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NEAR Touches Down on Eros
Every once in a while NASA does something
amazing.
Today they took a probe that was just supposed to orbit
a rock the size of Manhattan,
guided it
down to the surface,
reoriented the dish, and sent back a hello from ground zero. The
NEAR Shoemaker mission site
and its
mirror
are a little busy at the moment, but
CNN's coverage
is good, with simulated video, and actual photos from two hundred million miles up. Some engineers, and the operators at
Johns Hopkins,
must be awfully proud right about now.
If you claim that a given probe is supposed to land on the target celestial body, and it crashes, then you look really dumb and everyone questions your ability.
But if you claim that you're trying to crash, and then you "manage" to land it perfectly, then suddenly everyone is impressed with your genuis...
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How many kids in schools and libraries are going to miss out on this story because of porn filters blocking on the word "Eros".
Lucky Starr, as in a series of stories by Paul French (aka Isaac Asimov). See http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/Asimov/Series.html
for summaries.
I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well.
Actually, the moon's almost completely out of the Earth's gravity well. The main energy cost for exporting lunar material is getting the material out of the _moon's_ gravity well, and this is pretty low (especially since lunar vacuum lets you build mass drivers and the like easily).
It would be quite difficult to ship material from most asteriods (the ones in the belt) to Earth's location, because the great difference in GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy) from their different orbital radii about the _sun_. It could certainly be done; it's just probably more of a pain than using lunar material.
For supplying Earth's surface, we're always better mining material from the crust. No expensive shuffling about required at all.
Earth orbit is probably best supplied from the moon, though it'll be easier to ship stuff to higher orbits than lower (again, due to GPE).
Still, it's nice to have direct confirmation that some asteroids in the neighbourhood are made of mineable materials. This will make it much easier to build bases on _them_ (or to transform them into gaggles of space stations).
I think you're confusing missions. IIRC, the Clementine lunar mission ended a few years ago with the spacecraft slamming into the surface in order to kick up dust, so that we could do a water composition analysis from Earth. I seem to recall that, even with hundreds of telescopes looking for it, we couldn't spot the plume.
But a mission of this type would be highly improbable on Eros. Although it's a big asteroid, it's still just a small speck of light to Earth based telescopes. I don't think there's a telescope yet built that would have enough aperture to pick up a plume on its surface.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The term Near Earth Astroid does not mean they will impact Earth, but that the possibility is there since they come so close. In space you've got N bodies influencing eachother gravitationally. Eros orbit may appear stable, but all it would need is a random erratic body to pull it into a deadly course.
Go back and read the context in which I was making my statement. In other words, read the whole thread.
I was not giving a definition of Near Earth, I was merely stating that his use of the term "stable" was wrong. In space, nothing is always stable and 100% predictable, especially when the object is small, like Eros, and has an oblong orbit. The definition does not mean that the orbit is INSIDE the Earths, its simply that its orbit INTERSECTS the Earth's plane.
So not only are you wrong with your definition, but you also didn't bother to read the entire thread.
Yes kudos... Now can anyone tell me what the point was, besides taking pics on the way down? Does it serve any purpose on the surface of the asteroid?
Well... we could. Now the Chinese will.
viadd wrote:
... which may have at last gone quiet ... were kept alive because they could still do science just by reporting their position.) Last year a team studied Galileo's options, based on a collision with Jupiter or one of her four major satellites, with consideration of UN Outer Space Treaty prohibitions against accidental transfer of Earth organisms to those bodies. So far, though, they apparently haven't decided what to do.
NEAR is a 'faster better cheaper' mission. The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade. NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid.
I fully agree with this. faster-better-cheaper means more missions for the bucks. (Now, if they'd only have a little more flexibility on the budget, we could keep Pluto-Kuiper Express.)
And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
This, however, isn't true. Indeed, they'd rather do an "orderly disposal" of a probe like Galileo than just shut it off, because at least a controlled disposal allows the opportunity for some science to be done. (The solar-system-exiting vehicles like Pioneer
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{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Or will NEAR be loved and cherished, like an ancient Bolo tank (cf. Keith Laumer)?
I wonder how safe the ISS will be from space junk. I know it's something NASA cares a lot about. I find it very humorous that the Cold War resources for tracking nuclear weapons now do a lot of space junk tracking.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
There could be buggers there. (Or should I be PC and say Formics?)
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Gallileo Jupiter orbiter dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere when it arrived in the Jupiter system a few years back.
Every time NASA gets the shuttle up and back down is an amazing feat. Every time it trains the collective eye further out or further in is an amazing feat. It absolutely astounds me that people dismiss most of what they do as commonplace. I remember on the 20th anniversary of the moon landing I actually sat down and thought about what that meant and just about lost it. Sadly, most people seem to have been unimpressed not two years after that fact.
I hope some of you guys on the NEAR project are reading this.. I want to give you all a big *HUGGY* for your awesome work. Space travel has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. Reading news like this makes me feel young again and fills me with hope for the future.. not mine, but humanity. Cheers and rawk on!
