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Odyssey Arriving at Mars Tonight
moloader writes: "Odyssey will arrive at Mars on October 24, 2001, 0230 Universal Time (October 23, 7:30pm PDT/ 10:30pm EDT). As it nears its closest point to the planet over the northern hemisphere, the spacecraft will fire its 640-newton main engine for approximately 19.7 minutes to allow itself to be captured into an elliptical, or looping, orbit about 20 hours long. Go Mars!"
I still think it is amazing that they can use a spectrometer from orbit to tell what elements are on the surface of a planet....
I bet Homeros didn't expect his Odysseus dude to go that far..
Now here's the ultimate sequel!
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
Should be enough for anybody
Best Slashdot Co
... to calculate the point where to fire the engine :-)
300,000,000 miles is 480,000,000 Km; let's hope they got it right this time :)
"As it nears its closest point to the planet over the northern hemisphere, the spacecraft will fire its 640-newton main engine for approximately 19.7 minutes to allow itself to be captured into an elliptical, or looping, orbit about 20 hours long."
Or, it will fire its 64.0-newton main engine for approximately 197 minutes to allow itself to slam into the surface at about 20x the speed of sound.
Decimals sure can be a bitch.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
Let's hope they set their "universal clock" right... Look for a short, bright light in the sky... :)
The Giant Dust Storm currently swirling around could make for some interesting study, anyways.
on the mars section of the site : If you want to be a real engineer, set your hands to work on paper models of: Pathfinder Mars Global Surveyor (pdf), and 2001 Mars Odyssey Color or Black-and-White (pdfs) spacecraft.
with these kinds of drafting techniques...
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
We will know more. That's how.
Knowledge is the only thing that truly separates us from barbarism and animals.
Seriously, I hope the mission goes as planned, and doesn't circum to the problems that haved dogged missions to Mars in the past!
Tony
an elliptical, or looping, orbit
All stable orbits are looping. Elliptical just means that it isn't always a uniform distance from the origin of the orbit, in this case, Mars.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The real goal is to have the orbiter revolve around the planet every two hours. The rockets will slow the orbiter down to a 20 hour orbit - then, over a period of months, the orbiter will ease into a two hour orbit - thanks to aerobraking.
If all works well, that's what'll make this mission a success - the aerobraking technique means significantly lower fuel requirements, which makes for a lighter and thus less expensive mission.
Let's hope everything works right this time!
By flying all these spacecraft into Mars, we may be destroying their ecosystem, and future generations of Nartian aliens may well have an issue with us violating their airspace, and they may well retaliate, or at least prosecute. Perhaps we should ask before sending these probes
They are still the the only organization on Earth to have place man on the moon. They are the only organization that's consistently flying commercial payloads to the orbit.
The "metric mishap" was due to a sub-contractors.
I wonder how the global dust storm on Mars is going to effect the Odyssey's gamma ray spectrometer and other systems. It'd be an aweful pitty to go all that way just to find out you've got an obstructed view :\
I want to know about LIFE !!!
Land a fscking probe there and tell me if there's life or not.
Damn it, man. US send a bunch of probes to mars in the 70's, with computers 1000 less powerfull than a PS2. why we can't do it again now ???
What ? Me, worry ?
Even Arnold knows that when you go to Mars.. you are supposed to be staying .. "TWO WEEKS".
Learning where the water is is a necessary prerequisite to finding what life may still exist. If there is life still there, it will be close to water. Water is easier to find that scant traces of life. Therefore, find the H2O, and you actually have a chance of finding something else.
NASA sent only two probes to Mars in the 70's, Viking 1 & 2. It has firm plans to send at least one probe every two years until at least the end of the decade. Considering the budget they operate within, I think they're doing a damn good job.
"What happened?"
"You used miles. It's kilometers you idiot!"
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Since space radiation presents an extreme hazard to crews of interplanetary missions, the experiment will attempt to predict anticipated radiation doses that would be experienced by future astronauts and help determine possible effects of Martian radiation on human
You have to give NASA credit for thinking far ahead. I'm not that optimistic about space exploration. We need some major breaktroughs in order to get further away from the moon.
First theres the problem with the propulsion system: we're simply not fast enough in our spaceships. In order to get anywhere we need to approach the speed of light or even exceed it (or better yet, make the whole thing about space/time irrelevant, but that is sci-fi for the time being)
Second humans are really not meant to be put in space. We need to adapt, and we need to adapt in a serious way. Most of our body is made up of this little molecule H2O, and we need lots of it to survive. Water is not easy to get in space! Food is another problem. Another is that the human bonestructure degenerates in space (it wouldn't be smart spending billions on spaceexploration just to make astronauts land on mars realizing that they have become crippled in the meantime. We can minimize the effect of zero gravity but the problem remains.
