Why Mars May Be Difficult

An anonymous reader writes with a link to this "dramatic article leading up to the three Mars probes for December/January at NASA's JPL (also hosted at Ames) on Mars risks: Two out of three missions to the red planet have failed. After 300 million miles of deep space, 'One colleague describes the entry, descent and landing as six minutes of terror,' says Dr. Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars Program Office. Descending at 1,000 miles per hour, with only 100 seconds left at the altitude that a commercial airliner typically flies -- things need to happen in a hurry. Doesn't mention solar flares, electronics shielding, signal snags or budget tightening. The previous account listed the top 10 reasons Mars was hard in 1976."

Comments

difficulties

[mOoZik]

Space travel is a cruel mistress. There are so many factors in complicated missions like these that any success is closer to a statistical anomaly than achievement, figuratively speaking. During launch, the payload can be stressed to a breaking point, and many satellites have died this way. Even though there are measures in place to minimize these, there is still a probability that in the long run, something may become disabled as a result. Furthermore, there is a tremendous amount of radiation outside of our comfort zone, not to mention stray particles roaming empty space. When traveling at those speeds, in excess of 10,000 MPH, even a grain of sand can spell doom or at least have damaging effects. Then comes the delicate process of landing the thing, which further pounds the payload with extreme G forces, heat, and vibration. Couple this with a 20 minutes latency of communication, and you end up with an expensive toy at the mercy of computers and sensors.

And it doesn't help if idiots on Earth submit values in Imperial when the craft needs Metric, or vice versa. :D

Re:Maybe it's our solutions?

[TowerTwo]

I never considered MARS or anywhere else, MOON or otherwise as easy. Before the 'New World' was found how many explorers and and their kin died.

All astronaughts know, the moment they step into a craft of any kind may be their last, their families do too. It's why Christa Maculafs backup said the next day after the Challenger disaster, I would go up tomorrow if asked, we know and she knew the risks of space travel.

The exploration of the world is now the exploration of the universe. There will be the next James Town on Mars and others.

This is the price and reward or exploration.

Steven

Re:Maybe it's our solutions?

[matzim]

After reading that, and seeing conceptual pictures of how these "landings" occur, I think that what makes Mars "hard" is our solutions to landing problems, and maybe even transportation. I don't know what we could do about transportation, but the landings are obviously way to [sic] stressful for delicate equipment.

Consider the following:

• These probes are traveling to Mars at (least) 19,300 km/hr.
• It needs to travel that fast to get out of Earth's gravitational field and orbit.
• The only economically feasible way to slow down a craft going that speed is aerobraking.
• You need to be in a planet's atmosphere to aerobrake.
• Mars' atmosphere is (at most) a few hundred kilometers thick.
• Anything going that fast isn't going to have a long time to slow down.

Thus the problem is unavoidable-- you must go from 19,300 km/hr to 0 km/hr in a matter of minutes. If you can think of a method to do that that's less "stressful" than NASA's, we're all eager to hear it.

Re:Maybe it's our solutions?

[kippy]

Agreed. Of course getting to Mars is hard. Getting into low earth orbit was hard. Sailing across an ocean was hard. Adapting to a colder environment when migrating from Africa was hard. I hope that defeatist attitudes aren't widespread in govenrment and NASA about getting to Mars.

There will be risks, engineering chalanges, and deaths but this is already the case with NASA. Think Apollo. The fact is, pusing the envelope of human civilization will never be "easy".

our tech sux

[demo9orgon]

We need self-healing technologies.
They don't come from space. We need to make them here.
We can test them in a variety of environments, cheaply.

If we, the collective humanity, can stop wasting money making faltering attempts at greatness and just set reasonable goals (sustainable deep-ocean habitats,sustainable polar habitats, better/safer/reliable energy) and create the technologies necessary to make them happen _here_ we will flourish anywhere.

Until then, it's all hand-waving and one-upmanship nationalistic stupidity.

I'd rather see a handful of "Burt Rutans" than a hundred NASA's.

Not only would it be more efficient, but with the lack of red-tape/buckpassing/budget-crap something like "progress" might actually take place.

Personally, I think the governments of the world are scared to death of people getting out of their reach. Governments, like any entity, don't like to lose their source of wealth and power and they absolutely hate competition.

I'm probably repeating myself here. That's ok. Everyone who frequents slashdot understands the value of repetition (esp. the editors).