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ESA to Deploy Mars Express Radar
fenimor writes "Mars Express was launched on 2 June 2003 and reached the planet on 25 December 2003. After eight months of intensive computer simulations and technical investigations the European Space Agency has given the green light for the MARSIS radar on board Mars Express spacecraft to be deployed during the first week of May. Assuming that this operation is successful, the radar will finally start the search for subsurface water reservoirs and studies of the Martian ionosphere."
After eight months of intensive computer simulations and technical investigations
if people are wondering why the decision took so long, besides commanding something on Mars, would be the loss or impairment of the antenna boom. Of course they have safeguards and workarounds but if that fails MARSIS is dead in the water. Good luck ESA.
-Teiresias
Honestly, this is why we need a manned mission to Mars. All these countless robots and satellites wouldn't be necessary if we just sent several men with testing equipment to stay there for a few months. Imagine how much more can be accomplished! Combine all the cost of all the landers and satellites to Mars and compare it to a manned mission. I'm willing to bet the cost will be very similar and more can be done in a shorter amount of time.[tt]
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What's the effectiveness of sub-surface RADAR? I can't imagine you can get a good picture of something under a pile of rock from orbit.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Mars was in its closest orbit in 60,000 years when it launched, so it reached there in 7 months.
Hence the name "Mars Express".
From TFA:
follows eight months of intensive computer simulations and technical investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.
It's good to know they took the time to work out all the conversions to and from metric.
I wonder did they simulate switching the damn communication channels on this time!
Those Martians better watch out. When radar is deployed, speeding tickets are soon to follow.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just imagine how motivated to find water they'll be when they're marooned!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hence the "Express". Any longer trip and it would be the Local ;)
If I recall, the Viking missions took just inside a year to arrive at Mars; 10 months or so. seven months is pretty good speed...
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
It has proven difficult enough to keep people healthy and sane in Mir Space Station for any substantial period of time. Mir has proved that it is possible, but that's in a reletively large stationary object, not a spacecraft. The technology is certainly not with us for manned missions to Mars just yet and most of the lessons learned from Mir are with the Russians rather than NASA. I think NASA will need to do some long term studies of their own before committing anything other than chimps to the great beyond. Aside from the survival of the astronauts (whatever species they may be), I suspect we will have to get a great deal better at rocketry and robotics before manned missions are on the agenda.
For a moment there, I misread the title as ESR to Deploy Mars Express Radar and I thought, what the heck is Eric Raymond doing now?!!
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Houston, we have a problem.
That was classic intercourse!
The first time I saw the headline I read it as "ESA to destroy Mars..."
They could have launched it to rendezvous with ISS, and then deploy everything (once it's in space, there's no more need for a nosecone), test the whole contraption and send it on its way.
That way they could have done something if deployment had failed.
The vikings sailed to mars?!?!?! And they didn't even get credit for America, what a rip off.
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What will the tinfoil hat crowd like Richard C. Hoagland say about MARSIS radar images, especially when MARSIS does the radar imaging of the Cydonia region of Mars, probably late this year?
I know that many want a 2 way trip, but for the first one, it would be better to send a small group on a 1 way trip. We will need to send supplies every so often, but it would be possible for them to live on the planet and probably only need but several trips.
As to volunteers, I would (but I am too old; 45). I am sure that there are others with the same willingness to go conqueror a frontier.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If they were unsure if they were going to use it, why did they build it and attach it to the spacecraft to begin with?
Europeans have arrived.
The ideas and technology was developed in the 1960's by Freeman Dyson, and was called "Project Orion". The project, I believe, was a sub-project of Project Plowshare - the "Atoms to Peace" initiative to look for peaceful uses of atomic energy beyond nuclear reactors. Orion was a true "heavy lift" vehicle - 200 tons to Mars from Earth's surface would have been EASY. Unfortunately, it had an ultimate downside of the fact that it used the energy of multiple nuclear explosions to power it (and all the attendent issues with fallout, among other problems). Also, because of what powered it and the need to keep them small - new designs for the nuclear bomb "propellant" created working designs for miniature nuclear bombs (few kiloton range, IIRC - as small as a basketball) - which were immediately classified, of course (ie, "suitcase" nukes). The project did get to the point of building working model craft that were propelled by explosions generated with "plastic" explosives detonated behind the model - this was done by the company General Dynamics. Other testing was done on the ablative properties of the pusher plate, what could be done to protect it, how fast it would lose material to the nuclear blast, etc - as well as what could be done for sheilding of the crew, etc (IIRC, a tank of water was to be used between the floor of the cabin and the pusher plate/drive system).
