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Mars Orbiter Launch Delayed
Mictian writes "NASA's newest Mars probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), was originally scheduled to be launched from Kennedy Space Center Wednesday morning atop an Atlas 5 rocket. However a potential problem with the Atlas' Redundant Rate Gyro Units (RRGUs), that are part of the vehicle's flight control system, detected at Lockheed Martin's factory has caused the engineers to make sure that the two RRGUs in MRO's rocket are working, thus delaying the launch at least until Thursday morning. There is a 1.5 hour launch window daily until the end of the month."
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, was on hand to address the jubilant masses:
During the question-and-answer session that followed, when asked by a citizen whether rumours were true that the device damaged was only a minor inconvinence to the sickening inhabitants of the evil blue planet, and that in all probability the craft would be launched within a day, K'Breel ordered the citizen's summary execution. The remainder of the question-and-answer session passed in a remarkably subdued manner.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Mission Controller 1: What about the R.R.G.O.U.S.'s?
Mission Controller 2: Redundant Rate Gyros Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
R.R.G.O.U.S: GRAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHH!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
They expect to launch Thursday morning.
But its better to wait one dya, than loosing a big rocket, just to stay on shedule. Better be safe, than sorry.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Imagine if it's only a Rate Gyro Unit. They could have launched and their rate gyro might have been off.
Thank god to that engineer who figured out "let's have a Redundant Rate Gyro Unit".
The thing I don't understand is as long as it gets to outer space on the right course isn't that good enough? They arn't recovering the shuttle as this is going off into the far ether (well Mars far)
They are planning on testing the gyro unit today so they can get the launch off Thursday morning.
Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I know that a launch window is a period of time that you can launch in, but is this an environmentally created window (ex: the atmosphere being ideal at a specific time), or is this some sort of legal clearance granted by the FAA/NASA, etc?
-=Lothsahn=-
The 1.5 hours is because of the optimum time for launching to Mars due to the earth's rotation right? Darn scientists! If they'd stuck to the flat earth model we'd not have to worry about all this launch window mumbo-jumbo.
It takes almost 5 seconds searching the term in the Wikipedia.
Launch window is a term used in aerospace to describe a time period in which a particular rocket must be launched. For trips into Earth orbit almost any time will do, but if the spacecraft intends to rendezvous with another (or a planet, or other point in space) the launch must be carefully timed so that the orbits overlap at some point in the future. If the rocket does not launch in the "window", it has to wait for the next one before it can be launched.
"There is a 1.5 hour launch window daily until the end of the month.
/. ROAD TRIP!!
Anybody else thinking what I'm thinking?
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
They're a matter of when the planets are close together so that you can conveniently lob a piece of hardware from one to another, and when the Earth has rotated to point in the right direction. Closeness of Earth and Mars happens every so often as they mutually orbit the sun at different speeds, and pointing in the right direction happens once a day.
Once it's launched "Guy/Girl On Mobile:" submissions are expected to skyrocket.
"Dammit, I knew we should've loaded it with falafel instead."
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
-1, Redundant.
Love the Third Amendment?
just rewrite the onboard navigational software to have a multiton rocket moving in excess of earth's escape velocity do a 180 degree turn so it points in the right direction towards mars
with today's level of understanding of OOP and the required 49 layers of abstraction it should be as easy as baking a pie... never mind the bazillions of joules of energy wasted in reversing the momentum of a rocket
Then some black screen with the words Windows appears and some little bar on the bottom of the page moves to the right leading you to believe that this Windows is loading up stuff important to running your computer successfully and securely
There's a word you don't see every day - unless you're Stephan R Donaldson of course.
Good job!
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Every story having to do with mars, I know there's going to be a funny update in the continuing saga of the Martian Council and their plans to keep the nefarious Earthlings off their planet. Just saying that in counterpoint to the jealous asshats who keep trying to drag you down.
