NASA and CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to deal with a similarly deficient device in 1993 — only it wasn't a feckless flashlight, it was a $3 billion space probe.
After rocketing through the solar system for five years, the Galileo probe had finally come within range of Jupiter and its moons. Astronomers rubbed their hands in eager anticipation of the pictures and other data the probe would be sending back. Mission controllers sent the signal to unfold the umbrella-like reflector of the spacecraft's antenna, designed to beam data back to Earth in a concentrated radio signal stuffed with bits of computer information. But the reflector wouldn't unfold.
That left Galileo with only its omnidirectional antenna, analogous to a reflectorless light bulb and capable of transmitting much less information than the balky antenna.
After trying desperately to get the antenna to deploy, mission controllers turned to Oliver M. Collins, an expert in deep-space communications. Now an associate professor of electrical engineering at Notre Dame, Collins was then working at Johns Hopkins University, following undergraduate and graduate study at CalTech.
The engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab wondered if a procedure Collins had recently written about could be used to pack more information into the unfocused signal they were left with from Galileo. He thought it could. The JPL team first had to rewrite the spacecraft's computer software. But when Collins' advanced coding system was turned on, it worked, saving the space agency a galaxy of money and embarrassment.
"The mission has accomplished about 80 percent of its original objectives," Collins says of Galileo, which is expected to finally cease functioning later this year from radiation exposure.
In part for his work salvaging the Galileo probe, Collins received the 1998 Judith A. Resnik Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the IEEE's highest international award. Named in honor of the astronaut killed aboard the space shuttle Challenger, the award is presented to an individual for outstanding contributions to space engineering within the disciplines of IEEE, the world's largest society of electrical engineers.