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Mars Lander goes Spelunking!
Khan writes "Seems like the Polar Lander may have landed a little too far..about 1 mile deeper than expected into a canyon and probably broke apart in the process. Check out the article in the Miami Herald." According to the official Mars Polar web site, they are still looking for it, or at least some evidence of a crash. Maybe some Martian dragged it to its garage for spare parts.
"However, he said, the planet is covered with craters and canyons and it is impossible to remotely place a spacecraft at a precise location. He also said JPL scientists couldn't find a single landing zone on the planet's generally smooth south pole without a hazard."
If it is not safe enough to land a probe there, we can forget about manned mars missions. Even though a manned landing might, due to "last minute corrections" (like with the lunar landing), go well, one would not risk as much anymore as the NASA did during the Apollo missions.
Yes, P10/11, and V1/2 did accomplish -some- of their missions spectacularly. However, most of the equiptment was shut down (through lack of power), the data rate was reduced (which may have resulted in higher lossage) and much of what they could be accomplishing right now (had they the means) will be lost to us for decades to come, or longer.
The solar winds are being blamed for pushing Skylab out of orbit, causing it to crash & burn rather spectacularly in the Earth's atmosphere. If the cause is correct, then this was easily avoidable on NASA's part, and a major blunder.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Communications with spacecraft highly directional antennas on both ends. An emergency beacon would have to have an omnidirectional antenna to be any use so would require more power. This is not to say that it couldn't be done, and with an orbiting relay, it probably could be done on Mars, but you still have line of sight problems and the problem that a serious failure would likely cause a catastophic impact which no reasonable beacon could survive.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
While material costs for probe is not very significant, launch costs (especially manned ones like the shuttle), assembly costs, and ground monitoring costs are significant. Not to mention the fact that you would feel pretty foolish having two probes fail in exactly the same way. You would want to send a probe, then wait until the mission completed to send another. At that point, the state of the art would have progressed enough that sending the same probe again would be a waste of money.
Another way of looking at it is that you are asking for a more extensive testing program. Extensive testing programs is what got us to the $1b spacecraft in the first place, and much of that testing was on the ground. Doing the testing in space would be likely more expensive.
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"L'IT c'est moi!"
Spare parts? I'd like to see the power supply in that thing. Ultra-life-Radiation powered super cell. The ultimate UPS. Just wear a lead suit when servicing.
Hey, you didn't even mention the fact that whenever a NASA mission goes wrong, or starts to look like it's going wrong, the news-dweebs start quoting the mission price - giving the reader the impression that NASA is just wasting money left and right. (Of course, I'm sure they *are* wasting money...they are a government agency.)
If they really need scientific data I'd like to offer them to put my car on the shuttle and launch it towards Mars. I'm sure it would make a much more visible impact than a mere spacecraft. This is AMERICAN IRON afterall. Also, if they miss, no harm done... it just goes into the sun.
Several months ago, Lou Dobbs, VP of CNN and the host of the show MoneyLine, left that organization and became Chairman and CEO of space.com. He got a lot of publicity on TV and radio at that time.
A lot of people thought that the Web Site in question was not a big enough business and did not have enough potential to fully occupy a man of his talents. OTOH, some said that space.com had the potential to expand into its own cable channel, and it could become similar to CourtTV, which I guess is a successful business.
I realize Dobbs is a media darling, and that's why I'm asking the question here. A lot of people in the community just ignore media hype when it's coming from traditional media sources.
I don't care if the site is popular with the average Internet user, is the information on it accurate and useful?
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Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
The Denver Post article that CNN and others refer to can be found here:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news010 6m.htm
There is a tad more information included.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
If it is not safe enough to land a probe there, we can forget about manned mars missions.
That's an entirely unwarranted conclusion. In the first place, manned vehicles aren't *planned* to smash into the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. And when you have an experienced human pilot you can pick a landing spot with far better precision than is possible via onboard AI and telemetry.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hey, that's completely fucking *unfair*, unjustified and completely WRONG.
When NASA had proper government support they sent men to the Moon. With basically 1950's technology ferchrissakes! Now we look back at what they achieved with the Apollo moonshots and gawp in wonder.
Since then instead of continued support they've had nothing but indifference from the public and he Whitehouse and hostility from Congress, which seems to be largely composed of people bickering over their share of the pork barrel. So NASA's budget has been squeezed tighter and tighter. Add on top of that the fact that space travel is expensive, all their stuff has to be custom made by large aerospace contractors who thoroughly rip them off in the process.
