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NASA's Mars Odyssey Enters Orbit
maddmike writes "Nasa's Mars explorer Odyssey is scheduled to brake and orbit about Mars today at 7:30PDT. Among the mission's objectives are to understand Mars' climate and geological history and to search for signs of life sustaining environments including water. Main web site is at the JPL website." Update: 10/24 13:12 GMT by T : The BrownFury writes cites a Space.com summary which says "The Mars Odyssey spacecraft appears to have succeeded Tuesday night in one of the most tricky and critical parts of its missions by slipping into orbit around the Red Planet."
Im just not holding my breath until this mission is over, I mean, when something is that far away, there are TOO many variables capable of destroying the entire mission to ever guarantee success... Bravo to the NASA boys for all their hard work, even when it ends in expensive failure :)
What, me worry?
The Cold War has ended 20 years ago. Please upgrade accordingly, and read some A.C.Clarke novels while you're at it.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
But couldn't you print times in posts like you do with the time the post was posted so it would adapt to user settings?
No "assertion failed" mean that I do equal "faggot". And gee, what a fine argument that is. Like.. oh no, I'd be really horrified to find out that I was gay... please. If anything, I'd be bisexual. Well, now I'm getting offtopic and feeding the trolls. Forgive me.
"Odyssey turns on its telemetry and begins transmitting data at 40 bits per second. The Deep Space Network will take several minutes to synchronize their equipment with the pattern in the telemetry because of the slow rate at which the data is being received."
"The spacecraft is currently 1.53e+11 meters from Earth. Even with a directional antenna, signal power drops with distance squared, so the path loss is on the order of 200 dB. That is, if the transmitter power is (say) 50 watts/m^2 at 1 meter away from the spacecraft, as measured from Earth it would be something like 10^-20 watts/m^2, not counting antenna gains. At those powers you'd be lucky to get 40 bits/s, simply by running into Shannon's limit. (Somebody check my math, I haven't had coffee this morning.)"
Now some quick math...
1 megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes... which = 8,388,608 bits... divided by 40 is 209,715.2 seconds. divided by 60 seconds = 3,495.25 minutes. divided by 60 minutes = 58.25 hours... So it would take 2 days 10 hours and 15 minutes to send 1 megabyte of data.
Now lets have some fun...
It would take 8 days and 6 hours to download an average 3 1/2 minute song in MP3 format.
It would take 1,553 days (or about 4 years and 3 months) to download the entire contents of a CD.
It would take about 425 years to download the entire contents of an average 60GB hard-drive.
Sound about right?
Once the high-gain antenna is up and running, expect to hear that Mars has joined the coalition against terrorism.
No word on bases. Yet.
dude... what's your problem? I am not who ever that is. Calm down.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans