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."

Comments

Cool!

[Bob McCown]

That means our cloaking technology was successful against those pesky aliens that have blasted last few probes.

Onward to planetary colonization!

It's about time :-)

[Anton Anatopopov]

I guess by the law of averages at least one NASA mars probe would eventually get through :-)

Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.

I can't help thinking that we are not spending enough money on cool space research like this. Why does congress always seem to resent paying for NASA ?

NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets. After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.

Re:It's about time :-)

[anzha]

Why does Congress resent paying for NASA? Pretty good question. Think about it though.

The short answer is that NASA happens to be demonstrating that it's rather incompetant. Flamebait? Karma killer? Perhaps, but think about it.

Shuttle? Years delayed and expensive as h*ll to operate. Space station? Ditto.

X Vehicles? Let's take a look there!

X-33 was cancelled for starting to run down that same route, and they picked the winning Lockmart proposal because it was full of nifty tech, not based on the stated goals of the X program (much cheaper access to orbit using SSTO technologies).

X-34 was killed because MSFC wanted to incorporate THEIR engine instead of the original one (*GASP* it was delayed and overbudget...)

X-30? The National Aerospace Plane fell the way of the X-33, but back in the early 90's.

Manned spacflight at NASA has been an embarassment for some time for its screwups.

On the bright side, look at the unmanned probes recently. Sehr gut! Pathfinder, Global Surveyor, DS-1, Lunar Prospector, etc, etc...

BUT...when NASA f*cks up like say with the Mars 98 missions: English to metric unit conversion problems crash one probe into Mars. WTF!?! These are supposed to be the best and brightest and make THAT stupid a mistake! The royal screwups in the lander mission are ...ummm...amazing.

Good and bad, Goldin did get one thing right in that he said that for NASA to be trusted any time soon with the budget to go to Mars manned style they'd have to fix - budgetwise - the ISS program. It didn't happen.

On sci.space.policy, Gary Hudson, of Rotary Rocket and more fame, made the following remark when someone suggested that he be nominated to take over NASA. . .and politically, that's about as likely as slashdot deciding that they're going to run IIS.

In short, NASA is a wreck.

Now. Why do you think Congress resents spending money on NASA? Money isn't the main problem here...

Re:It's about time :-)

[s20451]

In short, NASA is a wreck.

NASA is no different from any other sci/tech organization. However, they have the combined disadvantages of very high risk projects and intense public scrutiny.

Example:

NASA engineer writes a bug in code: $300 million spacecraft pancakes into the Martian plains; elected officials demand answers; public wonders why NASA is full of buffoons who can't do something as "simple" as launching a spacecraft into orbit around another heavenly body on a shoestring budget.

Microsoft engineer writes a bug in code: Another MS engineer is assigned to write a Service Release; yet another engineer is assigned to correct the bugs in the Service Release. Resulting security holes lead to viruses costing billions in lost productivity, according to some estimates. Elected officials defend free enterprise; public doesn't care.

Linuk kernel hacker writes a bug: Another hacker finds and corrects the bug; elected officials and public don't give a rat's ass.

What's Next....

[cybrpnk]

There are three instruments on Odyssey. One is a gamma spectrometer that will be able to map the presence of permafrost and subsurface ice - obviously important. A second is an infrared spectrometer - not only will it be able to make a geological survey map of the minerals on the surface, it will be able to locate "hot spots" on the surface where there might still be liquid water and perhaps even life. The third instrument is a radiation monitor that was supposed to measure the dose an astronaut would receiv on a Mars mission. It appears to be broken, one hopes not from excesive radiation exposure.....

Teflon was *not* a spinoff.

[kaszeta]

After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.

Why does everyone feel the need to falsely attribute various inventions as space program spinoffs?

Teflon was invented in 1938, well before anything that could even remotely be considered modern space research.

Don't get me wrong, space research is good, and it produces a valuable product: knowledge.

False attributions to the space program don't help with their budget problems, though. I'm not blaming you, however, NASA themselves is quite guilty of exaggeration.

Distance, reliability

[s20451]

1. When the spacecraft first goes into orbit, you want a reliable, simple telemetry signal to indicate the basics of what is happening with the spacecraft. This means a low-gain, wide-beam transmitting antenna. The high-gain antenna will provide higher rates, but must be aimed much more carefully; such a system would not be robust if something went slightly wrong during orbit insertion.
2. From the Where is Mars Odyssey Right Now? page, 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.) Imagine the communications challenge for Voyager 2, which is now heading out of the solar system at a range of billions of kilometers; or Galileo, which lost its high-gain antenna at Jupiter ...

Re:Why can't we just sned a KH11?

[Wyatt Earp]

Because a KH-11 is heavy.

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/xk h- 12.htm

14 tons for a KH-11, 18 tons for the Improved Crystal.

Niether the Americas, ESA or Proton have rockets with the throw-weight to chuck 18 tons of KH-11 to Mars.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atlsiiib.htm
The Atlas III can launch 4,500 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer trajectory

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm
The Delta IV Large can launch 10,843 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ariane5.htm
The Ariane 5 can launch 6,800 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer

Shuttle might do it - 24,000 kgs to LEO, but you'd have to have a big boster. Perhaps if Saturn hadn't been killed, or Energia. But right now no one has the rocket to send something like that to Mars.

No joke

[s20451]

The NASA people talk about the "great galactic ghoul" which lurks somewhere between Earth and Mars, which eats Mars-bound spaceprobes. It's their tongue-in-cheek attempt to explain why roughly half of all Mars probes fail -- some for apparently no reason.

Touching scene in mission control

[Rogerborg]

I was watching the mission control footage, when the satellite came out of Mars' shadow, two mission control geeks went to high five each other, and missed. That's NASA for you: nerding it old school. ;-)