Slashdot Mirror
Mars Phoenix Lander Given The Go
stlhawkeye writes "The BBC is running an article which indicates that NASA has green-lit Phoenix, the next Mars mission. NASA also has some details on the mission, which is centered around locating water on the red planet. Originally planned as part of the 2001 Mars Surveyor mission, the lander would launch in 2007. Among the more interesting plans for the mission is a new type of camera to photograph the landing site just before touchdown, and a robotic arm to claw through three feet of soil. The lander would touchdown near the polar ice cap. The mission is characterized as the first 'scout' mission for possible manned landing in the future."
Panic swept through the community today as the Council of Elders confirmed the rumours that the sinister blue plane third from our star is preparing to send yet another of its mechanized invaders to ravage our peaceful world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, stressed yet again that there was no cause for alarm:
When asked to comment upon an alleged image of the latest invader, circulated by a cabal of rogue scientists, K'Breel declined.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
To Firebird?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Sounds like some of the weeds in my backyard garden!
Do they plan on making the new vehicle able to eject itself from sand dunes?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Why would Nasa want to land a probe in Phoenix?
Among the more interesting plans for the mission is a new type of camera to photograph the landing site just before touchdown. Color perhaps?
NASA administrator Paul Brown was quoted as saying "We've recently discovered a pervious mission with the name Phoenix, therefor we'll need to change the name to Firebird."
This was quickly followed up by another response "Actually we've found another mission with the name Firebird, so uhhh.... we're gonna settle with FireFox".
And a few moments later, "OK, fuckit, we're just gonna call it WammyJoMammy. Take that ya name hoggin bastards"
Send Arnold
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
as far as sending humans to Mars, from what I see we don't even have plans to build a launch vehicle big enough to send three guys to the Moon! So far all talk has been on the space vehicle but nothing on how to get it to where we want it to go.
Some of the concept artwork, it shows the space vehicle in the direct ascent mode. Geez, did people forget that the lunar rendezvous mode is what made Apollo successful? Did everyone forget physics particularly the rocket equation?
What about the viking experiment?
Test for life
Will this mission carry up the second stage of the experiment? I want to know the results of a reaction to right-handed molecules on mars...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Originally part of the 2001 Mars Surveyor Program, the spacecraft that was built and tested to fly with the Mars Polar Lander mission was stored after the loss of the Surveyor. Renamed Phoenix, the craft is in preparation to finally take flight.
The damn thing was built and tested. This Phoenix is literally off the shelf.
I do wonder what elements of this design may have changed if say it had been designed in response to the recent lander successes we have had.
Why not land on its POLAR ICE CAP and melt some?
.. NASA/ESA/RSA essentially never mention it ...
HELLO!!!!
The one place we KNOW for sure there is gound water (in any form) and it gets ignored
wtf?!
-GenTimJS
I know that lots of smart people have probably thought about this and the landing site and all that, but the notion of sending a probe completely without the ability to move just strikes me as not a smart idea. Even the ability to move very slow would seem to greatly increase the chances that this probe will yield interesting results.
You've obviously never been to Houston in July. Phoenix is hot, but it's a dry heat.
But your post raises serious issues. Why is NASA, an arm of the US Government, sending out aggressive missions to US cities? It really almost sounds silly, and would be funny if it weren't such a serious concern.
I believe this is all a sham, and that the real mission will be, get this: to Mars. Call me crazy, but I think "Mars" isn't just a code name. In my theory, Phoenix is the code name!
Now, I know people are going to laugh and make jokes about tin hats, but it really makes you stop and think.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
It is ironic that NASA will actually call this the Phoenix Lander. It will really be in Arizona's Painted Desert, which isn't far from Phoenix.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
The mission is characterized as the first 'scout' mission for possible manned landing in the future."
What were those two rovers doing there then?
"For Great Justice."
I wish the ESA's Mars probes had this. Then we could've finally answered the question of whether ESA's Beagle 2 landed in a crater, or whether it created a crater. ^.^
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I wonder what purpose this camera would serve? I mean, what is the point of photographing the landing site just before touchdown? What do we achieve? At best we will have a before and after image. Coupled with retro engines, that will probably be blowing up dust, the 'before' picture of the landing site is not even going to be 'pristine'!
And it is not as if the lander could take evasive action at the last minute if it spotted some Little Green Men!
All views my own. Anyone else with the same views needs to have his/her head examined.
...without the Expensive Hardware Lobbing scorecard. Play along at home.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
When I was growing up, I expected us to have made a manned landing on Mars by now. I fear that NASA's bureauscoliocis has made that event ever-more unlikely under the current bureaucracy.
Crow T. Trollbot
NASA is saying that they are using even more advanced designs and materials on th Phoenix mission.
Looks like it is true too, just check out the Robotic Claw they designed for digging!