Speak truth to power.
If we can't find a bunch of movie stars to blow it up, maybe we can launch enough of them at it, at a high enough trajectory, that their impact can knock it back off course.
Hmmm Celebrity Assisted Rail-Gun.... interesting possibilities.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Or could someone use it as a Trans-Terra data-cache? :)
Sure latency will kill you, but I want to see the Feds/MPAA/RIAA try to raid THAT server.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Man, and think of the explosion the plasma (hot air) could produce ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
From the CNN Coverage:
Eros became only the fifth celestial body touched by a human spacecraft, following the Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
How did we touch Jupiter? Does atmospheric brakeing count or something?
You know some guy at nasa got to be shaking his head though....
"We try to land on Mars and ended up with the world's most expensive lawn darts.
We try to land a probe that was never suppost to land on a tiny rock and -poof- prefect landing."
AdFuel
They busted out their Apple II's and played Lunar Lander all weekend.
...and my parents thought that I was wasting time with it...
This is more or less true. But APL is operating under NASA supervision.
it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.This is false. APL has run several space missions previous to NEAR. My father worked on FUSE and is now doing MSX. I wouldn't doubt it if other research labs did as well.
It's easy to take shots at someone else's work, but it can be damned difficult to make a complex project succeed.
Kudos to the folks at Johns Hopkins and NASA for getting the job done.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The NEAR/Shoemaker gig was built and run out of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. I think NASA gets credit for not much more than funding this project.
illegitimii non ingravare
Here's a de-spagettified link to CNN's best of EROS picture gallery with little descriptions. Some of them are very cool.
Black holes are where god divided by zero
FYI: I went back, and viewed the video today (Tuesday). I'm now getting a 34Kb stream (far better quality). I guess that the 12KB stream was because of heavy demand for the video (better a slow stream than no stream at all).
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
As CNN says: Spacecraft may take off after landing on asteroid.
Course, what else could it do if it stayed there? Take repeated pictures of the same spot? Makes sense.
I say they pogo stick it around for a while...
NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?
Doh!
In a word, no:
Assume that Eros is a cylinder about a mile in diameter and 20 miles long. And made of rock (6g/cc). Multiply all that together, and I find that Eros weighs (roughly) 10^11 or so metric tons. Even if Eros weighed 1 metric ton, there is no chance that Eros would even notice....compared to a million years of solar wind and Jupiter perturbations, it is meaningless.
Telemetry operator: "Woohoo! It LANDED! It's even transmitting!"
Systems controller: "Great! So what do we do now?"
Boss-type guy: "Uhm... er... Well, we never really expected this to work, so... I guess we just go get drunk now"
Systems controller: "What, we can't do anything with it now? Then what the hell did we spend all weekend practicing for?"
Boss-type guy: "Well, it was a really good job guys, and everybody's really impressed, but we just don't have anything to do with it."
Systems controller: "I'll be damned if I'm going home now! We've gotta find something to do with this thing!"
Telemetry operator: "You know it still has a bit of fuel left."
(Telemetry and Systems look at each other)
Systems controller: "You don't think -"
Telemetry operator: "Well why not?"
Systems controller: "But it could never..."
Telemetry operator: "It was never designed to land in the first place, but we pulled that off, didn't we?"
Systems controller: "What the hell! Hey boss! We checked out the neighborhood, and it sucks. We're leaving."
Boss-type guy: "Huh? Leaving? What the hell are you talking about?"
Systems controller: "We decided that the view on the surface isn't half as cool as the one we had before, so we're going back to orbit."
Boss-type guy: "But there's no way to do that! The odds of making it back to orbit are less tha"
Systems controller, interrupting: "Never tell me the odds!"
Boss-type guy: "Good point. You guys have fun, I'll go call CNN."
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
The power source thing is a great idea, but it would be pretty hard to make it work on Earth. Any singularity kept around for long would accelerate at the good ol' 9.8 m/s^2, straight out of its containment. In microgravity, however, you could hold a small singularity in one place by feeding it from different directions if the matter you throw in is moving fast enough. Hawking radiation is mostly electrons and positrons, not directly gamma rays (the positrons usually end up as 511 keV gamma rays after meeting up with an electron, though). If you trap some of the positrons, along with any antiprotons you get, and feed the rest back into the singularity, you might be able to accumulate macroscopic quantities of antimatter after a long enough time. Unless singularities are particular about what particles they will emit, which is one thing that could be studied from nucleus-sized versions.
So we just need to build an orbiting accelerator capable of energies several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can get on Earth, and we might be able to make lots of antimatter. No problem, right?
I think we've strayed sufficiently far from the topic of the story, so I'll stop now.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Do not mistake "faster, lighter, cheaper" with poor engineering. The two are mutually exclusive. Any well engineered spacecraft should be able to fullfill some additional unknown criteria, despite it's cost.
Keeping
I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well. I can't wait for nano-robot-dispensing probes: just drop them on an asteroid and wait a few years while they sort the atoms into piles...
