Mars Express' 2nd Boom Deployment Postponed

ricshaw2k4 writes "Releasing the second MARSIS radar boom from Mars Express has been delayed after a problem with the first boom was discovered. From the BBC "Officials said 12 out of 13 segments that comprise the first boom had deployed successfully, but segment 10 was not fully locked into place." Lets just hope segment 10 wasn't eaten by the Martians!"

Comments

Stupid question

[Locke2005]

Can't they use the second boom to knock the first boom into place? Is it just me, or does having so many segments violate the "Keep It Simple, Stupid!" rule in the first place? Every joint between segments is a point of failure, it seem like 3 would be sufficient...

A "Galactic Ghoul" protecting Mars

[Rei]

I've heard it described as a "Great Galactic Ghoul" that protects Mars. At every step on the way, Mars missions have tended to be frought with problems. The Soviet program fared even worse; only about one in five Mars probes that they launched went as planned.

Some people have suggested that having humans onboard would have helped. In most cases, this is not the case. Only the Phobos probes and perhaps one Viking mission would have had a chance for humans to help the situation, since their problems were computer related. Most accidents were explosions, bad trajectories, invalid atmospheric assumptions, etc - things you don't find out about until it's too late.

In fact, one mission that was a success could have killed humans if it were to happen: Mars Global Surveyor. A solar panel was damaged (its damper arm was sheared off on launch), and dipping down into the atmosphere to brake like it was supposed to, in order to brake, would have destroyed the probe. The damage wasn't known until the first atmospheric dip, making (on an equivalent manned craft) a spacewalk for repair quite difficult if it were even possible (doubtful, given the damage, unless they brought along entire extra solar panels). NASA solved the problem by suspending aerobraking and letting the orbit circularize much more slowly - delays that humans on board would not have been able to tolerate.

It seems that there is just so many opportunities for failure en route to Mars that even if chances for a single mistake are miniscule for any given system, the overall failure rate ends up uncomfortably high. We're not going to want to skimp corners when we send people to Mars, that's for sure.

Re:ESA cursed on Mars

[jandrese]

I think if you look around you'll notice that just about every space program is a joint venture with the JPL.