I dream of space too (wonder if all people does in a way). Just can't see how we're going to get there. What bothers me the most are that I don't find much evidence either, of breakthrough technologies that will make humans able to explore space by them self in my lifetime. Pitty really, it's just not the same wathing a robot land somewhere doing the exploration for us! (well maybe for the guy controlling the robot
Thomas S. Iversen
too bad, it missed Mars and soon arrives at Pluto as we can see here... how could that happen? Dont they look at their own web pages?
God. If they're going to place people in front of the media, they should at least teach them how to speak properly. All four guys spoke with a strained geek voice that was agony to listen to.
Are you cheering on the planet? If Odyssey and Mars were to collide, I'd put my money on the planet too. Or maybe that's a vacation slogan?
Ah, I remember the long nights of SimEarth, working to terraform Mars into a habitable environment with carbon dioxide and water vapor generators... then getting bored and flinging a couple of ice comets at it -- accompanied by the terrible Sound Blaster MIDI sound FX -- and then finally overdoing it and creating a planetwide ocean. I wonder what approach NASA is planning to take?
Too bad that game didn't have an option to make sentient rocks...
The martians may shoot it down, they get pissed when we enter there air space.
High Res Spectrometers
This baby has two spectrometers, one in infrared for working out the mineral composition of the surface to a resolution of 100 metres, and one in gamma rays, for working out how much hydrogen there is near the surface, and consequently how much rocket fuel they can make in different places if/when they land.
Comms satellite It acts as a relay between the surface and the Earth, so any new probes (like the twin rovers due to take off next year) wont have to carry big dishes and radios.
All this and more on the website.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
I heard on CNN today that our ground troups over in Afghanastan have surrounded Osama Bin Laden within a 20 mile by 20 mile area. Unfortunately it's impossible to seal the area completely so escape would be possible.
... see what a pussy he really is... all chained up in hand and leg cuffs... wearing a bright orange jump suit. If they ever do put in him in jail, he's going to be raped in the ass and tortured to death. Like Jeffrey Dahlmer.
Afghanastan is about 650,000 sq. kilometers, which is slightly larger than the state of Texas. So the country really isn't all that big.
I hope they capture him alive and bring him back to the United States for trial so all Americans can sit and watch his ugly mug on T.V. day after day
And not 640 pounds-force?
wouldn't it be fun, just for the fun, to have a little Linux-box serving a webcam on mars? complete with an ip-number and http-server and all.
that would be pretty cool
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
The Dust Storm which can dramatically change the height and density of the atmosphere, are a particular concern during aerobraking.
A great article on the whole procedure is at this link.
Krispy Cream is people
Well, a realplay video of the conference is available here.
don't forget to visit other NASA sites too.
o c_5_24_01/face/index.html
specially the mars global surveior's one, with cool hi-res pics of the "martian face". the link is here:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/m
What ? Me, worry ?
Don't forget about the infamous Martian Defence Force. These guys are sure be up for some more target practice.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Interesting. Pulling predictions from the air, now. IR will get a glimpse of the mineral content of the clouds, and clear areas can be determined from visible images. Gamma and neutron will still be able to see the elements on and below the surface. We shall see what they will see.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
LOL, actually it was Taco himself. When he wrote the infamous First Post Script. But that aside, it would have to be Signal 11.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
"They are the only organization that's consistently flying commercial payloads to the orbit. "
Hmmm, I think the guys at ESA may beg to differ. I think the guys on the Space Station are probably grateful that a place a wee distance from the USA called the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan exists and regularly sends up Soyuz taxis. I reckon there's more than just NASA in the history of space.... (not to belittle their great work, but have some perspective, eh?)
BTW is it only the Americans who use imperial rather than metric units, or are there other countries who also use a non-metric measuring system?
:)
hawk
It was blatant Quayle plagarism. Well spotted.
Did he crash it?
</jarjar>
The Martians are just going to shoot this one down too, just like they did with the others. Why bother?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Regarding atmospheric conditions on Mars and other planets, does anyone know why storms often seem to be global events? I don't think a global storm happened on earth recently, but other planets seem to have them all the time.
That and the fact that we'll be that much closer to being able to travel there. That's a little bit important as well =)
How does that make us better off? Because we can do it. Because we can habitate other planets and expand our race beyond just one planet.
And because we can.
If God gave us curiosity
Shouldn't that be Earth Standard Time? It's a bit much for us to presume that we can set the standard time conventions for the entire Universe.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
C'mon moderators. Would this be informative if he simply put in a link to last week's
Knowledge is the only thing that truly separates us from barbarism and animals. ..that, and of course, beer :)
Space rules me. As does /. :)
I wonder what the face on Mars is gonna look like this time around?
i.e., broadband
How is mankind any better off? In two areas: technologically and, for lack of a better word, spiritually.
Two examples should suffice to prove my point.
