the European Space Agency encountered some unusual resistance. The spacecraft, which has been creating a highly detailed three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond, proved surprisingly difficult to kill. "Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job," said Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira in an ESA statement. "But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off." That's Gaia's creators made it incredibly resilient to its hostile environment. "Gaia was designed to withstand failures such as radiation storms, micrometeorite impacts or a loss of communication with Earth," Nogueira explained. "It has multiple redundant systems that ensured it could always reboot and resume operations in the event of disruption." As a result, the team had to "design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the ... Read full article.