Mars Recon Orbiter Nearing Mars Orbit

DarkNemesis618 writes "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched 12 August 2005, has nearly completed its 7 month journey to the Red Planet. At 9:24 pm GMT, the MRO is scheduled to fire its thrusters to slow it down enough to enter Mars orbit. NASA scientists are concerned about this final step for the orbiter as Mars has a history of 'swallowing' probes, orbiters, and landers sent to the Red Planet. What makes it more difficult is the delay time between NASA computers on earth and computers on board the orbiter. There is about a 12 minute delay between when data is sent from Earth to the time the orbiter's receivers pick it up, and vice versa. Because of this, onboard computers will handle the burn which adds to the risk."

Comments

Re:Good PR

[MichaelSmith]

much cheaper and safer than manned (or wo-manned) spaceflight

Says who? Somebody who doesn't want to fly? Watching stuff on TV is always safer than actually going places but I will be stuffed if I am going to waste my life doing that.

Nobody is forcing you to go to mars. Don't project your fears on to other people.

Major Case of CYA?

[Waffle Iron]

For days all the headlines I've seen about this mission talk mainly about how risky it is. It looks like NASA has learned to saturate the PR channels with pessimism so that if things don't work out, people just figure "oh well", and if they do work out, NASA looks heroic for overcoming the odds.

Re:Success determined months ago

[odyaws]

Where a mission depends on preprogrammed intelligence to orbit safely, the success was really decided months ago when they sealed it in the launcher. It's good that humans are driving it to the last second, they put their energy into it, and error checked and corrected during production.

This isn't quite true. All missions of this type do multiple software patches in flight (even complete rebuilds). Things are by no means locked in at launch. The sequences to actually execute a critical event like orbit insertion are probably uploaded sometime in the week before the event, and changes are sometimes made mere hours ahead of time. This is particularly true for deep space missions like this where no spacecraft just like it has ever flown before, because controllers typically learn critical lessons about how the bird performs in flight that need to be incorporated into the critical even sequences.