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[Spaaaace!] Curiosity Lands on Mars, Orbital Mechanics, Neil Armstrong is dead.
Zilla360
Spaaaace!EarthRegistered User regular
Spaaaace!EarthRegistered User regular
Who is best at space? Curiosity Rover is best at space!
Landing times where you are (approx, for delay/relativistic effects).
If this fails, it will be a huge setback, so I'm crossing all fingers and toes for Monday. How about you fine D&D'ers ?
Landing times where you are (approx, for delay/relativistic effects).
Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011 that will attempt to land a Mars rover called Curiosity on the surface of Mars. Currently en route to the planet, it is scheduled to land in Gale Crater at about 05:31 UTC on August 6, 2012. The rover's objectives include determining Mars' habitability, studying the Martian climate and geology, and collecting data for a future manned mission to Mars.
Curiosity is about twice as long and five times as heavy as the Spirit and Opportunity Mars exploration rovers, and carries over ten times the mass of scientific instruments.[18] It will attempt a more accurate landing than previous rovers, within a landing ellipse of 7 by 20 km (4.3 by 12 mi),[19] in the Aeolis Palus region of Gale Crater. This location is near the mountain Aeolis Mons (formerly called "Mount Sharp"). It is designed to explore for at least 687 Earth days (1 Martian year) over a range of 5 by 20 km (3.1 by 12 mi).
The Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort for the robotic exploration of Mars, and the project is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of California Institute of Technology. When MSL launched, the program's director was Doug McCuistion of NASA's Planetary Science Division. The total cost of the MSL project is about US$2.5 billion.
If this fails, it will be a huge setback, so I'm crossing all fingers and toes for Monday. How about you fine D&D'ers ?
Zilla360 on
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Pretty low, I'd guess. NASA is rather good about not screwing up the same thing twice, IIRC.
Shatner's giving it a classy introduction.
I actually got choked up by the end...
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That is Wall-E levels of depressing.
how do you suppose that will be shot?
I usually just use one of NASA's many Youtube channels if I miss anything.
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One day we will go get its remains and return them home to go on a plinth in a museum.
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
Your damn right we will. Thanks little robot, we wont forget you.
Well, I mean. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, sure, but it's likely the best way we have right now. I'm sure it wouldn't have been greenlit if they didn't have a decent shot at it.
According to this article there's a camera on the rover facing down that will record video during the descent.
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/msl/120731skycrane/
You really want to bring a robot home that has been brooding on a distant planet for years?
That's just asking for robot overlords.
Reminds me of:
Guys, does anyone remember spacebat?
...How much different is Curiosity's deployment from Spirit or Opportunity's?
It's bound to happen one of these times, but this had better not be the time that something goes wrong out of the blue and wrecks the rover during the landing sequence. NASA really can't afford any accidents until America has a much science-friendlier administration (which is, in mind mind, incredibly stupid. But whatever; I guess it keeps JPL honest).
About 2.5 billion reasons I'd imagine.
No, we won't. There's very little reason for a manned mission to even land anywhere near either rover, and zero reason to bring either of them back to the Earth. It would be extraordinarily expensive for a historical trinket, especially when every kilogram of rover would be displacing a kilogram of soil/rock/atmosphere samples.
If they are recovered, it will be well after the initial manned exploration of Mars has been completed, when travel to and from the planet is much more commonplace.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
A lot of that is eaten up in the development and launch costs, though, both of which would only need to be paid off once if you have multiple identical payloads.
I'm having trouble finding a breakdown of how much was spent on the physical rover, which unfortunately might not be publicly available at all.
Cost, development time and the size of JPL / NASA. I'm sure that NASA would love to send 10 rovers to each planet in the inner solar system - but they have a shoestring budget and a pretty small staff of experts, so we get one rover every [X] number of years.
The 'Sky Crane' manoeuvre is making me wince, because that's a bit of engineering wankery if I've ever seen it. The proposed problem it solves (kicking up a dust cloud) is much less significant than the potential complications & risk it presents. If the rover touches down with rockets and the dust disabled a piece of equipment, or even if the dust jams a wheel and the rover can't move, that's much much better than if the Sky Crane manoeuvre gets botched (one strong gust of wind will screw it up) and the entire rover is destroyed.
I disagree. While it makes less scientific sense, it's a huge national pride boost, and from a political standpoint it would hopefully drive interest in even more funding and enthusiasm for scientific pursuits like this.
I guess it kinda says something that landing rovers on Mars is now a bit mundane.
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Given that there's no scientific reason to bring them back in the near term, I don't see it happening.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
MSL is much, much different than Spirit or Opportunity in terms of it's mission, location & capabilities. We're going to be using it to build a (rough) model of Mars's geological history, and to determine whether or not life is likely to have ever arisen on the red planet.
It's a huge landmark in exploration.
1) JPL gets pretty attached to it's probes. I think they'll want Spirit & Opportunity back.
2) There is a valid scientific reason to get both back & into a lab: we want to check over the instruments & make sure everything was functioning properly when they were conducting their experiments. Verification / falsification / replication.
I was a little surprised to see the thrusters firing before the rover itself was lowered, though. My first thought would've been to take advantage of the dynamic stability you get by essentially operating in a "tractor" configuration vs. Mars' gravity while lowering the thing down. I guess they're confident enough in their flight control routines that they won't tip the thing over between the parachute and sky crane phases.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
I don't take it as an insult...national pride may have been the wrong wording to choose. It just seems like bringing them back would be an easy political move to help garner more interest (and funding) in scientific pursuits.
Edit: Or at the very least it would spark interest in future generations to pursue scientific fields. I guess it just seems like an easy win, though I have no idea what the logistics would be to bring them back.
Now, those proposals *are* mostly dead in the water for political reasons, but that should give you [edit: second-person plural "you"] some idea of how technically difficult a return mission will be. I don't see us working to bring back anything from Mars that isn't either a person or an immediately relevant object of scientific curiosity--at least not in the near term. In proposing such a mission you might get a bit of traction from sentimental parts of the population, but you'd have to fight through both the scientific community (who will think it's a dumb idea) and all the usual anti-spaceflight elements of the political establishment.
StarCraft II User Name: DeadMenRise
That's a fair point, but we won't be launching a mission to mars unless we can put together a plan for a return trip, and I don't think it'll be too technically difficult to fit a rover or two into the craft once we've drafted that plan. Time will tell, I guess.
And I'm pretty sure nobody is interested in a one-way trip. There were volunteers for such a voyage, but I know JPL did not think it would be a good idea even if they had public support at the outset (mostly because the whole reason you'd want to do a manned mission in the first place is to prove that you can safely transport people from planet to planet).