Experimental space vehicles like Pioneer and Voyager are bound to suffer failures, if only a couple of them were built then they are by definition prototypes only. Do you know *any* group on Earth who can design and build perfect, infallible machines for such a hostile environment, on a tight budget, using crooked contractors - and get it right the first time, every time?
The Space Shuttle of course has had time to evolve over the course of its 19-year career. And that's why out of 96 (so far, I think) LEO space missions only ONE of them had casualties. Just think about that for a moment. Remember, we're not talking about a quick trip down to the shops in the motor. We're talking about riding an enormous stack of burning high explosive right out of the atmosphere and back, in craft now nearly twenty years old whose design dates back to the early seventies. How many organisations do you know that can build CARS that last for twenty years, never mind spacecraft.
As to your final point, is it really NASA's fault that they couldn't get the funding for the right experiments in Viking? No. What would you have had them do - go home in a sulk? They were right to send a probe anyway, even one with NO scientific mission because, first and foremost, they are in the business of space travel technology development and exploration. For that reason they built and flew the thing and their part of that was a success. It was Congress who failed, because they were too damn ignorant and too damn cheap to pay for the right payload.
I won't bother to admonish you to cut NASA some slack because it's quite clear that your judgment of them is so ill-considered it's hardly even worthy of consideration.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Hu? At time of posting the artical in question has ZERO mods... /. editors not arrogence of an AC..
It seems the poster saw the topic assumed it was or will be modded in a certen direction and posted acordingly...
In short a rant on something that never happend.. yeah that happends on slashdot on occasion but it's usually vea a mistake by
I don't actually exist.
It's obvious, going by this article, that NASA's JPL are trying to make excuses for their obvious incompitance in this mission.
"However, he said, the planet is covered with craters and canyons and it is impossible to remotely place a spacecraft at a precise location. He also said JPL scientists couldn't find a single landing zone on the planet's generally smooth south pole without a hazard."
Gee, it's strange how nobody at Lockheed Martin knew about the landing zone until it was virtually too late to do anything about it. The above quote from the article gives me the impression that either:
1. JPL knew about the risks all along, and never told anyone about them.
2. JPL didn't know about the risks (like they should have), and are now trying to cover their butts by saying, "Hey, it's not our fault! It's impossible to land anything safely on that planet!"
Come on guys, grow up and admit that you screwed up. Don't apologize, just don't do it again.
My favorite quote:
r ch/index.html - Aerial search turns up no trace of Mars Polar Lander, CNN
r ess/index.html - European Mars mission looks for lessons in polar lander loss, CNN
``No one on our side knew that canyon was there,'' the Lockheed source told the Post. ``All of the sudden, two weeks later, we got this MOLA data'' -- topographical maps and images -- ``and it was like, 'Look at that hole!'''
You've got to be kidding me.. They didn't have the terrain mapped well enough to know there's a damn big hole in the ground? I thought the maps of mars were fairly well up to date.. Maybe not excessively high res, but come on...
Anyway, here's some links to various stories for those who never saw them:
http://www.cnn.com/1999/TECH/space/12/31/mars.sea
http://www.cnn.com/1999/TECH/space/12/29/mars.exp
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
NASA seems to be having a lot more difficulty lately. I realize that now they've got serious budget problems, but come on...
For $600+ megabucks total you'd think they could get something to land in a functional state..
BTW, I live near Huntsville, AL and know one hell of a lot of guys over at NASA, though nobody on this project...
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In the night sky of Mars flies the 73rd wing of the South Mars Air Force. In their latest stealth interceptors this proud all volunteer force keeps guard over the peace and freedom of Mars. Successfully interdicting efforts of the FBI, NSA and OSHA to plant listening devices disguised as landing probes, self-concealing and buring cameras and taps into to Martian Internet for surreptitous ergonomics inspections, this team is widely hailed by all Mars citizens.
Just underneath the canopy of Col. Fthehwqq, wing leader, and lead trainer of the South Mars 'Top Gun' school are painted 4 icons resembling interplanetary probes. For it the much decorated Col. Fthehwqq who has recently repelled the latest dastardly attempts by Earth to usurp the soverignty of the free creatures of Mars.
Really? Isn't one of the reasons there were only a few missions to the moon that the publics interest was lost quickly?
