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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.
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.
I used to be a very harsh critic of NASA back when the shuttle was the only thing they had flying. Most people don't realize that the reason there are six crewmembers on a shuttle mission is that until the mid-90s, all of the computer instructions were stored on punched paper tape! The "mission specialists" had the job of feeding the paper tape into the vintage 1970 computer while the Flying Winnebago did laps around the Earth for a week.
Each shuttle mission costs more than the $165MM we paid for the lost Mars lander. The way I look at it, compared to what NASA has spent in the past we should think of the Mars landers as being disposable. For about the cost of a jar of Tang and a few of those toothpaste tubes full of dehydrated ice cream, we can now send a probe to another planet. If it blows up, send another one, or two, or ten.
Sojurner was a huge success. That mission cost about $150MM. This one was a bust at $165MM. You take your chances with these things.
I think we have a much better chance of getting important science done by sending more and more of the cheaper landers. Think of them as probe droids, drop them by the dozens.
The problem is that the public's imagination is captured by manned space flight. Sending robots just doesn't do it for people the way a test pilot or scientist risking his/her life does. The sad fact is that humans are exceptionally well adapted for life on Earth and we suck at being space creatures. Our spines deteriorate, we lose muscle mass, our circadian rhythms get all fouled up. The way I see it, the only reason for manned space flight going at all right now is to give the Congress something they can relate to in hopes of keeping the budget from being slashed.
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.
3. JPL never said that they had the landing site pinpointed to an exact spot, and never guaranteed that the site was as flat as a billiard table.
Don't do what again? Don't send out any space probes if there is any risk of failure? Don't build any space probes until they've perfected the technology? (bit of a catch 22 there)BTW, this was one of NASA's new "low"-cost missions. According to them, the cost of two spacecraft is capped at $184M. Compare to, what was it, a billion dollars for Viking in the '70s? Given the immaturity of the technology, I think this is prudent.
Disclaimer: Currently, none of my tax dollars are paying for these particular missions. I am chipping in for the space station, however.
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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.