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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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
To Firebird?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
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"
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.
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 of it? Many NASA missions are designed to eject the parachute a few hundred feet above the ground, then use retro-thrusters to make the touchdown. (e.g. Viking 1) It has become popular with NASA as of late to perform landings via inflatable airbags, but such a profile only works if the instruments aren't too delicate. In some cases it may be required to use retro-thrusters to prevent damage to the probe.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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!
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...
Um...I thought the Martian polar ice caps were principally composed of frozen carbon dioxide.
Please correct if I'm mistaken...
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
From this encyclopedia
In 2003, California Institute of Technology researchers Andy Ingersoll and Shane Byrne argued, on the basis of high-resolution and thermal images from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, respectively, that the Martian polar ice caps are made almost entirely of water ice - with just a smattering of frozen carbon dioxide at the surface.
Even if they are water, however, the climate at the caps is much to harsh to support human life, too damn cold, and too much seasonal change. That's the primary reason why we don't head to the poles.
That's the southern pole, the northern pole has much higher concentration of water ice. The latest theory on the reason is that the closest thing mars has to a jet stream runs from the south to the north, which evaporates the water ice and re-deposits it on the northern pole.
/ mars_poles_020320.html
Here's the story:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem
I thought they said it would be prospecting for Oil, not Water ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Crack is on moderators.
You can't handle the truth.
Not really feasible. Such a huge ship would be awfuly hard to build. And what for? Protecting what from what?
My suggestion: Space elevator with pipeline to the top. Pump the water up. (maybe as steam, this way you get desalinating and transport in one step, plus centrifugal force on the opposite side of the orbit would help pumping it up.)
Cool it in open space till it forms huge blocks of ice. Attach small, single-use maneuver engines (or small unmanned reusable crafts that would return upon releasing the ice low above Mars.) Release when the trajectory would match Mars (speed from centrifugal force/rotation of Earth). Drop on Mars. They will evaporate in the atmosphere, fall as rain. Sure they will take long to cover the distance, but you could keep sending almost a constant line of them, releasing blocks of ice daily or so, far more than any ship could transport.
(and if you need just concentrated water, not steam in atmosphere, just put them on Mars orbit, concentrate in a huge block that wouldn't all evaporate on reentry and parachute it down.)
Water has this neat advantage, that, as opposed to humans of electronic devices, it can withstand quite a lot of abuse in transport, so you may use much less gentle (and cheaper and more efficient) means to transport it.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The problem is that it is cold on Mars. And there may not be enough air pressure to really hold lots of water down for a long time. And any water vapor in the atmosphere would probably be taken away by solar winds due to Mars's lack of a magnetic field.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Looking for water on the moon is like looking for the Northwest Passage.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Well for one WATER IS HEAVY.
To life it off the earth and send it to mars would cost Trillions not Billions.
The rest of the post is as poorly thought out.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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!
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