Should we spend more than M$ advertisement department on a man mission to Mars, just as a hope to keep the public interested? Do you really think people in this era can have their attention grabbed for the year and a half or so it takes to send a tin can with 4 boring people to a big red rock? You wouldn't be able to sell a soap opera with that theme to a network, let alone do the real thing.
I don't think the general public is interested in a multi year mission to Mars and back.
-- Abigail
Earth has a lot of places that are much flatter than Mars. A thicker atmosphere, weather, and most of all, the presence of water make for erosion and the settling of sediments that make flat areas.
I do however disagree with the Sahara being reasonble soft. I've been there, and the Sahara isn't made of the same sands as a beach. It's very rocky, and I imagine it's a lot like the surface of the Moon or Mars, minus the craters and canyons.
-- Abigail
It doesn't take AI or a crack pilot to trigger Big rock! Avoid!. It does however take quite some computing power to recognize a big rock while descending from orbit to the surface.
-- Abigail
Right.... and who's going there and pick it up? There's no point in exactly knowing where a piece of junk on Mars is. It no longer works, and hence, it's useless. Sending something there with equipment to "salvage" things from the crash and then bring it back is much, much more expensive than just to rebuild it. It's faster to rebuild as well, as a round trip takes quite some time.
-- Abigail
Deep Space 1 used an experimental drive that had failed every single test ever done on Earth
But still worked in space. Also remember it was experimental.
Pioneers 10 & 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 all suffered hardware failures - main antenna and/or solar panels
But still accomplished their missions fairly spectacularly.
NASA was convinced that deep-frozen rubber rings would work just fine when super-heated to a few thousand degrees centigrade, suddenly (duh!), killing 6 astronauts and a civilian
Yep, that was a pretty bad boo-boo.
NASA knew about solar winds, and even devised spaceships to travel by them, but neglected to take them into account when positioning Skylab
What do solar winds have to do with Skylab's orbit?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Well, perhaps a human pilot won't pick the actual landing point if we use the bounce-around-the-landscape-on-balloons technique on manned landings. I rather doubt that we'll choose that method.
I think the funnier (if unlikely) explanation I heard earlier is that the martians are now monitoring and intercepting spacecraft of unknown origin after a small, wheeled probe vehicle was discovered in a desolate region of the martian outback.
Daily news broadcasts from MNN featuring 'expert' guests speculating on the origin of this probe as a prelude to interplanetary invasion forced the Martian Supreme Council into funding a crash program of SDMI (Strategic Martian Defense Initiative), or "Star Wars" programs to develop and deploy a system capable of detecting and obliterating any small probe spacecraft approaching the red-planet by instantaneously re-programming the onboard computers with unit-of-measure conversion 'virus' that would render the craft unable to navigate, causing it crash violently into the planet's surface.
Exclusive footage of the latest alien probe to be destroyed by SDMI technology was paraded around to the news media in a highly-covered press conference conducted last tuesday at the Martian Defence Departments spectacular headquarters, known as the 'Do-deca-hedron'. Martian Generals were seen to show slow-motion footage of what appeared to be a small alien lander probe jettisoning two smaller free-fall probes immediately before it augered into the side of a huge canyon in the polar region of the planet.
Unnamed officials also told MNN that several other alien probe vehicles had been detected and obliterated in recent weeks, citing a 99% effictive kill rate.
"With a virtual barrage of these alien craft, we at the Martian Defense Agency feel completely vindicated in the quintillion-dollar overrun of this program, as the vital interests and security of the citizens of this planet are being well protected." said uber-General Vlad Quabuchi
"Our success in wiping out the tools of out unknow hostile invader is clear validation of the entire SDMI program as a successful and essential asset in the overall Martian Defense arsenal."
(Disclamer IANA Rocket Scientist, just someone who's read too much sci-fi and grew up playing with lego blocks instead of trucks :)
:)
Its true that human missions definately would be able to correct better but here's a thought.
I believe that current technoledgy would allow a plane to land itself. Additionally, we have a wonderful thing called GPS which circles our globe and allows some really fun toys to locate 'exactly' where you are (give or take less and less if you have military grade models).
What would it take to put into place either a partial set of GPS satellites (note I'm not seggesting a full fleet as I'm sure that would be overkill for the current situation), or perhaps some network of 'navigation satellites' that would allow a probes on board systems to make 'last minute corrections'.
I have to believe that this would allow more precise landings. Additionally depending on their life cycle (I don't know what the standard GPS satellites life cycle is), it could provide more support for a manned mission (provided that the system lasts that long) in the form of relay/navigation satellites.
