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Giving Up on Mars Polar Lander
toast0 writes "NASA has stopped all attempts to communicate with the mars polar lander. Their press release is very brief, but notes that they will still attempt to find it with the Global Surveyor throughout February. " It's kinda sad really - but NASA's had lot of successes as well lately, which has been good to watch.
I doubt it was anything to do with the atmosphere, I mean they've landed several probes already I think they know what to expect, and the landing type wasn't new either. Right, but one possible scenario was a separation failure, which would probably mean that the heat shield wouldn't protect the Lander. My question is whether it's possible that the Lander could have left no wreckage at all.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
No, I got it by working there, and seeing how things really -are- done at NASA. Badly, with lots of internal politics and far too much management.
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)
China has a much longer history than Europe. In the last 500 years, Europeans colonized much of the world, started massive wars, and enslaved or killed millions of innocents. In the last 5000 years, the Chinese have never exerted significant military or political control outside of South East Asia. Which society has more to fear from the other?
Don't get me wrong. I do not support the current Chinese government's position on human rights, but I see no indication that China is threat to the territory or people of the US. China may be a threat to Taiwan, Tibet and their own people but not to the people of the US.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Here here! I completly agree. I'd moderate this up if I hadn't already posted. Humanity must go to the stars if it wants to progress. Earth is nice, but it won't last forever. We have to leave, and the sooner we start spreading out, the better off humanity will be.
People complain that we should spend money on the present to help fight hunger and poverty. But, compared to welfare NASA's budget is tiny. And compared to PERMINANTLY obliterating human suffering, spending a few more millions on poor people doesn't look quite as hot.
Here's to space!
--Nick
ps: I know I can't spell. I'm just too lazy to break out the spell checker. Bite me.
I risk being rated as a troll for this.
:)
Here goes nothing.
Has anyone ever thought about this?
The communication is working properly between the Mars Lander and NASA but NASA wants you to think that the mission has failed.
Why? Maybe because research there is intended to be kept a secret.
What if a lifeform or another extraordinary thing is discovered? How will the people on Earth react to this? Personally, I believe in the above theory but thats just my own
Oh well, maybe about 10 or 20 years later we will read about a de-classified paper relating the adventures of Mars Polar Lander...
I wonder how Columbus would have fared with an attitude like that?
Ah, the joy of receiving enlightenment from those more intellectually well-equipped than oneself! Words fail me.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the key point here. If the craft that was lost had been a manned vessel, the crew would have seen that it was coming down in unsuitable terrain, and taken evasive action. We need manned missions to the planets; it's the only way to be sure. Besides, unmanned probes are all fine and dandy for the scientists, but they aren't actually getting us any closer to what should be our goal: expansion into the rest of the Solar System. Remember: expand or die.
Finally Humans gave up all attempts to find their piece of cosmic junk. After nearly a month of bombarding Mars with radiowaves of all frequencies and types we can finally take a good rest from them. And it is probable that we are not going to hear anything from them for the next 2-5 years. They are still breaking their heads on how their "mega-super-techological marvel" managed to get lost in our planet. And the last news is that they will try to make a whole redesign of their trashbaskets. While the next probe is scheduled in half year from now, it is highly probable that it will be delayed. We have some hope that their nature known as "beaurocracy" and the usual pedantism on budget cutting will give a chance for us to see it 5 years from now (10 Earth years)
Anyway Mars Surveyor Productions keeps successfully to manage their probe and sending quite monotonic images back to Earth. On what concerns the fate of their new probe the government thinks to offer it to one school so that kids can play with it and to learn something about our neighbors. However this seems to meet some resistence of private groups that consider it worth to have a place in the Etnographic Museum.
Wrong decision for the wrong view. The fact that there is no contact is just a signal that Mars is not so simple as it seems. You see a planet that looks too much like Earth. But which is not Earth. Laws of Nature may play the same role in Mars as in Earth. However how, when and why they happened make Earth and Mars radically different. Note: going to Mars is the same way as running over a beach like field and suddenly note that they are in fact moving sands.
This view has consquently a price. The price is high. But it is natual that it should be this way. Humans have no more than 40 years experience in Space. And if we consider their landing experience then we should consider it miserable. Try to compare it to thousands of years that humans have taken to learn about Earth.
Now there is a problem on giving up. Yes one lows the risks. But also it lows the stakes for a lot of things. Imagine that ARPA decided to "close doors" on Internet when it possessed a few hundreds of hosts. Can you imagine what Net we would have today?
It is a very risky venture to send probes to Space. While humans do not get serious with going to Space, this will had an extreme risk that failures may be deemed as net losses. The provincial ape still does not fill quite ok in a spacesuit. And that's the real problem. By making Space a permanent Terra Incognita ("humans out") we are just shortening the chances for evolution.
