Find out what went wrong.
This mission came home with almost nothing. The spacecraft was healthy at launch, the payload worked, and the ground station was listening - and still, hardly any data arrived. Your team has the mission readings. Work out what happened.
The payload worked and the data never arrived. What stopped it?
Learning outcomes · Grades 9–10
What you should be able to do, and the evidence that shows it.
- 01By the end of this mission, the learner will be able to quantify the shortfall between the data collected and the data delivered, and demonstrate this by reporting the difference with units.
- 02By the end of this mission, the learner will be able to model why an always-on policy exhausts a resource that a selective policy would preserve, and demonstrate this by relating the policy text to the readings.
- 03By the end of this mission, the learner will be able to test whether this mission met a stated delivery requirement, and demonstrate this by comparing the delivered figure against that requirement.
Before we start
A quick check of what you already know. There is no score.
The idea behind the mission
One mission, one set of readings. Everything you need to explain the failure is in them.
Collecting is not delivering
A spacecraft that fills its storage has achieved nothing until the data reaches the ground, and sending it takes power. A policy that collects at every opportunity can drain the battery so far that the spacecraft protects itself by shutting things down - and then it cannot send anything at all.
Predict before you run
Before you look: what do you think a spacecraft is most likely to run short of, and what would happen next?
What do you think this spacecraft ran short of, and what would happen next?
At least 20 characters — say what you expect and why.
Configure the mission
This is the set-up you will run. It is fixed on purpose, so everyone in the class is reading the same evidence.
Baseline case
This mission
- Write your prediction first.
- Read every reading before deciding; the obvious one is not always the cause.
- These readings come from a model, not from a real mission.
Units stay attached to every result: angles in degrees (°), time in seconds (s), power in watts (W), energy in watt-hours (Wh), battery state in percent (%), and elevation in degrees (°) where available.
Run the Digital Twin
Run the mission and collect its readings.
Baseline
This mission
Read the evidence
Follow the battery down and see what changes when it gets low. Then look at what was collected against what was delivered.
Run the Twin to produce evidence.
Make the engineering decision
What one change to the mission policy would you make, and which reading justifies it?
What one change would you make to the mission policy?
What this does not prove
What this mission shows
- My prediction
- The mission readings for this run
- Where each number came from
- One thing this model does not cover
What it does not establish
- These mission readings are produced by a model. No real mission was flown.
- This is a teaching operations run and is not an operational assurance result.
- This lesson does not establish how a real mission would be recovered.
Name one thing this model does not tell you about recovering a real mission.
Show what you understood
Formative feedback for you and your teacher. There is no official grade.
The spacecraft collected data but sent almost none home. Why?
Which reading shows the mission failed to deliver?
What one change to the mission policy would you make, and which reading justifies it?
Name one thing this model does not tell you about recovering a real mission.
Revisit the mission evidence
Formative · not an official grade
No formative evidence has been recorded yet.
Next: Write your prediction, run both set-ups, then pick the evidence that supports your answer.
Formative guidance only. Official grade: none. A teacher still reviews your written reasoning.