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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.
____
~ |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.
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.
"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?
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
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?).
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/
1. The early Atlas rockets were known for exploding on the pad when they had a Mercury capsule mounted on them. You see, the spacecraft was a far heavier payload than the Atlas was designed to carry. They were originally intended to carry a modest nuclear warhead, not an astronaut and all the things needed to keep him alive. All the weak points in the Atlas were eventually strengthened, and it went on to lauch 4 guys into orbit without much trouble(Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, and Cooper all rode Atlases).
In any case, you did notice, didn't you, that they're using an Atlas 5? Don't you think that after four more (numbered)generations, this just might be a more reliable rocket than guys in the '60s could ever wish for?
2. And the stuff about Glenn's flight? He was only ever scheduled for three orbits. Both his flight and Carpenter's flight were planned this way. If both proved to be successful, ony then would they try for more ambitious flights. Go take a look at the book Deke!, written by "chief" astronaut Deke Slayton. He goes into a lot of details of some of the planning of many of the missions.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, while I mostly agree with you, I also realize that since I'm living in a country with a democratic(ish) government, the sentiments of the majority will dictate(more or less) national policy. If the masses don't care for piloted space flight, neither will their representatives or sentators, which will eventually lead to the pathetic funding piloted space flight receives. I also think that, even with the limited budget, if the piloted space flight guys had permanenly grounded the shuttle after the Challenger accident and funneled all the shuttle budget after that into one or more R&D projects aimed at building a newer vehicle, we'd be much better off now. 20/20 hindsight, eh? Isn't it great?
I'd rather be flying
"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.
there are no rain forests or decent atmosphere on mars...so what would be the benefit? lording over two dead planets?
live in domes there, live in domes here... and if we can teraform mars, we'd most likely be able to fix earth much more easily
just failing to see the connection between reaching a dead world and the fate of our own
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
Actually, I was born about the time Apollo was finishing up... reading history is where I get my information. Quoting the book I mentioned above, page 106(second paragraph of the "Delta Seven" chaper in case editions are different: "Both MA-6 (John's flight) and MA-7 (mine) were intended to last for three orbits. In the original planning for Mercury, that had been intended as the culmination of the whole program It was the creation of the Apollo program, then Gemini, not to mention the Russians with their day-long flight, that encouraged us think about longer flights." You'll forgive me if I take the word of a Mercury astronaut over your's. :-)
I'd rather be flying
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.