Slashdot Mirror
Sounds from Polar Lander? Well, Maybe Not
rosewoodwrote to us saying that those faint signals from the Mars Polar Lander have turned out to be much ado about nothing. NASA has said that based on the fact that other sites have been unable to hear those faint sounds, the sounds were probably terrestrial in origin.
BTW, to the moderators. Pancaked is a term for going splat, this is not a pancake troll.
kwsNI
I hope that this will not stop NASA or other Space agencies from going to Mars. What would be good is if NASA and the european space ageny joined forces and then sent a similar lander to Mars. Then America would not have all the costs.
I am sure that there is enough money floating around, and if there was some cooperation between europe and America on this then maybe, just maybe all those Americans will stop saying 'spend less on Space and more on Welfare'.
..search for signals from Polar Lander.
:=)
Why couldn't they have given it a mobile phone ? You appear to be able to use them almost anywhere else. Maybe next time they should install a few mobile phone antenna masts in the vicinity of the landing zone as a backup to the backup comms system.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I just think that we should simply encourage new technologies rather than laugh everytime another space robot goes boom. I once saw a show or something about scientists developing these little sensors that were so small and light that, when the machine that got them to a planet ejected them, they would kinda just fall to the ground and scatter like a spilled bag of Cheetos. It would be these Cheeto-bots that would take all the readings and data. It sounded like a cool idea to me at the time. I should think that if UMass students are doing graphic design on blood cells, we could build a Cheeto size robot.
Of course this is all coming from an Art major. So feel free to ridicule me with Scientific jargon.
Peace. Sway icq 5202646
Peace. Sway
Peace. Sway
kackle kackle, buzz buzz asckk asckk bzzt fffffiiiirrrr bzzt sssssssttttttt kackle kackle pppppppooooossssss asckk asckk ssssstttttttttt
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Sure they do............
;) for the Humour-impaired
I mean when Voyager flies past us, it goes 'Voooooooom' and all those space battles, X-wings and Tie-Fighters going 'zapzap' 'powie' 'kersnuffle' (well ok, maybe not 'kersnuffle')
And the explosions, planets and ships going 'bang' (but very loudy)
I mean if there wer no sound in space, the gigantic spaceship would go past going ' ' (loudly), release the hoardes of smaller ships, which would go ' ' (more hight pitched), shoot each other with ' ' and ' ' and ' ' (well maybe not ' ') and finally the plane would explode with a spectacular ' '
Are you telling me Hollywood is wrong and the boring guy with glasses at school was correct all along?
I think I'll cry
Troc
PS
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
This is too bad. Shit happens I guess.
After the Polar Lander was lost, I recall NASA saying they were going to use the orbiter to try to get images of the landing site to see if there was any sign of the lander. Were there any images released?
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
from http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html
16 February 2000: Mars Polar Lander Failure Uncovered? According to someone@jpl.nasa.gov: "A potential problem with the MPL descent sequence may have been located. During footpad deployment for the MPL, tests indicate that the touchdown sensors may have thought that the spacecraft had landed due to the force of landing gear deployment. If this occurred, the spacecraft would have separated from its parachute and descended normally to an altitude of forty meters. When the radar indicated this altitude, the spacecraft was programmed to descend at constant velocity until it touched down. But if the footpad sensors indicated a touchdown, the spacecraft would have shut off its descent engines at 40 meters altitude, dooming the mission."
In the 'heyday' of Pioneer, Voysger (even the Galileo and Cassini projects) the projects were getting more expensive and 'bloated' (according to the Congressional budgets) This money wasn't just being thrown away, but spent on backups, backups, and more backups and a lot of testing. (As a matter of fact, an "extra" spacecraft was often built to work out the bugs...)
The result: even through seeming distaster, these spacecraft did some amazing things:
- Voyager 2 was able to continue the "grand tour" of the solar system even though its systems were *pummeled* by particles in Saturn's rings. (There was a project that measured the density by 'listening' for spacecraft collisions on the plasma wave antenna)
- Galileo returned a huge amount of data even though the primary antenna was crippled.
I guess my point is that cranking out cheaper spacecraft in a hurry is not the best way to go about things. (Gee... sounds like software development) It would seem prudent to possibly have fewer missions if the extra time and budget to devote to testing and double-checking. (Granted, landing a spacecraft on another planet *is* a tricky thing, but hey, the Viking series seemed to do pretty well..)The result? We're more ignorant about Mars -now-, than we were when the Viking probes landed.