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Please don't use metric measurements in this discussion. It has a tendancy to confuse NASA people.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
FULL TEXT
NEAR stayed on the asteroid for a few hours, made breakfast and idle chit-chat. But after a while, he could tell that it was his time to go. Firing its reverse-thrusters, NEAR left the surface never to return. NASA engineers excitedly noted that the landing and take-off have prepared the asteroid for future landings.
full text
satellite pr0n!
... that you can double check.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
check this out http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/12/near.land ing.02/index.html
it seems that their not happy with their luck on 1% odds. JHUAPL is now considering firing up the thrusters and lifting off Eros. Pretty amazing stuff. Congrats to the team who worked on this!
To give you a perspective of the situation... Consider if you will this basketball representing the earth, this grape the asteroid, and this grain of salt the represents the probe... Landing the probe on the astroid would be like trying to land this salt grain on the grape without any roll from 20 miles away with an error margin as thick as this piece of paper.
And I'll give a free nose goblin to anyone who can figure out who's in charge. The orgchart reads like a hedge maze.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
george carlin fan....and your absolutely right. "near miss! bullsh*t! its a near hit!"
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
According to Fox News the NEAR was built under the 'faster, better, cheaper' philosophy. IMO, that philosophy doesn't mean that the craft are any less robust (generally, if a satellite payload survives launch, it's structurally sound enough to handle anything during spaceflight)... it just means that there are less 'bells and whistles' built in.
The computer on the NEAR runs VxWorks, from Wind River. VxWorks was also the first on another planet, controlling the Mars Pathfinder. And boy, isn't it cool that it worked?
. . . for signs of it blacking out. You never know when an insect-like race will suddenly decide to invade the solar system. What's the next step, building an orbiting schoolhouse for training soldiers?
For those of you arguing about microgravity: A tidbit from the video (I'm listening to /watching it, as I type this)
Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
For a craft that wasn't intended to land, or even survive for a prolonged period of time, this is incredible. It sort of makes you wonder about current NASA budget woes, though. If NASA is forced to switch to a "faster, lighter, cheaper" program, then opportunities like this will become more and more scarce. If the craft were only designed to handle the strict specs of the mission then it would be impossible for impromptu experimentation to take place. The cheap probes and landers would not be as likely to cope with a new situation should it appear. What if a once in a life time event were to occur? With cheaper probes, would it be lost to the scientific community?
Pax Digitalia
But if you think this was great, just wait till you see what other missions JHUAPL has in store.
A number of these are excellent examples of the great, focussed science experiments that can be done under the faster-better-cheaper paradigm, and they're even competing for slots in the slightly more expensive Mid-Explorer program.
*It should be noted in fairness that NEAR itself had a glitch; in December 1998 they failed to make their planned orbit insertion, and had to circle the sun 14 months before another approach could be made. (At that time I'm sure many
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
they had to be smoking something to come up with:
"Hey man, let's land this thing!"
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I wonder if people with censorware will be able to see them.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
10. Approach one stuck in the event horizon.
9. "Rocket Jump" from a near by Quake3 map.
8. Use the force to move the Asteroid under your feet.
7. Surf to "http://www.howtolandanastroid.com" and click "final stages, turn or burn"
6. Wait till one hits the earth and just jump on top of it.
5. Tuck and roll.
4. Pray that the Asteroid's gravity plane actually exists.
3. Go out to sea and find some oil workers... they have a strange 6th sense about Asteroids.
2. Review page 456b of the Star Command Manual.
1. Think, "There is no asteroid."
It's a joint operation. Lots of other folks involved, too. See their mission page.
In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.
How are you defining "deep space craft"? The Soviets sent missions to Mars and Venus (and the Comet Halley).
Awesome job! I wonder -- even though the satellite is officially "not designed to land", the engineers involved kept it in the back of their minds while designing and made tiny adjustments to make it at least possible. The guys at JPL did this for the Voyager missions, making the "grand tour" possible even though Congress initially only gave the go-ahead for a Jupiter/Saturn tour.
Every once in a while, NASA does something amazing.
Amazing step 1: land non-lander on Eros
Amazing step 2: use same non-lander to carve Eros into giant erotic sculpture.
Amazing result 1: Public interest in space increases by 3000%, as do NASA's budget and high-power telescope sales.
Amazing result 2: New "child safe" digital telescopes that won't point at Eros (or Venus, after the finish that project).
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There are some signs of bad science on the CNN site though. I don't believe Eros is in danger of hitting the earth because it has a stable orbit. I hate it when the news over-exagerates dangers, such as when the researcher from the RHIC said there is a small possibility of a black hole being created. Because of that, everyone was sure a giant movie-like black hole would be created at Brookhaven. Next, we'll be hearing that the NEAR landing might have pushed the rock off course, allowing it to hit the earth and destroy everything.
Just hope we can find a bunch of movie stars to quickly blow it up!
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Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Anyone who can land that satellite that well with that kind of lag, I want on my team.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples