Report on the failure of the SLO in SMILES
19th January 2011
The cause of the discontinuance of the SMILES observation at 08:59 of 21th April 2010 (UT) was identified as the failure of the Gunn diode at the submillimeter-wave local oscillator (SLO) in SMILES.
The conclusions of the failure investigation was reported to the Space Activities Commission (SAC) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology on 19th January 2011. The presented material was written in Japanese and can be downloaded from here(pdf). JAXA and NICT also reported about the conclusion of the observation phase of SMILES. The report can be downloaded from
JAXA page, which is also in Japanese. This presentation declared that the nominal operation of SMILES was over. The planned project for repairing the failed submm local oscillator on orbit was canceled because of another trouble in SMILES, that is the cryocooler is still unsuccessful in recovering the cooling ability since a temporal shutdown of the system on 5th June 2010.
The detailed report on the failure of the submm local oscillator is available (in Japanese). Contact the Environment Sensing and Network Group.
<Contact>
Y. Murayama, S. Ochiai, or K. Mizutani
Environment Sensing and Network Group
Applied Electromagnetic Research Center
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology
4-2-1 Nukuikitamachi, Koganei,
Tokyo 184-8795, Japan
Tel: +81-42-327-6685/6901/6955
Fax: +81-42-327-6678