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Mars Odyssey begins
Soft writes: "NASA's latest Mars probe has had a good launch on the first try. Stories at SpaceflightNow,
CNN, and the BBC. The Delta rocket's onboard camera gave impressive pictures of the ascent..." Read the CNN story for an awesome picture from the nose of the rocket looking back. I want a print of that.
I remember 4 years ago they used to put downloadable movies showing the complete launch on the web. One was a 320x240 which cut between the onboard camera and the ground. Nowadays internet hosting budgets and staffs have been cut so far it's like we've stepped back 30 years.
Put me and Heidi Klum in there - I'll keep at least me entertained for a year :)
Is there a problem with putting the capsule on a shuttle and just sending a shuttle to Mars? It'll give more room and storage for a landing device. I suppose it'd take more fuel for the needed thrust to head out and leave Mars.
We need a proper offworld colony. Not this endless succession of rock-counting toys.
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There is a project to do just that: put one or more telecommuncations satellites in orbit around Mars, to provide 24-hour comms access from any part of the Martian surface. The Mars Telecom Network, it's called: more details here.
This probe is not going to land on the planet, but will stay in interplanetary territory. Join me in hoping this mission goes better, or our relations with Mars could seriously deteriorate.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
NASA launched a Space Odyssey. The name is a nice tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, whether intentional or not.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
This gives me another idea: mini black boxes, with beacons, for the landing craft that could survive even the total disingration of the probe itself. At least thay way we could work out where the probe crashed - this would be possible since there is still the global suveyor orbiting Mars.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Anyone with pointers to camera system specs/downlink specs? Who made this, why did they add the cameras? What OS was it all running?
In light of the recent reports that the folks on Alpha have spent tons of time trying to get Microsoft Outlook to work right, would be neat to find out what powered something that looked as good as this.
Seems we have no shortage of Katz apprentices...
You seem to forget, however, that part of the success of the Apollo program was due to abandoning old methodologies.
I am talking about the "all-up" Saturn V testing program, which was a departure from previous multistage rockets which were all tested stage-by-stage. The first Saturn V flew with all 3 stages firing for the first time. This concept scared the piss out of lots of people, and it was a big gamble.
But it worked, and you know what, there would have been no way we'd have gotten to the Moon by 1969 (or ever, judging by the tenacity of the public's acceptance of Apollo) without that integrated testing.
And did you forget that Pathfinder worked, although it has a completely insane landing strategy?
Things break. The Voyager 2 spacecraft was about one flaky capacitor away from total loss of communication with the Earth, but JPL wrangled with it until it worked. Give the guys some credit.
Back to the future, indeed. I remember a presentation about how NASA was going to be "better, cheaper". I guess the two Mars crashes have been a tough reality check...
Want to know why there are now black boxes/web cams? These guys spend MEGA bucks trimming weight, so that they can even launch the darned thing. If they have a kilo or two of "spare" weight "budget", they'll tack on another experiment! One of the hard parts in satelite design is figuring out what experiments go, and which get cut. Picture telling some researcher somewhere that has been working for 20 years on a theory, "Sorry, we don't have the 2 lbs for your instrament"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
When looking back at the recent phase of NASA's better cheaper faster program that has now ended with this much more carefully managed expedition, I can't help but wonder if the cultural ramifications of the "new economy" were far more widespread than just the dot.com hysteria.
Perhaps NASA also got caught up in the mindset that great things were possible by abandoning the careful ways of the previous space program. At the time this new methodology seemed to make sense to me as well. Perhaps all of the care and planning that had previously made our space program so successful was overly redundant, and we could do better by cutting corners and launching more missions, particularly when no human lives were at stake.
But now that we are on the downside of the bubble, we're all shaking our heads and asking what we were thinking? Haste apparently still makes waste. What gave us the idea that we could abandon our ways of old and expect things to just work better?
Note, I'm not criticizing NASA. Variety is the spice of life, and the failure of the quick and dirty approach will be a valuable lesson in the history books. And of course, noone was killed in the process.
It just strikes me as too much of a coincidence that this new economy fad and NASA's revolution in thought occurred at about the same time. So perhaps the ramifications of our recent economic mania were much deeper than we had thought, extending into our culture in a way that affected the space program as well.
Just a thought, flame at will.
I give NASA all kinds of credit. I have nothing but respect for the things they have done. You've misread me apparently.
It was just an idea to bounce off you guys, I didn't expect a kind of Spanish...
If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me.