It has been proposed that such machines be built in orbit, a little bit at a time, then gradually moved out of orbit and "launched" (and, if the acceleration is kept at a steady rate, simulation of around 1G "gravity" is possible within the craft as well). However, such craft would have to deal with the term "nuclear", and the irrational fear it inspires in people (I am not trying to say all radiation is safe, nor am I saying that we should resume above ground "testing" or such - but use as a propulsion system in space, why not? Where is the danger?)
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Imagine how much more can be accomplished! Combine all the cost of all the landers and satellites to Mars and compare it to a manned mission. I'm willing to bet the cost will be very similar and more can be done in a shorter amount of time.[tt]
Keeping humans alive just for the trip to Mars is hugely expensive. And getting them back requires dozens of robotic missions just in non-scientific preparations, like generating fuel and water, so you still need the robotic technology.
All in all, you can probably fly hundreds of robotic missions to Mars for the cost of a single manned mission. And those robotic missions will generate a lot more useful data and scientific results than a few astronauts walking around on the surface.
I'm sorry if Hollywood gave you the impression that a manned mission is a piece of cake, but it isn't. Even a manned mission to the moon (far more useful and feasible at this point) would be a major undertaking.
"To send a couple hundred kilogram human"
what is that the fatest guy you can find?
200kg = 440lb
Faster and cheaper...
The radar should get a massive return from the metallic parts of Beagle2 (assuming it hit Mars.)
troll tuesday ? it must be an american schoolchild playground thing
keep pushing buttons [tt]
I read somewhere that any manned mission costs around ten times as much as a robotic one for the same target. That means you could send ten robotic ones for the price of one human mission. Each probe maybe won't be as capable as the human mission, but they make up for that by redundancy. If you send ten robotic probes and half of them fail, you still have five successful probes. If half a human mission fails, you don't have a single mission left. And even if it doesn't fail, it can't go to ten different locations simultaneously.
With better robotics, the human/robot cost ratio is likely to become more pronounced, not less. The human body isn't likely to adapt to the vacuum of space within the next few million years, and humans would still rely on robots to babysit their life support systems for them.
Humans may come in handy to do important things robots cannot yet do very well, but their primary motivation appears to be fame, the planting of a flag in a worthless desert on a planet far, far away.
"First foot on Mars!" - "Yeah, big deal. But robots took the first footage."
Have you actually done the math? One very good way to estimate the cost of a space mission is to assume that the cost per pound is constant. That means sending 1000 pound to mars costs exacty ten times less than sending 10,000 pounds to mars.
When you send people you need amoung other things a rocket that they can use the launch themselves off of mars with. Such a rocket would be quite large. Also you need years worth of food and water for the two way trip and so on and so on.
Just add up the mass. We could send robots to mars for decades at a total cost of less thaen one manned mision.
OK send people if you like but the reason you send then is certainly NOT to save money. The trouble with people is that they need a return trip so you are forced to fly a "Mars to Earth: missions off of mars where there is no industrial infrastructure in place. Everything needed for a return missin has to be send ahead of the people.
I don't know what the spacecraft looked like, but I recall it carried Beagle 2 to Mars as well. Deployment of the radar booms was to take place after releasing Beagle 2. It could very well be that Beagle 2 prevented the tests you suggest, or at least would have made them very expensive. They could have designed the spacecraft to allow for mechanical deployment tests even with Beagle 2 in place, but then how would you know those test results would be relevant to the situation in Mars orbit?
Anything can be tested in advance, except your ability to test things you didn't think of testing in advance. In hindsight, everybody else is stupid.
The three radar booms of MARSIS were initially to have been deployed in April 2004, towards the end of the Mars Express instrument commissioning phase. They consist of a pair of 20-metre hollow cylinders, each 2.5 centimetres in diameter, and a 7-metre boom. No satisfactory ground test of deployment in flight conditions was possible, so that verification of the booms' performance had to rely on computer simulation. Just prior to their scheduled release, improved computer simulations carried out by the manufacturer, Astro Aerospace (California), revealed the possibility of a whiplash effect before they locked in their final outstretched positions, so that they might hit the spacecraft.
