Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 10:04:33 -0500
From: David Rust <david.rust@jhuapl.edu>
Subject: Flare Genesis Update - Jan 20 

  From January 16th until January 18th at 06:00 UT the Flare Genesis telescope carried on its observations of the active region 8824 without a glitch. On January 18 at about 06:00 UT a VME-bus reset caused both on-board computers to reboot. The command interpreter computer, responsible to interface the main computer with all the payload subsystems, restarted normally. The main computer didn't restart. For about 13 hours (until 19:00 UT of the same day) the gondola drifted without pointing at the Sun. Finally Pietro Bernasconi, was able to first send a command through INMARSAT to turn on the pointing and then to restart the main computer. The Sun was acquired again, and observations of active region 8824 were resumed at about 20:00 UT. At about 00:00 UT on January 19 INMARSAT telemetry and commanding capability was lost again. Since then all attempts to send commands to the gondola through INMARSAT, as well as through HF have failed. We still have telemetry via ARGOS about once every hour. Since we are not able to communicate with the payload, we couldn’t send the commands needed to switch the observing target to active region 8831 at 07:15 UT as planned. The telescope is still pointing at AR 8824. At about 09:30 UT January 19 the main computer stopped again. Since we are currently unable to communicate with the payload, we cannot send a command to manually restart the main computer. We are confident that soon we will be able to resume the observations, leaving us at least 5 more days of observations before we overfly McMurdo Base and terminate the mission.