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

Maybe it's our solutions?

[blankinthefill]

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 stressful for delicate equipment. There has to be a better way to do it, because a landing like the one described would destroy almost anything! I don't think, therefore, that Mars itself is hard. I think it's how we access Mars that's "hard"!

NASA obesity

[gnalre]

What's inside the airbag weighs 453 kilograms (half a ton)

Maybe thats what NASA has been doing wrong

Beagle 2 weighs 33.2 Kg

Time will tell...

Re:difficulties

[whome]

The article mentions various technical reasons why Mars is hard, but Mars missions actually have a far worse success record than missions to any other location in space. NASA people joke (or used to joke) that Mars was protected from intruding spacecraft by the "Great Galactic Ghoul."

I have my own theory about why Mars has such a bad record. Although Mars is the closest planet to the Earth, it is in one respect the most inaccessible . Mars has the least frequent launch window of any major object in the Solar System, it coming around only once every 26 months. This means that any engineer who reports that one section is not quite ready to go, or could use more testing, becomes responsible for a delay of almost 2 1/2 years. Obviously, there are considerable career and institutional reasons not to do so.

This factor will have to be dealt with carefully on an institutional level if a manned Mars mission is attempted, or astronauts will certainly die.

It seems to me

[falcon5768]

that the list reads like the same list they had for moon landing, except we where both

A) pushed to do a moon landing

B) came up with much better solutions than the quacks running nasa came up with (and I mean the clueless managers, cause im sure there are much better ways to land that the managers nixed cause of cost.)

What it boils down to though is that the additude in Nasa now has to change before we do anything about going to mars. Its not the same one as was around durring the 60's Nasa has become bloated and stagnant. Truth be told, I almost hope the chineese do it first, because at least they get the point of space exploration now.