Terra Weekly Mission Status Update

Weekly Update Archive

March 11 - 17, 2005

The Terra spacecraft is operating nominally in science mode. The scope and design of the Terra automation development continues to be refined. Trade studies of the capabilities of the first release were discussed in a meeting this week. On March 15, 2005, the automation meeting centered on schedule, requirements, and a rehash of nominal operations. The “Fire-Watch” operations concept always has at least one person on-console. Contingency operations for a sole operator in this Fire-Watch scenario were discussed.

Raytheon Denver isolated and has fixes for the dropped command problem, the load segmentation problem that affected late changes, and the load buffer jump problem. They hope to deliver the patch for testing to GSFC by March 23, 2005, for testing.

Mission Impact Report
Two MIRs occurred this week having to do with the High Gain Antenna Motor Drive Assembly (MDA2) BITE failures while in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA). There was no impact to science objectives and no data loss.

Ground System and Data Processing System Anomalies/Issues:
Two MIRs occurred this week having to do with K-band dropouts with TDE. In both cases, WSC performed a chain failover restoring operations. Any science data lost during dropouts were recovered on subsequent contacts. Therefore, there was no impact to science objectives and no data loss.

Two MIRs occurred this week having to do with S-band dropouts. One dropout occurred while using TDW and the other with TDE. Both dropouts lasted about a minute and did not affect K-band service (science data).

One MIR occurred this week involving no Low Rate Science (LRS) received with nominal commanding. This occurred after high rate science data was dumped successfully. Subsequent LRS dumps were also successful. This anomaly is under investigation.