With regard to technology, the integrated circuit was developed for NASA, to use in satellites and spacecraft. No doubt, if the space program had not existed, the IC would have been invented some time or other; but the space program meant that we had it sooner and faster than we would have had otherwise. Big, interesting problems bring about technologies that are interesting and useful; and no problem is bigger or more interesting than space flight.
With regard to the spiritual value, think of the photograph of the Earth rising over the Moon that Anders took in Apollo 8, in 1968. Can you think of a better description of the unity of the Earth, and its relation to the cosmos? I think that photo alone was worth the billions we spent on the space program.
Recently, I viewed the movie "Apollo 13" with my two teen-aged children. It's quite a movie, for it captures the excitement - the romance, if you will - of the Apollo adventure. The hardest part was trying to explain to the kids why it was that when I was their age, we were flying men to the Moon, but nowadays we have simply given up going.
When I look around the world now, with the horror of 911, and of the Afghanistan war, and the rise of Islamo-Fascism threatening to return the world to the dark ages, we need to remember the glories of enterprises like the the exploration of space, which enriched the lives and broadened the imagination of all humankind.
First theres the problem with the propulsion system: we're simply not fast enough in our spaceships. In order to get anywhere we need to approach the speed of light or even exceed it
Getting to another star system would require near-C travel, but getting to other planets certainly doesn't. Chemical rockets can get just about anywhere in the inner solar system in a couple of years, and anywhere in the outer solar system within about five years.
Use an ion drive, and you can get just about anywhere within 1-2 years.
Sure, you won't be commuting to Mars for the weekend, but this is certainly good enough for colonization and trade. Think back to the old days of wooden ships on Earth.
Second humans are really not meant to be put in space. We need to adapt, and we need to adapt in a serious way. Most of our body is made up of this little molecule H2O, and we need lots of it to survive. Water is not easy to get in space! Food is another problem. Another is that the human bonestructure degenerates in space.
Humans aren't going to change their basic structure. We can, however, build contained environments that can support us.
Water isn't a problem. We already have water-reclamation systems that are perfectly efficient (we just don't use them because they're expensive). Your ship is air- and water-tight - you won't lose any mass to space.
If you have a big enough ship, food isn't a problem - grow it the old-fashioned way. Or stockpile a year's worth of army rations (this will take mass, but not an unmanageable amount of mass; it's just probably cheaper to grow food).
Gravity similarly isn't a problem. You can either live with bone degeneration, or you can connect two ship parts with a long cable and spin them to get a wonderful simulation of gravity and avoid all zero-g related health problems.
In summary, I don't think we need any new magical technology for in-system space travel. We have pretty much everything we need already.
If past events are any indication, NASA's servers are going to get a hell of a lot more than a slashdotting tonight.
The doppler plot is the main thing that everyone will be looking at, and I bet it's going to be completely unavailable during the most interesting times.
How about a few dozen mirrors to help NASA out?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
If I had mod point you would have got 'em all. Couldn't thave said it better myself....
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
...this is just an official bitch about having submitted this yesterday only to hav it ignored and replaced some totally dork-ass post on the same subject...
oh boy.
I'd hate for it to accidentally arrive at Venus because someone loaded "1984" on it and it thought 2+2=5. That would be, you know, mightily embarrasing if millions of dollars were spent on a probe that couldn't do math.
I wonder what kind of data will come from this experiment that will send the religious nuts into a frenzy. Maybe we'll find the "neck of Jesus" to go along with the "face of Jesus"
Subject basically says it. When you say 20 hour orbit, it means to me that it takes 20 hours for one revolution about the planet. Thus for a 2 hour orbit it would be moving 10x _faster_, not slower. Did you just get them reversed or what?
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
That would be about a T1200-0, as near as I can tell.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Then it's clear what we need! An über-race of galactic space pilots. They will be living in green gas-tanks and will be able to foresee the future. So they will be able to guide the space-ships safely through the universe. This genetically mutated monsters will establish a monopoly on space travel and draw their power from strange drugs they call 'spice'.
Finally! It's all so obvious!
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
This is very hard. Weird sh*t happens when you try that. You get heavier, shorter and time slows down. IANAP (I am not a Physicist) but we aren't going to get close to the speed of light until we radically change our physics
Actually, we could do it now. It would just be horrifically expensive.
Method number one is to use an external power source to accelerate the ship. The least expensive way to do this is to build a giant laser array in space and use this to propel a solar sail. This would still take something like the US's entire military budget for the last century to implement (out of our price range for now).
Method number two is to use a fuel with a very high energy density, with a nearly-perfect drive. Antimatter works decently for this (antiproton annihilation produces charged particles (mesons) that can be directed with a magnetic field before they decay). However, the entire world production of antiprotons is something like a few nanograms per year. A pure-antimatter-drive ship would need hundreds of tonnes. Other approaches to interstellar craft use various types of fusion drive. The problem is that you need a fusion reaction that leaves most of its energy as kinetic energy of charged particles, which rules out the easiest two or three forms of fusion (which aren't terribly "easy" to produce as it is).
