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Spirit Rover Lands Successfully
So, as I write this, the latest word is: the Spirit rover has landed and NASA has received a signal indicating it landed right-side up (so it shouldn't have any problems in the unfolding process) and will shortly be retracting the protective airbags which kept it from splattering all over the countryside. Y'all can fill in later news in the comments below. There's a nice site with up-to-the-minute text updates.
BBC News Mars Rover Report.
Press conference here at 9:30pm PST, so in about 25 min.
Check out the live mission updates on Spaceflight Now:
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.html
I watched it on NASA TV, too. It was quite an exciting ride through entry and landing. We have the second rover landing to look forward to on January 24.
this is my sig
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Ah you say that, but today (January 4th) we should know if Beagle 2 is actually alive or not. As I understand it, when The Beagle goes this long without having made successful communication, it starts to transmit all the time. This, coinciding with the oribiter being in the right orbit to pick it up, should let us know whether it's ok or not.
Fingers crossed!
Check out #maestro on irc.freenode.net!
I've been trying to watch Nasa TV but it won't connect. There's a text-only site that has been updating every few minutes with new info here:
m l
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/status.ht
Looks like michael achieved the very difficult simultaneous posted/rejected duo.
Here's the rejected post which amounts to a mixed report on the success of the mission, courtesy of Reuters, Space.com and the BBC:
Reuters and the BBC report that the first U.S. Mars Rover - the Spirit - has landed and radioed a confirmation signal, but has since gone silent. NASA/JPL are waiting to learn if it survived. Space.com reports that the Spirit has indeed landed safely.
While the landing is surely good news, there are still a few perilous moments ahead. To be successful they first have to deflate the airbags, and open module up. Then they must deploy the solar panels in order to get power before sunset or the mission is over. Seems like i remember reading somewhere that they must get the batteries partially charged to survive the intense nights there on the martian surface.
Looks like a picture perfect landing for them so far.. I sure wish them luck.
I think you would have trouble sending a signal 10 lightminutes to Earth too if the Earth had set below the horizon. They had to wait for MGS to orbit over it and send back data...
With your probing requests at spirit@nasa.gov. Please, no spam.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
nothing further needed...
On Apple Input Peripherals: They're okay, I guess, but I was really hoping for a one-key keyboard and a 109-button mouse
Cool. The rover is powered by a PowerPC chip:
"The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second. Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power."
Largely because it's not necessary. Solar power is available--and Mars isn't getting (much) farther away from the sun any time soon, so it will continue to be available.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/chronology_ma rs.html
Mars 3 - 28 May 1971 - Mars Orbiter/ Lander
"Mars 3 was launched towards Mars from a Tyazheliy Sputnik (71-049C) Earth orbiting platform. A mid-course correction was made on 8 June. The descent module (71-049F) was released at 09:14 UT on 2 December 1971, 4 hours 35 minutes before reaching Mars. The descent module entered the martian atmosphere at roughly 5.7 km/s. Through aerodynamic braking, parachutes, and retro-rockets, the lander achieved a soft landing at 45 S, 158 W and began operations. However, after 20 sec the instruments stopped working for unknown reasons, perhaps as a result of the massive surface dust storms raging at the time of landing. Meanwhile, the orbiter had suffered from a partial loss of fuel and did not have enough to put itself into a planned 25 hour orbit. The engine instead performed a truncated burn to put the spacecraft into a long 12 day, 19 hour period orbit about Mars with an inclination thought to be similar to that of Mars 2 (48.9 degrees). The Mars 2 and 3 orbiters sent back a large volume of data covering the period from December 1971 to March 1972, although transmissions continued through August. It was announced that Mars 2 and 3 had completed their missions by 22 August 1972, after 362 orbits completed by Mars 2 and 20 orbits by Mars 3. The probes sent back a total of 60 pictures. The images and data revealed mountains as high as 22 km, atomic hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, surface temperatures ranging from -110 C to +13 C, surface pressures of 5.5 to 6 mb, water vapor concentrations 5000 times less than in Earth's atmosphere, the base of the ionosphere starting at 80 to 110 km altitude, and grains from dust storms as high as 7 km in the atmosphere. The data enabled creation of surface relief maps, and gave information on the martian gravity and magnetic fields."
The Vikings were the first really successful landers on Mars, like the above poster stated.
I believe there was also another microchip on another of the mars probes, where your name got on it if you were a member of the Planetary Society but I can't seem to find the link at the moment. I just vaguely remember printing out a certificate a few years ago.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Here is the breakdown of failures and sucesses.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 3, which fails after liftoff.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 4. First successful Mars fly-by in July 1965. The craft returns the first pictures of the Martian surface.
1964 Soviets launch Zond 2. Mars fly-by. Contact lost in May 1965.
1969 U.S. launches Mariner 6 and 7. The two spacecraft fly by Mars in July and August 1969 and send back images and data.
1971 Soviets launch Mars 2. Orbiter and lander reach Mars in November 1971. Lander crashes but orbiter sends back images and data.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 8, which fails during liftoff.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 9. Orbiter reaches Mars in November 1971, provides global mapping of Martian surface and studies atmosphere.
1973 Soviets launch Mars 5. Orbiter reaches Mars in February 1974 and collects data.
1975 U.S. launches Viking 1 and Viking 2. The two orbiter/lander sets reach Mars in 1976. Orbiters image Martian surface. Landers send back images and take surface samples.
