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Mars Express Successfully Deploys First Boom
Psiolent writes "As reported yesterday, the Mars Express team is beginning the antenna deployment process. The BBC reports that the satellite has successfully deployed the first boom of the primary antenna. The article also states that 'the mood amongst instrument team members is now said to be positive, following the problem-free deployment of the first boom.' The second boom of the primary antenna is scheduled to be deployed Sunday."
Not to counter your point (which I largely agree with), to be picky, the ion engines like DS-1 have been around for at least 25 years.
Brett
That's nice dear.
It's an ESA mission, not NASA. The fact that this is the first ESA mission to Mars makes it slightly more newsworthy, ESA has never worked at these distances before.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean you should ridicule it and call it pathetic. Good thing you're posting anonymously, because you're making quite a fool out of yourself.
Here's some examples of what you conveniently forgot:
- Two rovers on Mars, which have covered more than 10 km so far, combined, and taken tens of thousands of high resolution photos and other measurements, found solid evidence of past water, and expanded our knowledge of our closest neighbor so much that it will take years and years to even fully comprehend it all
- Huygens landing on Titan
- Cassini's elaborate tour of Saturn which is revolutionary in how much it teaches us about how the solar system came to be
- High resolution mappings of the moon, Mars, Jupiter & moons and Saturn & moons, as well as a few asteroids
- Vast amounts of experience about large scale construction work (crucial to planetary missions) and long duration living in space
- Near 100% track record of current satellite launchers, such as the Titan, Delta, Soyuz and Ariane rockets. Majorly improved from the days of Apollo
- Major advancements in adaptive optics in telescopes, which give ground based telescopes close to equal resolution to the Hubble
- First private flight to space
- The arrival of commercial companies in larger scale to the space business (Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, Starsem, etc.)
- A high number of new members of the space launch capable countries; India, Japan, China, and soon Brazil, South Korea and probably many others I've forgotten
Pretty much the only thing we haven't done is go to Mars or continue going to the moon. But going to the moon always has been a topic that is very hard to understand for many. Because it's so much further away than low earth orbit, people assume that going there is equally much more complex and hard. That's simply not the case.
The biggest challenge by far in space exploration is getting heavy equipment to go fast enough that it stays on orbit. To get to low earth orbit, you have to reach a velocity of nearly 8km per second. And the main challenge here is that you're launching through a thick atmosphere. Once you're in low earth orbit, getting to the moon only requires a very small (proportionally) amount of additional velocity. You don't burn the engines all the way to the moon - you just light them up for long enough to accelerate 2 more km/s. To go to Mars, just a tiny bit more velocity still is needed compared to going to the moon.
The navigational challenge of going to the moon is actually quite simple. We're doing orders of magnitude more complex things right now with probes like Stardust, NEAR, Cassini, Gallileo, all of the Mars probes, and for example Rosetta. Compared to what those have done in terms of navigation, going to the moon is child's play.
And of course, to land on the moon and go back to earth, all you have to do is change your velocity a little bit more. But since the moon's gravity is low and because there's no atmosphere, it's way easier than launching a rocket to space from earth.
ESA's Smart-1 probe is a good example of what we can do today. It went to the moon using less than 100kg of fuel, and using pin-point accuracy navigation. It did so hitching a ride on an empty slot of a rocket that was putting up a couple of satellites in geosynchronous orbit. With less than 100kg more fuel, and a lot of smart people, it's nor orbiting the moon.
That's how far we've come from the Challenger days. That's what you're calling pathetic.
And sure, we've had some problems too. But no more than we used to back in the Apollo days. Or have you forgotten Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Gemini 8 spinning out of control and making an emergency landing, Friendship 7 (Mercury) failing to jettison the retro rocket pack and nearly burning up on the way down, Aurora 7 (Mercury) running out of fuel, Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury again) having a hatch just suddenly blow after landing, without being commanded to do so, half the Ra
In space, no one can hear you boom. :-)
You need a medium to transmit your sounds through
But on the spacecraft, you HAVE a medium: The spacecraft itself.
I bet that there are some kind of acceleration/attitude sensors which picked the 'sound' of the boom deployment up.