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A Deep Space Primer
phil reed writes "With the latest Mars missions still in the news, people might be curious about what it takes to actually run a deep space mission: how a spacecraft is designed, how the communications are handled, what kind of project management is in place to make it all work. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a primer online that gives broad general coverage of all aspects of putting a satellite into orbit and how to manage it once it's there. Fascinating reading, with lots of links to more detail."
It is so mind boggling when you think aabout the actual costs to make one of these mars rovers and how much it costs to send it up in space. After all these are basically disposable because they most likely will never get them bac unless we make a succesfull manned mission to mars.
MonkeysKickAss
There are a lot of smart, dedicated, and *unsung* heroes at JPL. NASA tends to get all the celebrity, but JPL deserves it just as much. Thanks to all who are working on our Mars missions and the various other missions that are increasing our knowledge of our universe and ourselves.
It's nice to see that space exploration has come so far in my lifetime. When I was a boy during WWII, travel to Mars, even by machines, was just science fiction, and the stuff of magazine covers. Most of the world's scientists and engineers were at work developing weapons of war, and for some of them, rockets, high altitude airplanes, etc. were allowed projects that laid the foundation for today's space miracles.
This type of careful planning and careful execution is useful for any endeavour with long or expensive feedback cycles. That includes terrestrial tasks like creating nuclear powerplants. Too many engineers have a hands-on, tweak-and-see hacker mentality, where projects like Mars rovers, nukes (and many other projects)need to work as planned right out of the box.
A former boss and engineer had a great story about his early job experience designing circuits for a guided missile. He showed his first circuit design to the boss and the boss noted all the little adjustable pots in the circuit. The boss simply said, "Are you going to fly with that missile to tweak all the pots?"
Although simulations, testing, and prototyping are great, truely great engineering just works because it was designed correctly from the beginning to just work.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Humans have yet to perform any "Deep space" exploration.
The Voyager missions come the closest, but still remain fairly near home, on any meaningful interstellar scale.
The linked article discusses interplanetary exploration. Quite a bit of a difference.
Doesn't work. The vibrational impulse is passed through the medium in the tube. This impulse goes slower than light.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
But I look forward to the day when we can develop space hardware the same incremental way we develop other things.
Absolutely! I look forward to a range of advancements such as lower cost access to space (personal fav is a space elevator), truely routine manned space operations, and better adaptive/autonomous robotic systems.
Yet I fear that the foreseeable future (next 20 years at least) will be dominated by rare and expensive space projects in which every lauch counts and every EVA-hour is carefully scripted and rehearsed.
Its a vicious loop, really. Because space is expensive, space projects are very carefully planned and executed. And because space projects are so carefully planned and executed, they are expensive.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I cannot begin to comprehend an organism that can be so wrong in so many ways in such little space.
...American people need to vote this year, so their minds should not dwell on 500+ unnessacery deaths.
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to take one sentence...
They should dwell on it, and their responsibilities as Citezens of the US. If the more than 200 million citezens, of the most powerful nation-state currently in existence, ever felt squeamish about the loss of 500 lives, there would be a LOT more wars, a lot more killing and a lot more misery. Or would you rather have Saddam still murdering and starving his people ?
There's so much trouble that could have easily been solved if that energy was put to more urgent matters
in short, my answer to your first sentence
The human condition is the need to explore.
Calling the almost insignificant distance between Earth and Mars "deep space" is like calling ankle-deep water at your local becah "deep ocean".
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