1992 U.S. launches Mars Observer. Contact lost with orbiter in August 1993, three days before scheduled insertion into Martian orbit.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Global Surveyor. Orbiter reaches Mars in September 1997 and maps the planet. Still in operation.
1996 Soviets launch Mars 96, which fails after launch and falls back into Earth's atmosphere.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Pathfinder. Lander and rover arrive on Mars in July 1997, in the most-watched space event ever. Lander sends back thousands of images, and Sojourner rover roams the surface, sending back 550 images.
1998 Japan launches Nozomi. Orbiter suffers glitch in December 1998, forcing circuitous course correction. Mission fails in 2003.
1998 U.S. launches Mars Climate Orbiter. Spacecraft destroyed while entering Martian orbit in September 1999.
1999 U.S. launches Mars Polar Lander. Contact lost with lander during descent in December 1999. Two microprobes "hitchhiking" on lander also fail.
2001 U.S. launches Mars Odyssey. Orbiter reaches Mars in October 2001 to detect water and shallow buried ice and study the environment. It can also act as a communications relay for future Mars landers.
2003 European Space Agency launches Mars Express. Orbiter and lander to arrive at Mars in December 2003.
2003 U.S. launches Mars Expedition Rovers. Spirit and Opportunity rovers due to land on Mars in January 2004.
Note: I ripped this info from MSNBC.
Life is not for the lazy.
There is an interesting and informative entry on the NASA site regarding how much data can be transmitted back and forth between Earth and the rover:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/comm_data.html
If we assume best case scenario for the transmission potential stated there and assume the direct-to-Earth rate averages the midpoint between the stated 12000bps and 3500bps, the total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.
Of course, this has to include protocol overhead, error, and operating instructions, but it provides one quantitative, if not qualitative, answer to how much data can be retrieved by the mission. In this case, a bit more than 2 CDs worth.
Heat inside the warm electronics box comes from a combination of electrical heaters, eight radioisotope heater units and heat given off by electronics components. Each radioisotope heater unit produces about one watt of heat and contains about 2.7 grams (0.1 ounce) of plutonium dioxide as a pellet about the size and shape of the eraser on the end of a standard pencil. Each pellet is encapsulated in a metal cladding of platinum-rhodium alloy and surrounded by multiple layers of carbon-graphite composite material, making the complete unit about the size and shape of a C-cell battery.
The density of the atmosphere of mars is only one percent as dense as our atmosphere on earth. Due to the thin atmosphere a parachute alone is not enough to slow the craft sufficiently for a safe landing. Spirit used a parachute then retro rockets fire just above the surface to practically stop the craft. The airbags inflate and take up the small drop that is left.
Got Code?
http://www.nasa.gov/ram/35037main_portal.ram
Beagle 2 is ~1/2 a planet away.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I was curious about the base petal down stop - was there any kind of design (like weighting) to "encourage" it to stop that way, or was it basically like rolling a die and seeing where it landed?
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
From what I understand, it's basically like rolling a die - there may be a slightly higher probability of landing on some of the sides due to weight distribution, but not enough that anyone was counting on it landing base petal down.
With any of the other three orientations, it wouldn't have been a problem - by deflating the airbags in just the right order and using other devices to reorient it, it's designed to end up right-side-up eventually. All of the possible scenarios were simulated and tested extensively at JPL. Remember that this was the same trick used successfully by the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997. Some improvements have been made, but it's the same idea.
The fact that it happened to land right-side-up just means that it will take less time, and probably use less power, to unwrap everything, and also that the overall chance of success is slightly higher just because there's one less thing to worry about going wrong.
...just relayed from the Rover through a Mars Odyssey uplink can be found here!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Real first image here
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
This is ridiculously low-quality, but here's a screenshot of RealPlayer's stream of NASA TV from a few minutes ago. I'll post more pictures if I get anything good, but probably the real, high-quality images will be online within the hour. The first image here is of one of the mission control computer screens showing the images downloaded, including one image of the rover itself.
In black/white:
1 .h tml
t im age1.jpg
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040104image
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/images/firs
A bigger version of the parent image.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Since I can't find it on TV anywhere, here's the video streams I've been watching.
NASA TV 1
NASA TV 2 - (looks better quality to me)
AC
Image 1 Screencap
Image 2 NASA Folks looking at image
Image 3 360' shot
Image 4 NASA Folks looking at 360'
Image 5 panorama
Image 5 Large larger panorama
Image 6 first image before contact
.html
and if you havent noticed already just change # on the URL for the latest:
http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/040104image #
Oh yeah, and I second the fact that NASA-TV should have made this a big event but:
a. What cable provider has NASA TV anymore, I think the general american public lost their space spirit (no pun intended) after the first few apollo missions.
b. Ok, so hypathetically, if it were a big event like, say, the first moon mission, and it failed horribly, that really wouldnt help the american general public moral, now would it.
I'm sure the CNN bit tomorrow will suffice for most people and as for those interested, check out this site for tons of images and some beautiful animations and video clips.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Hi-res images (that aren't just screencaps from NASATV stitched together) are starting to appear on the NASA press site. The first is here.
(and as far as I know the british electrical system is extremely good - less cabling needed, and safer than most alternatives ;-)