You know, when you look at past missions and the inferior equipment they used to have to work with, this is really sad. Now they've got technology that would have made the Apollo teams drool, but they cannot use it at all. Between this and the hubble, I'm not sure I'm getting my value out of these tax dollers.
Finkployd
Bill Gates: "Innovation"
The soviets never made it to the moon, we DID.
The measuring system you use is not relevent, as long as you can do the basic math and conversion to other systems. If you measure in inches, centimeters, or even widths of Arthus C. Clark's thumb it doesn't make any difference as long as you know that 2*2==4 and the square root of 9 is 3 and how to convert it to other systems of measure.
Maybe if we had politicians who actually cared more about doing the work of the people than in getting re-elected we'd get the budget increases that we need for the space (and several other) program(s).
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'd love it if the talking heads would take a bit more time in explaining to people that the faster-cheaper-better missions NASA is undertaking these days allow us to have a greater incidence of failure while still spending less and learning more than on average than in the old days. Instead, the Dan Rathers of the world just talk about what a disappointment NASA has been of late.
Face it, NASA saved all that money by firing it's public relations people. Which is fine... But without good PR they're not going to keep up even the funding they currently have.
A lack of public confidence is, IMHO, the worst thing that could happen to NASA. With two big public failures (well, at least made out that way in the media), NASA's gonna be hurting soon.
Don't blame the media for it, it's always been like that. The best news is bad news, from their viewpoint. Success is not shown off nearly as well as failure, so you must have a huge success rate to cope with one failure.
---
- 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.
which is not to say Oceanography does not benefit from NASA, the military, etc, but I think the point is clear)
I think that oceanographers tend to get more than that figure in the form of free time on equipment. A couple of people I worked with were working on installing some instruments for DUMAND in Hawaii were getting a a few weeks every year from the Navy on their submersible. From what I understand, the submersible time was around 100k a day if they had to buy it (they were working at about 3k down).
However, I don't doubt that the geosciences are underfunded and I think its a shame.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Of course, as we send more crawlers up there eventually we'll be able to play the game "Find Polar Lander". No winner if it did completely burn up, but then we'd end up with the south polar region extremely well mapped before giving up...
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I think the aboive statement does put you in the "traitor to his species" category...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While Cheaper, Faster, More (or whatever the exact doctrine is) has brought about wonderful successes like Pathfinder, we've had two spectacular and still expensive failures. While the failures are still less expensive than one giant mission every six years, the results still are not encouraging.
However, I don't think this means NASA should change the doctrine. Instead, let's find out how the system can improve without radically altering the structure of what I think is the most exciting time in NASA since the very beginnings of the shuttle program.
So what needs watching? Obviously better communication with contractors and subcontrators. Further, it ought to be worth looking at how NASA space missions talk and review each other. Of course, I'd like that to be on the scientist rank-and-file level.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Of course, Yahoo would try to coopt the whole mess and jump to Martian Media Player.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
And that could've failed to, like any other project, scientific or not. one COULD have done a lot of other things with the money, yes. but just because a project doesn't work, doesn't mean it is a complete failure.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Does anyone have the coordinates for the alleged "face on Mars"?
Also: The image of "Kermit" that NASA found and published as examples of how you can find all sorts of chance images on the Martian surface?
Didn't they find a "smiley face", too? Shades of _The Watchmen_. B-)
With respect to "the Face on Mars": There's a whole section of the human brain given over to detecting human faces and decoding expressions - which is why we see faces in everything from electric outlets to wear spots in linoleum if they contain even traces of similarity to facial features.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I agree with you -- we should be developing ways to inhabit the heavans -- but this technology is still awhile away -- and if we say that "well, we are destroying the environment, so let's get the hell out of here" we are kind of taking the wrong approach to the problem. What will we do? Go to another planet and proceed to exploit the environment and resources on it? No... not the solution. We could then quite possibly find ourselves screwed yet again. If we are going to solely depend on space technology to save our arses, that would be a very bad idea. Think redundancy here, people. =) Taking that analogy further, if we don't take care of the earth, it may well crash, leaving us with nothing... and we don't have a backup yet!
Okay, enough with the cheesy analogies. At the risk of sounding like someone who uses the shallow (if not logically unfounded) argument of "we have no business exploring space when there are starving people in China", I think that while extraterrestrial technology is important, we can't lose sight of the core problem here which is that we are destroying Earth. Rapidly. We are just evading the issue by running away to space. We have a much better chance of survival if we fix the environmental problems here at the same time as we work on tackling space; we are overrunning our planet exponentially at the moment, and if we don't do something quick I think we are going to start feeling the backlash.