I realize that there are lots of problems with this idea (ranging from 'its expensive' to 'but the GPS system is designed for _Earth_ and would have to be adapted'). Its just a thought though
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Because it was the best one in the area?
:-)
It's not like they were trying to take risks, but try and pick an area of, say, Kentucky that you could hit from Mars with a reasonable chance of your spacecraft landing in tact. They're hills & canyons & just about everything else all over the place.
Science dictated the area, Logic dictated the best landing zone, Luck dictated the outcome.
Stuff sometimes fails. This is important to remember during your next reboot for no good reason.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Who says humans have to land on the surface of Mars on their first mission there? A group of humans could travel to Mars, remain in geosynchronous orbit, and remotely control a landing craft. They would be able to control it in real time, which would guarantee a higher rate of success in landing a probe there. Granted, the cost of the mission and the risk would be greater, but only incrementally so when compared to a human-occupied landing craft.
---- Politics: Kissing ass and pointing blames.
I went to the lander main site, and clicked the landing Site link, and I can't find any mention of 'bloody great canyon' anywhere..
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Certainly there are risks/imponderables/luck. But these really should be discussed frankly to avoid disappointments. Had NASA said: "It's going to be hell to land there", no-one would have been surprised when it was lost. OTOH, it might never have been launched. Either would have been better than the blackeye NASA received.
I'm concerned that the mission planners may have neglected to consider approach route, preferring to minimize fuel. I'd like to know if this is a case of "penny wise & pound foolish".
-- Robert
For a polar landing, all approach vectors repeat every Martian day, ie 24.6 hours. So you have to time your orbital insertion inside that period to give the desired vector. No big delays, or massive fuel increase.
I don't think I know better than NASA, but I would like that proven! They have made an unadvertised gamble with my money, and need to account for it.
-- Robert
Finally, a reasonable explanation. But it begs the question: Why would anyone chose a trajectory with serious hazards (mountains/canyons) on it? Did they not have good maps, or wasn't there a better approach route?
With spaceshots or other artillery, you can control direction much better than distance. Thrusters keep direction true, but how are you going to adjust re-entry when the atmosphere is more/less dense/windy than expected? So you've got to expect some short- or long-fall.
-- Robert
Ok, starting with the computer thing, back in the late 50s and early 60s NASA was BY FAR the largest user of mainframe computers. Without the money that NASA invested in computer systems, do you really think that computer technology would be as far along as it is now?
Also, here are SEVERAL inventions beside TANG (which is an example of modern freeze-drying):
1. Velcro - invented by NASA to keep things from floating around in the space capsules
2. Gore-Tex - Put into Spacesuits to protect astronauts from extreme changes in temperature and moisture
3. Sudafed - invented for NASA as a decongestant for use in the Apollo program.
4. UPC bar codes - Invented by NASA to quickly and easily keep track of millions of parts necessary for the Saturn 5 rocket and Apollo space capsule.
5. Modern Communications satellites - It started with COMSAT. Modern communications is impossible without it.
6. EKG - Electocardiograph - invented to keep track of astronauts health statistics while in space..
Ok, I just went double what you wanted. The space program is beneficial for not just the United States, but for the entire human race. Do not make such broad statements anymore.
Your argument is a good one. But, it would only be useful if we had accurate maps of Mars. GPS will only give your position relative to the satellites. With the current system, it then translates that to longitude and latitude. You still have to have a map of Earth with lat/long on it to tell you where you are.
The only maps of Mars that we have right now are made at something like 10 meter resolutions. Meaning that one pixel represents 10 meters. That is not very accurate. If you look at the satellite photography at www.terraserver.com you can see these maps along with 1 meter resolution maps.
Mars Global Surveyor is currently getting better pictures of Mars, but those pictures will not be processed for some time.
Think of it this way, we were trying to fly a probe MILLIONS of miles (with a radio delay of 6 minutes) and then land on a planet for which the only map we have represents houses as a single pixel. Not impossible but extremely hard.
...and they're probably wishing Santa send them a set of Lego Mindstorm instead.
The real issue is one of cost vs. capability. An emergency beacon wouldn't do anything useful unless the rest of the mission was a loss. How much money do you want to spend on that? It would have been much more useful to have some low-speed telemetry from the spacecraft from before the point of cruise-bus separation to landing, to tell exactly where any problems occurred. Even that would have been about US$5m, on a US$136m mission. Sacrificing part of the science payload looked like a bad idea at the time.