So here's the problem. They designed this system based on computer simulations that turned out to be inadequate. It wasn't until years later that complete simulations were done which raised the possibility that deploying the radar could damage the spacecraft.
Why wasn't that discovered earlier? These kinds of issues should be raised and detected during the design phase, not once the craft is already in orbit around Mars! It's a lot easier to fix things here on Earth than forty million miles away.
I can't help thinking that they were trying to save money up front, so they could only afford a limited set of simulations. Then after the thing was launched they found money for more extensive simulation runs, which showed the problem (and led to yet even more extensive and expensive simulations, which gave them the courage to go through with the deployment anyway).
We've all seen cases like this, where there's never time and money to do it right, but then there's time and money to do it over again later. That may not be so bad in the office environment, but when you're talking about a spacecraft, it points to skewed priorities and inadequate management.
I'm curious how they are going to handle the data processing of the radar return data. Past spaceborne synthetic aperture radar systems have generated enormous amounts of data that had to be recorded or relayed to Earth for processing into usable images and data products. Earth-Mars communication links are usually slow.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The close orbit was actually not very relevant. The distance was not substantially more close than it is every other year anyway. It was only a matter of a few days to a few weeks less of a trip.
Earth goes around the sun once every year. Mars on the other hand goes around once per roughly 1.8 years. Now if you imagine two concentic circles which are the orbits of Earth and Mars, you'll understand that Earth will pass close to Mars quite often (every 26 months to be exact). The only difference between how close exactly it will come results from the fact that Mars' orbit is not perfectly round. But the difference is really not very substantial.
Add to that the fact that you don't fly "straight out" to Mars. What you do is increase your velocity around the sun so that you go onto a "transfer orbit" that takes you sort-of spiraling out from the Earth's orbit (which is closer to the sun) so that you end up at Mars' orbit. So the actual distance you travel to get from Earth to Mars is quite a bit longer than the actual distance between Earth and Mars at the time of the launch.
Just to give a rough idea of how little it matters, Mars Odyssey launched in 2001 and reached Mars in just over 6 months. Mars Climate Orbiter launched in 1998 took 9 months. The Pathfinder rover that launched in 1996 took 6 months. And so on and so forth..
I just love being modded redundant for being the first one to point out the obvious costs of stopping in orbit. The first answer was purely around the problem of synchronizing funds. Bah, mod points, give them all to me!
Mars was in its closest orbit in 60,000 years when it launched, so it reached there in 7 months.
Right, as opposed to 7 months and 20 minutes. The orbits of earth and mars are fairly circular, so the closeness of the orbit of mars+earth a few years ago is only a tiny percentage closer than they get every few years.
AccountKiller
your idea of 6 months sure is similar to the world's idea of 7 months.
Anyway.. because Kepler's first law, you don't go in the direction of the sun, you are just bound by its gravity. The orbit is kept on the mars side of earth and you just meet up with it in about 7-9 months (without any propulsion).
The other fuel-efficient option involves a gravitational slingshot with the moon.
Viking was freaking expensive, though. I mean, the landers were using a soft-landing retrorocket system, when today the only thing NASA can afford to actually implement successfully is stuff that bounces (airbags), or crashes (the DS-2 penetrators, which didn't survive... hrm, you think?); the Polar Lander was a more conventional lander, and didn't make it.
NASA could afford to splurge on tried-and-true technology back in the, "OK, we went to the moon, our budget is burning a hole in our pants, what do we do now?" phase of space exploration (Voyager and even the recent Cassini missions were offshoots of this megaproject mindset), but they're forced to be more innovative today.
I never said you go in the direction of the sun. I said you increase your velocity around the sun. That is, since you're orbiting the sun (as Earth and Mars are too), you fly out further from the sun by increasing your orbital velocity. To fly closer to the sun, to reach Venus for example, you decrease your orbital velocity around the sun. Changes in orbital velocity affect the altitude of the point in the opposite side of the orbit. For this reason, when you fly to Mars, it takes about 6-7 months at best, because that's how long it takes to get to the opposite side of the orbit.