Yours are the best first posts ever, may you get a million more and frustrate hundreds of slimey trolls in the process.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Isn't one of the major goals of this orbiter to look for signs of water, and didn't the British orbiter recently find a "pool" of frozen water in a crater? It'll be interesting to see this orbiter's observations of the pool, especially at the resolution the size of a dinner table (compared with previous orbiters' resolution the size of a bus). Martian animal fossils, anyone?
I'd like a pony.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, they'd better this shit fixed and let's get moving already.
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My films
in the 60s, those rockets were renowned for exploding on the launch pad. In fact, if the russians hadn't put a man in orbit before the US, they would have never strapped John Glen on top of one! BTW, they brought Glen down early because they thought they had a heat shield problem because of a defective sensor (all these seamless shuttle flights have spoiled us!).
What's it gonna take to get better space program funding? Osama Bin Laden beats us to mars?
Congress, and ultimately the People of the US need to accept responsibility for the shuttle disasters because of lowered funding since the 60s,70s and the fall of the USSR. Did they delay the entire space program to roll heads at NASA after the Apollo 1 fire? No, They re-engineered the hatch and got on with it.
We've become a nation of whiners and finger pointers, and I personally think it's disgusting.
This mission will carry the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise), which is "the largest camera ever sent out of Earth's orbit and will deliver the highest resolution images of Mars yet" according to an article that adds "The camera utilizes a series of mirrors and lenses that project the image onto a cluster of CCDs rendering images with a resolution up to 20,000 pixels by 40,000 lines, an image so large that it would take 1,200 typical computer screens to fully display. The camera's high resolution will enable the identification of objects as small as a coffee table while the camera orbits 300 kilometers above the planet's surface."
Back in January 2004, there was an interesting article at Space.com about the high quality of the 1-megapixel camera used by the Spirit rover; I assume this is manufactured to similar quality control standards (although by a different team), but the article doesn't specify and the cameras are not manufactured by the same groups. The Spirit PANCAM has two CCDs whereas this has at least 14 (28?).
Interesting. From the engineers' perspective, your plan looks like this:
Re: who wants to know the random names on /.?
Someone who takes the time to investigate *who* the 'random names' are.
Sometimes you just might be surprised...
NASA website for HiRISE: http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/HiRISE/
"All glory to the Council!"
They got the iraqi information minister?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Now that seems like a lot of data. Let's see, I read somewhere it's going to image 1% of the surface of Mars. Mars has a surface area of [Googles radius, punches calculator] 1.4e+14 m^2, so 1% of that is 1.4e+12 m^2. If the smallest thing you can resolve is a coffee table, and that's about 1 m^2, then that suggests each pixel is 1 m^2, so we have 1.4e+12 pixels coming back. Full color, natch, so no less than 32 bpp, totaling 5.8 terabytes.
That's a lot of data. If it has to get back here in a year or so, that's more than 1.4 megabit/second through your deep-space radio modem, even if you transmit around the clock all year.
I conclude either it's going to take substantially more than a year, or they've actually got a deep-space radio T1.
This story doesn't have enough hyperlinks. In future, I would prefer to see every word with its own link, please.
Many thanks,
Clickman
I'm sure the risk isn't hardly worth thinking about, but I've read taht some satellites are turned narrow side on during meteor showers to reduce risks of any kind of damage. I also noticed that the Perseids peak on Friday. I was wondering if anyone has any insight on considerations that might be made in light of the proximity of dates. Is it completely not worth worrying about, is it a calculated risk, or is there already enough shielding in place in anticipation of dust encountered during the interplanetary flight?
I suppose it would be disappointing for the MRO to reach orbit, only to find out their nice new telescope has pockmarks on the lens/mirror
It's not launching from KSC, but from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station CCAFS, right next door.
Only the shuttle launches at KSC since NASA got out of the secret military launch business.
Just taking a guess here, but I'd say they'll only consider lossless compression schemes (no point in throwing away data it took $400 million to collect), and that photos of Mars are not boring enough (e.g. with vast seas of one-color pixels) to be very compressable via lossless algorithms.
Yes . . . for my bung-hole. Bee-aatch!!