Perhaps this is how NASA can focus on profitibiliy instead of relying upon their slowly withering venture capitol. It's high-time that they start paying attention to their bottom line, and not continue to operate at a loss every quarter. I mean, can our future really bear the brunt of losing nasa.gov the way that we've lost boo.com, pets.com, and etoys.com
NASA - I beg of you, please - for the children... allow us to purchase your pretty space pictures and other memoralbilia so that you may stay in business for another age to appreciate.
- passion
Let's just hope they got their conversions from SI to metric right.
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an interesting set of specs: being a spaceship, it must be extremely lightweight, yet able to withstand a hundred atmospheres of pressure at 400 degrees Centigrade, passing through sulphuric acid mist to get there. Even more interesting: a couple of spaceships actually managed to land on Venus and send a few pictures from the surface.
Unfortunately, the photo Michael likes so much is among a bunch that are only available at low resolution here at the Mars Odyssey Website. More important scientific photos and artist renderings are frequently available in high-quality tiff format at places like this. I don't know if they had a high enough resolution camera to take the sort of pictures needed for reprint.
If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me (thanks for the idea, Michael).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I mean, how many times do you have to send a packet or something before you figure out that the problem is at the other end?
We do not want to end up like that engineer in the old joke about the engineer at the army firing range, however.
Very quickly, he was at target partice, and kept missing the target. The DI chewed him out for missing the target. Engineer puts his finger in the barrel of the gun, pulls the trigger, blowing off the finger tip. And so he promptly informs the DI that the problem must be at the other end.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
except for potential flybyes, none most likely.
After all, for both you would need something that could sustain extended times on the inside of a blast furnace.
and in the case of Venus a blast furnace whose primary atmospheric component is sulphuric acid, or some such thing.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I am sure there is a joke in here someplace, with the climate of Venus, etc. Probably along the line of "Love is Hell", or some such thing.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From the Lab that prepared the craft here's the story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/odysseypostl aunch.html
I've always had this little idea... You know from movies and stuff when the little missions and surveying stuff goes to the farside of mars and we lose communication?
:)
Well, If they send a few satallites to Mars equipped with communication hardware along with surveying stuff, etc- we would be able to communicate with anything there almost. And if there was multiple satallites doing certain tasks they could get the job done much quicker.
I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it
I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.
Just wanted to clarify that the cameras were not on the tip of the rocket, they(2 of them) were attached to the second stage. One was looking up, and one was looking down, the idea being that you can see the 3rd stage break off and second light up and also the second break off and possibly the first ignite as long as it stayed in view of the falling camera long enough. Watched the launch on NASA TV this morning on my dish. Oh and on another note, I thought I'd point out that in the ground control room for the oddessy mission there's a little green inflatable man up in the corner you could see on the camera(the control room for the mission, not the launch control room.) --
Did you notice how they lost video signal at the end of this video?
i n_qt.html
;)
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/odyssey/010407onsp
Bigger, Better, Cheaper eh?
You can watch NASA TV over the internet here. (The nice videos you saw on the news sites are taken from NASA TV - it's pretty interesting).
Our probes were spy satellites, sent to peep on the MSA forces and were shot down for that reason. The Pathfinder was spared because it landed on an unpopulated area (the desert of Gniiiijks's's-daaasd) and because that way it wouldn't stir up public suspicion.
Our government's double agents at the NASA (horribly infiltrated by Marzies) have managed to provide the UN and key human governments with vital information as to the Mars Federation purposes: they intend to
It's our duty to come up with an open source candy bar that doesn't violate the Mars patents ASAP, or switch to Snickers or Three Musketeers (we can't use Milky Way, that one's taken, too).
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Death to Vermin.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Apparently no one at NASA is superstitious, good on them. Odyssey was the name of the Apollo XIII command module, for the NASA-uninitiated. (The LEM was Aquarius). Apollo XIII's motto was "Ex Luna, Scientia"... can anyone tell me if the Mars mission has a latin motto? =P
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Before we rush into this business of serious space travel, maybe we should ask ourselves: is this exploration, or exploitation?
It seems like where ever Man goes, he makes a mess of his new environment. Perhaps it's just our great human arrogance, which we all posess, that we think that we can claim God's creations as our own. In this case, it appears that NASA is desperate to claim some sort of success after its string of startling failures over the last decade. Always good to show some kind of "scientific advancement" or benefit when Congress comes around to budget time. Meanwhile our nation's children are sorely lacking in education... why not spend these billions and billions to perhaps stop kids from smoking, drinking, or trying marijuana?
If even one teen pregnancy could be prevented by diverting such ridiculous sums of money, I think we would all be better off for it.
"If the Lord had meant for us to fly, He'd have given us wings with which to soar...." William, 14:35