So, we could build an interstellar near-C laser launched sailcraft now, for an insane amount of money, and we'll probably be able to build interstellar-capable fusion craft within the next hundred years or so. Both methods are difficult, but neither is impossible and neither requires new physics.
If a physicist out there is planning on the whole "But it's impossible!" rant, skip it. We WILL find a way.
The universe has its own idea of what its laws are, and doesn't care how much we *want* to find a way. Hard limits exist.
If we want to send a crew to mars we can do it now with current technology. If we send a rocket from erth directly to mars with a Departure velocity of 5.08 km/s we could get ther in only 180 days. A higher speed would make areo breaking dangerous, and a lower speed would extend the transit time.
A Hohmann transfer would take 258 days, and requer a departure velocity of 3.34 km/s. This would be the cheapest way of sending cargo to mars, but would be to slow for humans.
Both options are perfectly posible with a traditional chemical rocket burning hydrogen and oxygen.
For the return the roket could burn methane and oxygen. Methan and oxygen can be prodused from CO2 and hydrogen. There is plenty of CO2 in mars air, an and they would only need to bring about 6 ton of hydrogen to produse enough fuel for the return flight.
To reed more get the book "The case for MARS" written by Robert Zubrin
"Odyssey is an orbiter, not a lander."
Table-ized A.I.
There are already machines availabe which are powerd by the human body and use centrifugal force to simulate gravity on the body system. It has shown to be effective in minimizing bone loss and improving circulation in space. It's also a good exercise and time killer/filler when there isn't much else to do on a ship. The crew can't always be avoiding asteroids and conducting experiments.
Maybe we'll see an Old One. Or maybe they'll just turn the probe 90 degrees from everywhere and be done with it.
Does anyone have any links to view a live feed of this?
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
If it is the same guys that design the web page that those who program the probe, we'll have another crash tonight due to conversion errors:
From www.nasa.gov main page
NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey will arrive at Mars tonight at 10:30 p.m. EDT after traveling more than 460 kilometers (about 285 million miles) since its launch on April 7.
From NASA's own website, the very first sentence reads verbatim:
NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey will arrive at Mars tonight at 10:30 p.m. EDT after traveling more than 460 kilometers (about 285 million miles) since its launch on April 7.
Note the "460 kilometers". If 460 kilometers == 285 million miles, according to "NASA Math", this bird is doomed.
JPL scientists have just confirmed aquisition of signal from Odyssey after completion of its rocket firing and emergence from behind Mars. They've done it!
Now perhaps we can have /. articles posted about NASA without the dreary and predictable chorus of lame jokes about the 1999 failures.
Because his comment augments the story's technical aspect.
Most readers won't have the depth of knowledge to realize that the original posting is incomplete. His comment assists the reader, explaining that there is futher, pertinent information that was not available in the posting or in the links provided.
Just because he didn't make up shit, and just because he summarized information in a different slashdot posting doesn't make his posting "uninformed". In fact, just the opposite.
Think before you moderate.
I meant to say:
Really? A lot remains unknown, but we can be pretty sure about some things. To choose a chemical example, is it foolish to believe that silicon can never be a direct analogue for carbon chemistry in life processes? Well, no. Silicon can form the same number of bonds with other atoms as carbon, so it has been proposed in the past by people with not enough of a clue that we may find life with silicon-based DNA. Sorry, but that ain't the case. Silicon bonds are too weak in comparison with carbon bonds to provide the large array of stable organic molecules that carbon can.
And it was an unintentional AC. I'm not afraid to put my name to my opinions, I'm just too scatterbrained to log in :-)
Err well there's a legacy of people being conversant with these older measurement units but schools have taught metric units since at least the early 70s (I am 35 and was taught metric since I started school in '71). The government are bringing things inline with many other countries by insisting shops label good in metric, this has caused a few minor stirs but most people accept the change that has been happening for the last 30 years. Tends to mean most people under the age of 50 can work in both metric and imperial units. Weights in shops tend to be in both and of course there is the trusty pint of beer, but I doubt if you asked many people how many fluid ounces were in a pint or gills to a quart they'd know, more people could probably tell you how many millilitres to a litre. And we still have the mile for road distances :-) Reckon the time will come when we drop the mile though.
I believe that *scientific* work is all carried out in metric units. I guess my original posting wasn't descriptive enough, I was interested primarily to know if any space going nation apart from the USA is using imperial units in their construction and instructions for space vehicles. It does seem rather daft to me that one country should hold out on one measurement unit while all the others choose a different system. I know there's a lot of inertia due to the costs associated with retraining, retooling, new parts, etc but surely it is better/ inevitable that a single standard emerges?