This is only true so long as Congress (which is populated with the ideological offspring of Sen. William "Golden fleece" Proxmire) doesn't use it as an excuse to chop more out of NASA to make pork for their other constituencies.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The problem with having an emergency transponder would be communication. It's hard enough to find a black box in our own oceans (which is still transmitting), getting a signal in from another planet would be practically impossible.
Plus what good would it do? The odds are that the probe didn't land "lightly", otherwise it would still work in a way. I'm inclined to believe that the the probe was completely pulverised in its fall. In that case, a black box wouldn't have stood much of a chance.
As for the cost of the project, I wouldn't worry about it. This is pocket change for NASA, and the knowledge acquired while setting up the project won't be a loss.
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"After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" - The Onion
IIRC those probes were designed to transmit data back to the lander and the lander would "forward" the data back to NASA. They were also supposed to detach from the lander in the air and fall to Mars. If they survived they could have landed far from the lander and their signal isn't strong enough for us to pick up without the lander re-transmitting it.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You know, we can screw up a lot of robotic missions, leave a ton of craters on Mars, and still get the scientific data we want for much less than sending a manned mission to Mars.
A manned mission would cost several orders of magintude more than a fleet of simple robots. We'd have to provide a human-liveable habitat for astronauts that was absolutely fail-safe, to prevent loss of life (and the loss of a far more costly mission). We coudln't do a "fast-better-cheaper" human mission. The risks are too high. And risky missions are what steered NASA away from the huge, monolithic "everything including the kitchen sink" mode of exploration. I'm not talking about just the risk to human life, but the risk of failure of the mission.
And yes, I've heard the "but astronauts are brave pioneers who know the risks" argument. Even if we find people to shoot into space on a risky mission, I'd rather not spend a huge amount of money so some rocket jocky can Evil-Knevil his way to Mars.
We still know very little about Mars. Mars is a more complex evironment than the moon, and a hell of a lot further away. While manned missions to Mars will make sense someday, now is not that time. I'd say, let NASA continue with its plans. The funding we're expending on these missions isn't so great that screwing up and losing a few robots is such an issue. The more we learn about Mars in this "little to lose" mode, the safer (and probably more cost-effective) any future manned exploration will be.
Gee if it is that hard to land remotely, perhaps we need to admit that one of the only sure ways to avoid this kind of disaster in the future is to let a human pilot control the craft in real time...by being there!
Neil Armstrong saved the first moon landing by flying the LEM over a giant boulder (which a robot lander would have hit) because he could make decisions based on the immediate circumstances. If it is still too costly to send people, perhaps we need better computers - AI systems which could simulate the emergency decision making processes of a crack pilot like Armstrong.
Until that time, expect a lot more of these failures...small, cheap and fast just doesn't seem to be doing what NASA thought it could.
BTW, I'm more inclined to believe in "other" reasons for the failure of this and other Mars missions (at least 2 previous US missions and 2 previous Soviet missions). Kinda makes you wonder...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Cruise stage separation failure explains what we've seen. The DS2 probes, intended to impact and penetrate the surface, also failed to communicate to Mars Orbiter. What could cause both the Lander and both DS2s to fail?
After the last communication with the craft, it was supposed to rotate for reentry, and the cruise stage (carrying the interplanetary solar array and thrusters) would separate from the Lander. The DS2 probes were on the cruise stage.
If the cruise stage did not separate, the DS2 probes and the Lander were destroyed. Single point of failure, whatever the reason for the failure. It explains why the Lander and the two DS2 probes failed.
What I want to know is this: having designed and built a Mars probe, what's the marginal cost of building another one?
And if that cost is low, why not launch two missions; one shuttle mission to put 10-15 identical probes into a stable Earth orbit (hang 'em off the side of the Space Station even!), and one ELV (expendable launch vehicle) to put a bus with a big dumb tank of fuel and rocket engine into orbit a few days/weeks later?
The shuttle's reliable - it's manned, it's going into orbit, and it's coming back after it deploys its payload. The space station will be reliable; it's manned, it's not gonna fall down. So the odds that your science payload (the Mars probes) will be lost before launch are pretty slim.
The big dumb tank of fuel with the rocket engine on the back is expendable - it can be "as reliable as the rocket used to launch it", that is, "pretty good, but if it fails to reach orbit, we launch another one, our science payload is still safe".