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
On slashdot. It's cheaper.
You say that like it's a good thing(!)
"Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?
No; for some pretty obvious reasons: one obvious one being, you exclude anyone not using that particular browser. I thought everyone realised that was a Bad Thing - or maybe you haven't been one of those people who can't use their online bank because the bank decided to arbitrarily depend on IE. One can only hope that accessibility laws will put an end to such stupidities.
It's not surprising that both browser products have memory leaks. However one could reflect deeply on the differences in responsibility and approaches to remediation. In Firefox's case - being open source - you have complete transparency; you can file a bug on it, check the bug db, or even fix it yourself (don't laugh). In M$'s case, all you can do is kiss your money goodbye and hope they fix it "one day".
The same goes for all the rest of their system, too. It is not always obvious what a disturbing abdication of rights using a closed system is. A friend recently told me of a Visual $tudio crash triggered by a few \b backspace characters in a print statement. Not such a big deal, I thought at the time; but I found myself reflecting on his story later. Eventually the true horror of the situation sank in, which is that we have to completely trust the ability and goodwill of the vendor to deal with any and all issues in their O/S. That is no small responsibility and there is not much evidence that M$ is capable of fulfilling their end of the bargain. I would postulate, after RMS of course, that no closed and proprietary system on the scale of M$ products can be adequately maintained by one vendor. And of course maintenance becomes irrelevant when major "rewrites" are involved, such as have been prescribed by Longhr0n to fix W1ndows' fundamental ills (ref Spolsky on rewrites, Things You Should Never Do what a dead-end that is, and for putting in place viable alternatives./p
We do have warp drive - Phoenix is ready to launch! Now the question is whether we greet the Vulcans peacefully or do a "In a Mirror, Darkly" and pull out a shottie on them...hmm...
twit
This probe is vital to national security. We cannot risk further terrorist attacks on our turbinium mining operations.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
kg/am
In fact, this is what they should do: Build a gigantic ship with a hull large enough to contain billions and billions of gallons of water. Then, pump water from the oceans through a desalination plant and right into this ship. The water would be transported to Mars this way. Another ship would carry seeds, plants, and soil. All of this would be taken to the most opportune spot and placed there. Perhaps a crater could be filled with the water and then the soil and plants could be planted around it. After several hundred missions like this, there could be quite a number of lakes on Mars, with lots of plant life around them, which would create more oxygen in the air and allow a working natural cycle to begin.
This would have added benefits. There are some (misinformed) scientists on this planet who believe that global warming will cause ice caps to melt, which will raise the level of the oceans and cover the entire earth. Kind of like what's on the third page of Genesis, but then no Slashdotter reads the Holy Bible. Anyway, by removing a lot of water from Earth and using it to create lakes on Mars, we would eliminate the risk of drowning in the waters (which won't happen), the result of an overheating world (which also won't happen), and we would also create many square miles of land rich in nutrients previously untapped, which could be used to grow healthy foods for those who are starving (which is more a result of political problems in third world countries than a result of lack of land space to grow food).
This would be worth millions of dollars in investment.
Science advisors: Mr. President, we're going to launch a "scout" robot mission that will land near the polar ice caps on Mars.
.It'll find him.
Bush: I don't know fellas. Yeah, it sounds cool, but we're searching for Bin Laden right now. How is that going to help us?
Science advisors: (huddle together and discuss, then one clears his throat) Mr. President, if you remember in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, the Empire sent a probe to the Hoth System to find the location of the secret rebel base. The probe we're sending will be very similar.
Bush (excited now): That's totally awesome! So if Bin Laden is hiding on the secret base in the Hoth system, this probe will find him?
Science advsors: Er, yeah. Sure Mr. President. It . .
Bush: Good. Get cracking. Now when we find out where Bin Ladin is, we have AT-ATs we can deploy, right?
Science advisors (trying not to laugh): We're working on that now, sir.
Bush: Well what are ya waiting for! Have all the money you want! Let's send those probes out!
The Internet is generally stupid
In a related vein, new laboratory studies theorize that terrestrial microbes that hitchhike on our Mars-bound spacecraft could survive the journey and harsh Mars UV environment indefinetely, and even possibly grow if they found water ice.
NASA's policy on this is summarized here.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Let this lander have a "tone" system for determining status during Entry Descent and Landing (EDL). These tones are simple radio signals (256 of them in total, if I recall) that sent out simple program and error states (2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, 4G, Chute Deploy, Impact, etc), and also have the effect of sending back nice doppler data giving us an idea of where these landers are. They work nicely because it's an extremely basic analog signal that can be sent out even if you're wrapped up in airbags, falling at 5G with your heat shield on fire, or if you're tumbling end to end in a firey death.