America has a simple choice, IMHO. It can spend vast sums of money on weapons, most of which are likely to be banned by International treaties before they are ever deployed. OR it can spend that same cash on raising educational standards, improving the conditions of those on welfare, AND enhancing space technology.
"But what about potential invaders?" bleat the Hawks.
If your technology is advanced enough, there -are- no "potential" invaders. There is no threat so great that a sufficiently enlightened civilisation cannot build a non-offensive defence.
By bleeding NASA dry, and by NASA opting to be top-heavy, America has no central resource for space R&D. Indeed, it has no resources for space R&D at all. All the high-tech eggs are in that one basket. The Polar Lander is proof that Congress prefers scrambled.
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)
It is unfortunate. NASA keeps screwing up, and people are losing any interest in a space progrem. Personally, I think it is very important to continue our exploration of space... but I do not think that a private company would be able to generate the funding necesary to do the things that really need to be done. That money most likely needs to come from the tax-payers. Seriously, what mega corporation out there really cares if we are able to put a man on Mars? Yet I think it is in all our best interests that we do just that.
The only real chance to individually fund it is to find large individual benefactors... like say Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. But giving money for a space program is not the most popular thing right now... given the general public outlook on it.
I saw the result of the measurements done by the Dutch radioastronomers , that even made it to CNN and the campus newspaper (in Dutch ;-) , and, as predicted, there was no signal there. Just a stripe in a nearby frequency that could be anything...
I did not see the following ones, where they would try to point to another spot on the sky and check for the same signal again, and try to prove its Earthly origin ...
You can see the radiotelescope here , the staff, and the equipment, but the data analysis was done afterwards at the university. They managed to produce some extremely cool plots but no traces of the lander. :-(
Be happy NASA did that work, or you wouldn't have low orbits possible from aircraft.
Also, NASA would love to forget about this low earth orbit crap. Carl Sagan and others have been haranguing it for years to do some Real Work. Funding has been cut, so they have been required to change to the "faster, better, cheaper" model. It's a good idea; some $200 million probes will be lost. But no $5 billion probes are lost.
The Soviets beat the US into orbit, were damn close for the moon, yet none of their Mars probes survived. That NASA has been successful shows a great deal of technichal excellence.
The greatest hope for space exploration is China. They have a big space program, which will, hopefully, scare the Americans into spending more on space to beat the "Communists", like they did against the Soviet Union.
Sorry, but the movie was pretty lame. One of my favorite books ever.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Not used to gaving guerillas or unfriendly neighbors? This deserves to be marked up for humour. England has been in a state of virtual war for 2/3rds of my life. My home city was almost destroyed by the largest conventional bomb since World War 2. When I've walked down the streets, I see bomb-proof waste bins, designed to contain explosions.
I have grown up around armed conflict. I've been to schools, where lessons were interrupted by reports of who had just sunk which ship. The beaches I used to go to had "Danger, Sea Mines!" signs along the coast.
I've found unexploded bombs, whilst metal detecting. My landlord, when I was at University, was a tail-gunner for The Dambusters. A great uncle was one of those involved in The Great Escape. I have probably more direct experience with armed conflict than the majority of non-military Americans. And, frankly, it sucks.
There's nothing glorious about war. War IS hell, and hell deserves to be condemned for what it is.
As for the Americans pulling the Europeans out of the fire - there would BE no America if England hadn't single-handedly defeated the entire Luftwaffe, WITHOUT help from the oh so mighty US of A.
I'd gladly go to South Korea, if I'd the budget to build effective ECM systems, missile and projectile interception systems, and a nice, high-speed, high-efficiency vehicle. Sod the Korean threat! Given that, there's not a damn thing anyone on either side of that purile war could do.
Better still, I'd gladly build a rocket capable of carrying me, life-support systems, and PURELY defensive systems and fly to the moon or Mars. For the same reason that England remains the ONLY country never to have been invaded, for over 1,000 years (and even then, it was by invitation), not a single military power on Earth would be capable of shifting any homestead I chose to make there.
You can spend your money on progress, OR destruction, but NOT both. The military nations choose destruction, and as you can see, their technology is floundering and they are all but dead, socially.
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)
The Harrier can't outfly a MiG, true, but it CAN out-manoever it. You can't hit what you can't see.
Of course, you don't really need aircraft to deal with aircraft. Most modern aircraft have very sophisticated and therefore sensitive electronics. Confuse the computers, arc the switches with a high EMP, and watch the aircraft blow themselves up.