And if you think that you can't make a difference; you're wrong, you can. Here are a couple of links:
The fact that this message made it to the top score, albiet marked as funny, is one of the problems I think slashdot needs to address. I am supposed to believe that someone posting on slashdot just happens to be smarter than NASA? When was the last time you landed a probe on another planet? NASA has done it a good number of times.
NASA can do things right hundreds of times with no comment, but as soon as they screw the pooch, boom, here come the smart-asses out of the wood work who believe they have all the facts and know exactly how to fix the problem.
>You can only cut corners so far, for the mass >media's benefit.
Is this the same mass media where you got all of your information? jeepers man!
|n0::Shit|- |pyrexD::Say| i saw it on tv lost your mars probe
just ask zdI will gladly pay you today and eat Tuesday up like the cheap burger that she is.
Of course, I'm only going by what I read in the media, which definitely is not saying much these days.
Metric to English calculator - $35
Telescope - $270
Mars Lander - $135,000,000
Look on the scientists' faces - priceless
Now, that's not to say NASA is a bunch of incompetent twits. (Which they are, but that's another story.) However, I hope they learn from this. Quality is ESSENTIAL. Meeting Press Deadlines is NOT. That's how they lost the Challanger. You can only cut corners so far, for the mass media's benefit.
IMHO, NASA would function a -whole- load better if they launched another el-cheapo Mars lander, this time fitting it with the entire management side of NASA. That way, NASA could claim the presence of life on Mars (though intelligence would still be in doubt), AND be free of the money-draining side of the organisation, AND be in a position to actually get some real work done, all in one go. I think it'd go over great with the public!
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)
We have the technology now to send a man to mars. But the government would rather blow money on things like social programs and welfare which is creating more problems than it helps.
I would hardly say that money used to feed someone, or give them hospital care, is "blown". Aside from that, you do realize that the largest single government program is Social Security, which is paid for by your FICA taxes (not income taxes), and the next largest is defense? Entitlement ("social", "welfare") programs take up only
Where the Federal Budget dollar goes
The chart isn't very helpful in showing how the annual budget actually involves returning money to Social Security that was borrowed during the DEFENSE spending binge of the 1980-1995 period, but it does show how 14% is just paying interest on the national debt. We should be paying down both the Trust Fund loans and other government debts so that this crippling rate of interest can be reduced.
Today the government is all about managing problems, not solving them. God forbid they actually solve a problem and someone is out of a job.
I think you have a very short-sighted view of what government is actually doing, let alone what it can accomplish. Few people believe that we can "solve" poverty, for instance, but we can certainly provide a way out of poverty for those willing to make an effort.
What does this have to do with space? In any case, dealing with a given problem (poverty, crime, the economy) usually has to be combined with other objectives (science, education, tax reduction).
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
In this case, the sword is popular public opinion. NASA has from the beginning of the space program invested enormous energy in achieving high approval ratings, from the micromanaging of the "straight-arrow" Gemini astronauts' lives to the Pathfinder mission. NASA is now refocusing its planetary science program on the tantalizing, but slim, possibility of finding life outside Earth (Mars, Europa ...) in the belief that only this will motivate public opinion.
Permit me to exercise my skeptic-o-meter and suggest that raising expectations too high is a mistake. When programs and missions with other objectives get harnessed to the yoke of becoming another public relations wowzer, the science, more often than not, loses. The book The Hubble Wars provides an instructive example of how NASA's focus on an engineering success blinded it to the science needs of the mission.
As you (JoeWalsh) suggest, NASA believes it's dependent on public support to continue with its programs. (The fact is, we could have a NASA that provided us with both planetary science and propulsion research for a fraction of the budget; it's maddeningly less-than-really-useful do-nothing projects like Shuttle and ISS that eat up the budget. Which, in a cynical way, is exactly what it was designed for.)
Unless we're actively exploring and working toward getting people living on Mars or someplace like the asteroids or L5, you're correct -- we're putting the species at risk. When it's within our grasp! How frustrating.
But in the end, NASA has to accept responsibility for continually going to the trough of public opinion to win support for dubious and expensive projects. When you're that dependent on the goodwill of the voters, you're going to find a day when they turn off the spigot.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The hype surrounding the failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander seemed particularly nasty from where I was sitting. It truely is sad that we have lost two missions, but that will not stop NASA and those of us who are advocates for space exploration from trying. These programs are essential to our future and our childrens' and grandchildrens' future.
Expensive as these programs are, they give us unbelievable benefits: as inspiration for people to get into math and science (how many of us does that apply to???), to show us how small a world we live on (the first picture of Earth as a globe, on which we live in a fragile shell was taken by Apollo astronauts and served to galvanize conciousness of our environment and was worth the entire cost, IMHO), to allow us to better understand our home planet (some researhers are planning for a constellation of satellites to measure extremely small land movements, perhaps leading to better earthquake prediction), and to give us our new frontier to explore and use our creative energies, on which we spend too much figuring out ways to kill each other.
