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Putting the Odyssey Spacecraft in Martian Orbit

Posted by timothy on from the go-fast-turn-left dept.

FortKnox writes: "There is an interesting article about NASA attempting to place the Odyssey Spacecraft in Martian Orbit on Oct 23rd. Looks like it is a tough maneuver. Maybe they should just say the trip to Mars was the mission, and putting it in orbit is a "bonus mission" like they did with Deep Space 1. Seems they do a better job if it isn't a criteria of the actual mission ;-)"

1 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't sound easy... by ndrw · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Geez, I'd hate to be one of the guys in the control room on this one. With a) variably dense atmosphere, and b) major guesswork on how the heat will affect the spacecraft, I wouldn't be all that surprised if c) the ship failed! Also, can you imagine how difficult it is to "think ahead" and predict what's going on when the data you're looking at has taken a few minutes to get here from Mars? I guess that's why people consider rocket science difficult.

    I didn't see any real mention of the martian winds in this article, don't they get up to hundreds of miles per hour in the upper atmosphere? Couldn't that seriously screw up an aerobraking attempt? Or is that just a drop in the bucket compared to the speed of the spacecraft (which I didn't see in the article, but can probably be found on NASA's site - too bad I'm lazy)?

    This definitely gives pause when considering the difficulty of landing manned craft on the surface. With so many variables, you're almost guaranteed that something is going to go wrong. I'd hazard a guess that contingency planning is high on NASA's list right now!

    Insert funny tagline here.