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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."
EVERY fucking time there is a post about mars, this guy posts this SAME text, every single time. Mod this DOWN damnit! We're sick of seeing this filth.
Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.
One thing I've always wanted to seen done. Take all the US and Russian engineers, put them together, give them a blank check and the goal of colonizing space along with permission to use any and all knowlege (including classified) that they posses. And just wait to see how long it is until I'm living in orbit.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The Atlas V wasn't originally an ICBM. The Atlas was originally, but the Atlas II, IIAS, IIIA and IIIB were just normal launch vehicles. I work and did work on the latest four of these (I'm too young to have worked on the original Atlas and Atlas II) and can tell you that each is VERY different from the next iteration.
It would be like saying your current Pentium IV PC is anything like the Pentium you had 10 years ago. ISA bus is gone, RAM is different, video cards are AGP instead of ISA or PCI, floppy drives aren't as prominent, *ATX form factor and power supply connectors instead of AT, etc. There are so many architectural changes (aside from speed and internal cpu design) that they are barely considered similar.
IANAL, but I play one on
However, even that is not pertinent here. When launching a spacecraft, it is beneficial always to launch eastward, because then you get an extra 400m/s boost due to the Earth's rotation, which can save a considerable amount of rocket fuel. (Fuel is exponential in the speed boost you need.) The 1.5 hour-per-day launch window represents the time during each day when your launch location is moving in such a way as to give that 400m/s boost in roughly the right direction to get to the trajectory you want to use to get to Mars.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
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.