;)
I'm almost at the point of saying that retro-rocket fired landers are less reliable than their airbag repelling cousins. The airbag method has worked 3 for 3 in the past 8 years. Retrorockets have failed on the single attempt. But I don't think this is a landing technology problem. Landing on the surface of another planet is risky in the best of circumstances (Just before MER-A/B EDL'd I personally gave each of them a 50/50 chance of landing), but if your software isn't perfect, you're screwed.
Regardless, these tone style systems are critical for learning from our mistakes. They make for great TV as well... Beats waiting around for 20 minutes biting your nails.
Most of the larger corporations in Europe are ready to switch, having done extensive development work with FOSS tools internally. However, they never exposed their efforts since the vast majority of governments are completely tied with Microsoft and would never consider anything else.
Doesn't it strike anyone as unusual that it actually makes headlines if a town like Munich turns to linux? Shouldn't there be many more initiatives like that in a healthy market place ?
One reason for this complete lockin is that Europe still hasn't grown together (and might actually fall apart yet more after the failed elections about the new EU constitution in France and Netherlands), and individual governments don't seem to have the guts or the power anymore to stand up against an industy giant and monopolist.
They need to call a continental committee and write it up as an amendement #1,567,804 on page 57,119,328 of their EU Constitution Defining What Rights The Glorious Motherland Of Europe Benevolently Grants It's Cogs^H^H^H^HCitizens. But they are busy now adding the amendment banning women from shaving their under arms or the other one defining the acceptable Pantone colors for cheese wrappers.
Or in 10 years open source might well be illegal there.
What is this guy talking about? Europe needs to take a more proactive approach to open source or risk missing out. So what?? I get to use great open source software from somewhere else?
Whatever..
People in the US had just watched the Japanese automakers spend a decade kicking their US competitors in the nuts, and now they were fixin' to do our IT industry. Except that it didn't exactly happen that way. It's possible that it did some good; maybe it's responsibel for a lot of fuzzy logic being built into consumer goods. And it may have shaken loose some US government money in grants and contracts for our domestic AI people.
After a while, you begin realize that fear is one of the few ways somebody with an agenda can nudge the ship of state in one direction or another. It's not always a bad direction, it's just supported with invalid arguments. Like the classic example of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, getting education reform because of the "emergency" of falling SAT scores. The reason Johnny couldn't read was that the Johnnies of the world never had been able to read. We just didn't know because we only tested kids ranking above him, the kids going to college. Because Johnny now has to go to college, he has to take the test.
The thing is, we did need ed reform, not because Johnny is stupider than he was in years past, but for the same reason Johnny is being forced to go to college: the economy needs more highly educated workers and less uneducated ones. Right priorities, wrong reason.
Same pretty much applies here:
The illogic is stunning, if you think about it. Even supposing that somehow Europe is going to fall behind, if somebody else is going to make a product and share it with you for free, why does this matter?
The reason it matters is control of your destiny. European companies and organizations of all sizes will be readily able to get software tailored to their needs. If Open Source becomes the dominant paradigm in the next decade or two, then the software industry itself will be transformed to be a software services industry. If it does, it will be because this model fits customer needs better, and if that's true it means customers who don't have a OSS strategy will be at a competitive disadvantage. It doesn't matter if the programmers doing the work are located in Paris or Bangalore; do whatever is economically most efficient.
It's not about moving to open platforms. It's about brandishing a stick they can show when negotiating with Microsoft. We're sure to see a silent nice fat contract pretty soon.
Crack is on moderators.
You can't handle the truth.
Do you ever get tired of posting variations of the same joke on every Mars-related story, and always getting modded to Score:5, Funny?
Sorry, dumb question, I know.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Use metric not American measurements.
The last time you forgot this the lander crashed into Mars.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sorry, that name's already taken. ;)
R.Mo
It's not an either/or decision.
For example, the arm must be fairly strong for digging. You could put passive wheels on the thing and push/pull it with the arm. You could make the bottom a smooth bowl, which would mean it would slide down any incline, but could be moved fairly easily on flat terrain with the arm.
If it moves slowly, it needs almost no built-in intelligence for that, can get by with a single low gear, and has no extra power requirements--you just move it a few inches between commands.
If any of that doesn't work, you are no worse off than if you hadn't included it, except, of course, for the scientific equipment its weight displaced.
I'm just telling you, my gut feeling is that the tradeoff would be worth it.
I'm more impressed by the fact that he actually makes the first post on Mars stories so consistently.
I suppose the informative rating is from those genuinely interested in finding out what happens next. We're talking about the future of the human race here people! At any rate, it's better than 75% of the other comments.
The main problem of the MPL was the rocket descending method.
I don't know if this is the best option. The bouncing airbag was very successfull, so I hope JPL get lucky this time with RetroRockets!
Go Phoenix Goooooooooooooooooo!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
If you really want to read about it, you can go Here, Here and/or Here.