If we don't go into space and utilize the infinate resources out there, and therefor doom our decendants to an empty, resourceless world, they will look back on our day, and think to themselves, "What the heck were they thinking?!?" We have the opportunity and the means today to gain access to those resources, and I for one don't want my decendants to curse my name for my generation's failure to provide for them.
-Aerowolf
With the current success rate, I feal that it is about time that N.A.S.A gave up on the project. The reason for no contact could be one of many things. It wouldn't however be fair to blame anyone because I very much doubt that they will either regain contact or find out what went wrong. Although the shear amount of the costs involved must come into the equation sometime.\
I might however think back to the Venus Probes that were sent back in the 70's (I think). They were so well tested that if any problems would arise they should have all ready been thought of. From the Immence heat shielding surrounding the probe, to the high impact design that ment theat nothing went wrong and we learnt much about another planet in this uncomprehensibly small section of space.
http://www.nasa.gov/
or for the more sceptical of you, I recommend trying the Darkvault and look for a hint of alien involvment!
http://www.darkvault.com
The Well Known Fat Bloke
My main concern with this mission's failure is what sort of fallout will there be from it in the popular culture? Will we see popular support for space missions eroded even further? If I had a dime for everytime an acquaintance has told me that it's all a waste of money . . .
I'd love it if the talking heads would take a bit more time in explaining to people that the faster-cheaper-better missions NASA is undertaking these days allow us to have a greater incidence of failure while still spending less and learning more than on average than in the old days. Instead, the Dan Rathers of the world just talk about what a disappointment NASA has been of late.
Sigh.
The best hope for mankind's long-term survival is for us to spread to the stars. Failing that, we should spread to somewhere else in the solar system (perhaps in the space between planets, in totally artificial environments rather than terraformed planets). Otherwise, there will come a day when humankind is no more. It could be global thermonuclear war, it could be as a result of industrial waste products ruining the environment, or it could simply be a stray asteroid. But one way or another, it'll happen unless we spread out.
Anyone who is against exploring space is a traitor to our species.
When people ask "What has the space program done for us", people reply 'Tang' or 'Teflon' or 'Concentrated Orange Juice'.
They are trivialities that distract from the true answer.
What's the Weather going to be like tommorow ? How do you know ?
Strange, that a country that seemed to spend half of 1999 getting hit by hurricanes and storms, suddenly forgets why they get 2 day warnings before hand. What would the Eastern seaboard be like if they got 30 minutes warning instead ? How many people would die ?
But even weather prediction isn't the most important gift.
When did the enviromental movement really start to get into high gear ? The Silent Spring was certainly the first widely known warning, but what is the standard image of the enviromental lobby ?
When we started getting pictures like the above - not a vast limitless area that we can do anything we like to, but a small blue ball, hovering above the horizon of the moon, or the last crescent of the Earth taken by a space probe that is sailing into an almost infinte darkness. That's when terms like 'Small' and 'Fragile' began to be used about the Earth, which was historically regarded as the largest thing you can imagine.
Look at any enviromental message, and you will almost always find a shot of the Earth from space. These pictures have made quite an impression on the thought processes of this race.
And the impression is so deepy ingrained, that most people never think where they came from.
Whatever money NASA spends, it's a bargain, for the results of their programs might just save the planet from ourselves.
NASA, and the Military.
Now, how many BILLIONS of dollars does the military get annually as compared to NASA's hundreds of millions
? NASA has put people on the moon and telescopes in orbit, invented re-usable spacecraft, all for less than Bill Gates loses on a bad day in share price. I personally can't think of one government institution that's more deserving of my money.
There's no reason for a sig here.
Hi, I'm part of the MPL team, and thought you guys might like to know that we are taking the flight-spare MPL to a secret location in Death Valley, and running a complete simulation of operations as they might have been had it landed on Mars.
The point? To test the instruments and make sure they would have done what they are meant to, as a number will be reused in future missions (the Stereo Surface Imager in particular).
You can follow all the images and simulations if you're interested in what actual science was being conducted, at our official site www.marspolarlander.com
Cheers,
Anil Madhavapeddy - Ground Data Systems - Outreach
Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor
I really don't like the media's propensity (and, apparently, ours, to an extent) of judging NASA and our space program by a few failures. Sure, they get publicized more, but what about the untold missions that go off without a hitch? It's become so commonplace these days that rocket launches, and even space shuttle launches, have become just a footnote on an out-of-the-way place in the newspapers.
I wouldn't *want* NASA to have a 100 percent success rate - that would just tell me they're hiding the failures.
Technology, especially leading-edge technology such as this, is GOING TO FAIL occasionally. Don't read anymore into it than that. I think they're doing an admirable job, considering the resources they have available and the political climate they must work in.
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