101 Astronomy April 15, 2009
The XMM-Newton satellite has been pretty lucky compared to some of the problems other satellites have had. There have been relatively few complications since the launch of the XMMsatellite. However, there have been a couple of problems that have come up every now and then. Back in October 2008, the XMM- Newton satellite stopped transmitting data back to home. Luckily 24 hours later it started back up again, apparently the problem was with one of the radio transponders on the satellite. Another problem that has come along since the satellite was first launched has been with some of the updates and changes. Recently they decided migrate path the and databases of the XMM satellite. This created a large complication due to the format of the current XMM satellite database compared the format of the new one. This resulted in severe complications in the updating process and stalled it for several weeks. The scientists pretty much had to repeat all of the information for the new database which cost a lot of money and took a lot of time References: http://www.sat-nd.com/failures/timeline.html http://www.egos.esa.int/portal/egos-web/others/Events/Workshop/egos-workshop2004/MCS_Infrastructure/LogicaCMG__Migrating_the_XMM_Newton.ppt http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1538-4357/606/2/L131/17988.text.html