As for infantry weaponry, armies march on their stomachs (Napoleon). Take out the supply lines, and the toughest army in the world will rapidly disintegrate. Sure, some soldiers know which bugs to eat, but if you're using more calories than you're gaining, you're going to fall over, eventually. It's not an IF, merely a WHEN. If timing is tight, throw in some artificial snow, or drop firecrackers from a glider. Adrenaline rushes and cold both consume a massive amount of energy. Energy they're not replacing.
So far, I seem to have dealt with most of the Russian threat with a radio dish, a generator, a few Molotov Cocktails, and some bog-standard psychology. To produce the same effect, with much higher death rates, America needs to spend several trillion dollars, plus an unknown (but probably comparable) amount in it's black budget. Money it -COULD- be spending on creating a healthier, more enlightened civilisation.
There's nothing wrong in protecting yourself from aggression, but when that involves beating others to a pulp IN CASE they think about doing anything, it's not the others who are the aggressors.
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)
One failure scenario involves the leg deployment: the recoil might trigger the landing sensors on the footpads, so a little flag is set saying "Ground detected". Now, much later, when the parachute is cut away, the computer checks that flag which has not been cleared due to a software error. And it says, "Oh, hey, I'm on the ground! Time to turn off the rockets." Projected impact speed on the ground is over 80 mph. SPLAT.
Another interesting scenario: there was talk of searching for the lander parachute using the Surveyor spacecraft, so NASA asked Lockheed Martin, "Where did you say the parachute would fall again?" Lockheed Martin redid the calculations and it came out that the parachute could very well be draped over the poor lander. Imagine the lander - "Help, help, I'm trapped in a parachute." Yes, these are the same guys who screwed up the units in the previous orbiter fiasco.
And there are many many many other failure scenarios, too depressing to enumerate further: in summary, too little money, too little testing, and not enough redundancy means that not only was this mission likely to fail, it is unlikely we'll even know why it failed. Faster, better, cheaper - bah!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Those guys looked good because they launched a lot of birds, and eventually succeeded. If we sent ten probes to Mars over a short period, some would work and some wouldn't, and we'd get data back. Look at Iridium - dozens of launches, a few failures, operational on schedule. (The service isn't selling well, but it works as designed.)
> "Help, help, I'm trapped under a parachute." The Russian Venera program has a few amusing snafus of its own. After building a probe strong enough to survive the Venusian atmosphere (extreme heat, pressure and sulphuric acid rain), they successfully landed it on the surface. Unfortunately they didn't get any pictures because the lens cap had melted and stuck on! A subsequent mission did get the pictures, but when the arm designed to place a sensor on the surface to measure its properties was deployed, it landed (you guessed it) on the ejected lens cap...
the pioneer probes are not as far from earth as the voyager 1 probe, below are the statistic from the voyager and pioneer probes Voyager 1 top stat. Voyager 2 Distance from the Sun (Km) 11,445,000,000 8,987,000,000 Distance from the Sun (Mi) 7,111,000,000 5,584,000,000 Distance from the Earth (Km) 11,499,000,000 9,106,000,000 Distance from the Earth (Mi) 7,145,000,000 5,658,000,000 Total Distance Traveled Since Launch (Km) 13,251,000,000 12,465,000,000 Pioneer 10 Distance from Sun (1 February 2000): 74.46 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.24 km/sec (27,380 mph) Distance from Earth: 11.07 billion kilometers (6.879 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 20 hours 30 minutes Pioneer 11 Launched on 5 April 1973, Pioneer 11 followed its sister ship to Jupiter (1974), made the first direct observations of Saturn (1979) and studied energetic particles in the outer heliosphere. The Pioneer 11 Mission ended on 30 September 1995, when the last transmission from the spacecraft was received. Its electrical power source exhausted, the spacecraft could no longer operate any of its scientific instruments, nor point its antenna toward Earth. The spacecraft is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle), Northwest of the constellation of Sagittarius. Pioneer 11 may pass near one of the stars in the constellation in about 4 million years. So you see the distance isn't the reason we can't track them, Pioneer 11 is "broken" and we still actively track Pioneer 10, and it is looking for the heliopause as well the voyagers. And yes I totally agree with you about finding the heliopause that will be the definitive answer in telling where the solar system ends. PS - the Pioneer info was updated on the first of feb this year, and the voyager stuff was updated on the fourth of this month. And all of this can be found at JPL's and Ames research centers web sites.
It is much easier to see this if you use light-waves instead. That is how they make light sabres!
Oh and there is also those special laser beams which travel at a detectable speed. Otherwise you would not be able to manouvre away from enemy fire and that would be very unfair (and forbidden in the space-geneva-convention)
PS I did not wear glasses, so I was probably cool.
All opinions are my own - until criticized