The next step is pretty obvious - strap the bundle of probes onto the big dumb tank and fire it off, using whatever gravitational slingshots you like.
10 probes en route to Mars for the price of one expensive shuttle launch and one cheap ELV boost to low-earth orbit is gonna be cheap.
As a bonus, you get some statistics on lander reliability. Was Pathfinder "lucky" and Mars Polar Lander "unlucky"? Find out when you do the same thing next year with 10 MPL-style landers. "Of 10 MPL-style landers, only 3 made it. Of the 7 failed MPL landers, 6 of their DS2-style probes survived and transmitted; the bug is probably with the lander itself, not the separation of the probes. We were just really unlucky with the 1999 MPL. Of the 10 airbag-bouncy-landers, 8 survived. This is the better technology to use."
$150M per mission is faster/better/cheaper than $1B per mission. But $400M for 10 missions beats both hands down. We know re-entry is difficult - we don't know how hard "separating probes from busses is", but it seems pretty simple a'la Galileo. (And with 10 probes in my hypothetical mission, if one gets "stuck" on the bus, big deal, there are 9 more where it came from :-)
(FWIW, here's my guess as to what happened to MPL: Since the DS2 probes also failed to respond, I really question the "canyon" theory - there's no evidence that anything reached the ground in one piece. Or does the "canyon" theory posit that all three (lander and both DS2 probes) all landed in the same canyon? Not having the size of the canyon handy, nor remembering the expected distance between the probes and the lander sites, I'm not sure if this is plausible or not. My gut says "there was a problem on re-entry that destroyed the probe before DS2-probe-separation" is still the simpler explanation.)
UFO spotted landing on our planet! Some scientists assume existence of terrans. Government trucks have been seen carrying something from the presumed landing site to some submartian base known as "Area 51". Government denies knowledge.
The reporters are out of their mind. This was a test flight using one of our new planes. The Planetary Aeronautics and Space Association (PASA) has carried it back to its constructors. That's all.
First post!
Guess the first one explains why it's so far off where we thought it would be.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
This story is just CYA BS.
The real answer is probably related to the rumor that NASA forgot to put heaters on the explosive bolts. This would have prevented the cruise stage from separating and the lander+DS2 probes would have burned up in the atmosphere.
Cm'on, even if the lander rolled down a ravine, the DS2 probes would still work! After all, they were designed and tested to CRASH into the surface.
Armstrong, selected for the mission because he was one of the best pilots in the military, was able to use the LEM's thrusters to fly the Eagle horizontally until he could bring it to a safe landing a few miles from the planned landing site.
Robot landers can't make on the fly decisions like that.
Had this been a manned mission to Mars, a human pilot would have been able to see that the lander was heading for a dangerous spot and, most likely, landed the craft safely.
I read an interesting book a few months ago called The Case For Mars. If you are interested in manned exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit I highly recommend it.
Absolutely wrong. The drive worked fine on Earth, or it would never have been flown. It apparently got a piece of debris stuck between the accelerator grids during launch, causing a short circuit, but that was cleared by pulsing current through it. After that the ion drive was a phenomenal success.
This isn't right. It's not even wrong. For one thing, none of those probes carried any solar panels; they all ran off RTG's. And their main antennas worked just fine, it was Galileo (currently sending back some of the most amazing data about Jupiter we've ever seen) which had the main antenna fail to deploy.
The solar wind does not penetrate down to the altitudes where Skylab orbited, and thus was never a factor to it. What does happen is that the solar UV increase during the height of the sunspot cycle heats and inflates the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, which increases air drag on low-orbiting satellites (of which Skylab was one). The Shuttle, which had been intended for use to re-boost Skylab, was delayed by budget cuts (Congress' fault, not NASA). So Skylab fell down. Not a big deal, it wasn't intended for permanent use anyway.
I'd like to see a reference for this assertion.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Nice to see that the author went out of his/her way to mention this as "NASA's latest failure," and to remind us of the metric/English conversion problem. Funny how the complete success of the latest shuttle mission didn't get mentioned. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Let's put the $184 Million cost of the Mars mission into perspective. According to the Wall Steet Journal, the Air Force plans to buy 339 F-22's "over the next 16 years at an average cost of $200 million per plane" Surely a Mars mission is worth 1 F-22.
Too bad they didn't get any audio back from that microphone on the thing -- I suspect it would have picked up something along the lines of "Meep Meep!", followed by a high whistling sound and a "poof" on impact...
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.