Cosmic irony: Ulysses solar spacecraft freezing to death
In a twist of cosmic irony, the Ulysses spacecraft, which orbits around the Sun, is on the verge of freezing to death. The 17-year-old spacecraft's demise has been hastened by a glitch preventing power from keeping its fuel from freezing.
Ulysses launched in October 1990, then swung by Jupiter in 1992, using the planet's powerful gravity to change its orbit into one that passes over the north and south poles of the Sun - the first spacecraft ever to do so. The joint NASA and European Space Agency mission has studied a stream of charged particles from the Sun called the solar wind, discovered interstellar dust blowing through the solar system and flown through three comet tails.
The spacecraft is now critically ill, however, because a glitch is preventing power from being rerouted to keep its hydrazine fuel from dropping below its 2° Celsius freezing point. Once the fuel freezes, there will be no way to control the spacecraft.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
