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.

Comments

New job for all those SETI screensavers...

[maroberts]

..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. :=)

Re:New job for all those SETI screensavers...

[Mindwarp]

Mainly because, due to budget cuts, NASA couldn't afford the roaming charges from Mars.

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Should we give them a break?

[Sway]

I always have mixed feelings when a NASA project goes awry. Sure the project cost millions of dollars and all it did was teach us that Polar Landers don't bounce well. All I know is I couldn't even begin to pretend to dream about sending something to another planet. First of all, I have the worst sense of direction. I'd get lost in a tunnel. Some of you may work on systems just as complex, but to me, every NASA stunt that DOES work is magical. I couldn't get enough of the Mars Pathfinder, and I'm not even into astronomy or planet science or whatever that field would be.

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

Re:Should we give them a break?

[cowscows]

I think nasa takes way too much heat from all sides. First off, they've got a really difficult job. The fact that they're pretty much the only organization doing the stuff that they're doing testifies that it's a bit more than just a hobby. They're constantly being blasted for wasting money, even when they're suffering constant budget cuts. And they try and fight these issues with their "Better, Cheaper, Faster" policy, and they're getting their asses kicked over that with words like incompetent, and careless.

I'd just like to point out, if you watch some videos from around the beginning of the space race, back when space exploration and rocketry had a far larger budget, you'll see rockets and stuff blow up. Lots of them. Watch a special on it on the History channel or something. Half the damn things blew up before they even left the ground. Back then people realized that sending stuff into orbit isn't all that easy, and throwing more minds and resources at the problem works better than cutting funding and whining.

I think a problem is that with things the space shuttle program being very sucessful (with a couple exceptions of course), people have unfair expectations for NASA. Nobody cares about shuttle flights anymore, they haveta pull pr stunts just to get attention for doing anything right. When you percieve something as a routine, you'll come down on someone a lot harder for screwing up. But people need to realize, no matter how routine a manned shuttle mission is, it's completely different than sending stuff to mars, and then having it work completely on its own.

I pity NASA...brilliant people choking on red tape thrown at them by people who understand so little.

Probable failure scenario

[coreman]

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."

Cheaper, Faster... Better?

[Orville]

This type of thing is becoming a little too typcial. NASA has been forced to do "less with more" and have tried to push a lot of spacecraft projects out the door in a hurry to get the PR gains, but seems to take an awful lot on shortcuts.

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..)

Re:Probable failure scenario - more info

[pq]

Since one of the instrument team leaders who works down the corridor has been tearing his hair out over this, I thought I'd put in a clarification:

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!

Why NASA used to work better

[Animats]

The good years for NASA were back when they had all those experienced aircraft designers from the '40s and '50s available, people with a half dozen plane designs behind them. And they had the Nazis: Von Braun, Dornberger, the whole Peedemunde crowd, with thousands of launches behind them. All the real progress in space hardware came from the days when they had both. The Shuttle, remember, was designed in the 1960s.

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.)