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NASA Phoenix Mission Ready For Mars Landing
Several readers relayed the press release from JPL about the upcoming landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on May 25. It's going to set down in the north polar regions and look for indications of whether conditions have ever been favorable for microbial life. "Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour... In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour... before its three legs reach the ground. Confirmation of the landing could come as early as 7:53 p.m. EDT. 'This is not a trip to grandma's house. Putting a spacecraft safely on Mars is hard and risky,' said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 'Internationally, fewer than half the attempts have succeeded.'"
Is it just me, or is this just not really the right stuff anymore?
It just seems like a way to earn a good salary and have a lot of fun!
I am sure a lot of slashdot readers are interested (I know I was) in how does this beast actually look like. So here's a very good article on the Phoenix lander with a couple of fantastic artistic concepts based on the actual Phoenix.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Here we go again, just another poorly written slashvertisement for.. uhmm..
Actually, this is a really good posting.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
NASA: Oh my, Mars, what big craters you have!
GrandMars: All the better to SWALLOW you with.. grrrr!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
What if they find a way of slowing down to 16kmh, they abandon the mission?
I'm not talking about considering compressing time continuum to extend those 7 minutes, but it seems there are possibilities that could still be considered, like hardening the legs, finding a softer spot to land, finding a lower landing spot to extend braking time, etc.
This is not a trip to grandma's house
You've never met my grandma. As a kid, going there felt like a 25,000 mph trip, and there are still skidmarks from my shoes trying wildy to decelerate while my parents dragged me into the house. And about half of the times they tried taking me there, it failed too...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
how many international missions with the end goal of landing on mars have there been?
this guy makes it sounds like more than just a handful, and I can only recall 3.
is there some vast international mars landing conspiracy that i'm unaware of?
#space on irc.freenode.net is hosting a Phoenix Landing Party on Sunday, May 25 to share in this momentous occasion for planetary exploration. We'll be following NASA TV through landing, then ogling the raw images when they are released several hours later. Historically, #space has been a hub for collaborative efforts in image processing by the space enthusiast community (Mars Exploration Rovers, Huygens, etc). Hope you can join us!
Ah. That'll depend on whos grandma we're talking about, wouldn't it?
Come by for a visit folks and help us celebrate the landing, you won't be disappointed.
They're just learning from past mistakes.
Much like the experienced worker that estimates a month for a two hour job.
"21,000 kilometers per hour..." - Arggh! Ed (Weiler)! some of your guys are using metric units! Have a quick check round the lab and make sure they all are! Maybe the quiet guy in the corner in charge of retro rockets is still using miles not kilometres!
;-)
I'm sure you have, but you know, we've been here before...
Just because you do something a couple times, it does not mean that it is no longer hard and risky.
I work in a factory, and the first time that someone uses something like a table saw, they are nervous. I is a dangerous tool and could seriously injure them if they are not careful. But most of the injuries I see cause by power tools are by people who have gotten too comfortable with them and have forgotten about the risk involved.
commonplace != safe and easy
It's always hard and risky, even the 10th time you do it. Mostly because each success raises the bar for the next mission. First you land a shoebox sized rover, then a golf cart, then something the size of a Mini. Those are orders of magnitude more difficult in turn.
Paid quite well? JPL pays slightly under industry wages, but it IS a nice place to work, and glamorous. NASA pays substantially lower (government civil service jobs.. but there are some intangible benefits that are hard to quantify, and some that are)
People do get fired for making mistakes.
It wasn't JPL or NASA who supplied the data in pounds instead of the contractually required Newtons. JPL has been metric for decades.
My blog
Wow, that isn't a fast transfer rate. That's about 1KB/s, 4KB/s, and 16KB/s, respectively. I guess you don't need too much more -- but still, I bet it's slower than they would like. The high resolution camera alone probably produces images that are a few megabytes in size. Let's say the images are like 4MB -- Transferring 4 MB at 1KB/s takes about an hour!
Given the slow xfer speeds and limited hardware they probably use -- I think it would be fun to be a programmer for NASA. That's one of the few applications where efficiency of communications, small memory footprint and efficient CPU usage probably still count for something.. I bet you everything they do when it comes to the software running on the lander tries to be as efficient as possible (especially communications-wise).
Also, isn't there something like an few minutes of latency for light to reach us from Mars? You can't even really do any really realtime interaction with the onboard computer on the Phoenix lander.. Imagine typing into a shell and waiting a minute for your characters to appear! Ouch! So I bet you they have to premeditate a lot of the changes they make to the software or operating environment way a head of time -- they probably just upload scripts of commands when updating the software or filesystem, etc.
I wonder how much freedom they give the people communicating with the lander. Do they triple-check every command sent to it to make sure noone does the inadvertent 'rm -fr
Cut them some slack! Most of us slashdot readers have trouble getting an Apache install right the first time through. These guys are doing nearly the impossible and they don't get much of a chance to fix any mistakes.
There are like THOUSANDS of possible things that could go wrong with the landing that DON'T because the engineers did their job. If you have ever engineered anything, you know how much you have to think ahead. They sat really hard and long and tried to perfect the landing process.
But it's darned hard. Mars is really really really far away. The data transfer speed to the lander is like 16KB/s on a good day. You can't send realtime flight data and have a pilot fly the thing with a joystick (because of the latency and the bandwidth is just too limited). You just have to build smart control logic into the thing and hope for the best.
And -- what can ruin the whole thins is -- just one largish rock in the wrong place and the whole mission is a failure. Historically, only 5 out of 13 landers made it to the surface operational!
So, stop being a douche and start appreciating how hard this all is. And it isn't just NASA -- the Brits also tried and failed. It's hard. NASA is doing a great job. Let's see you send 100LBS of spacecraft millions of miles away and have it get there safely. It's pretty amazing it ever worked at all!
Oh and what "corporate committes"? Last I checked NASA was a government agency.
Stop thinking like a corporate douch and start thinking like a scientist. These guys are smarter than you or I and give them some respect.
According to Russian Space Web, the USSR attempted four Mars landings with only two actually reaching the planet. Of those two, only one failed upon landing.
Invenio via vel creo
Yea, we should have this Alaskan crab fishing thing down pat too, 0 fatalities. Or computer security, many people get paid well to fix that, why do we still mess that up?
It's not just NASA, the Russians and Brits fail at this too. They suck more then NASA, even.
Maybe rocketing state of the art probes to another planet and landing them there IS STILL ACTUALLY HARD AND RISKY.
Exactly... And they also landed 2 Viking crafts in 1976 without 1/10th the tools or even computers for that matter that we have now... And both missions were successful. They also put men on the moon without those tools or computers as well in under a decade where we are now proposing to do it in double the time just to recreate what they did in the 1960's.... Were these guys just luckier?? No... The difference was that these guys put aside the "hard and risky" non-accountability crap and got the job done...
The argument of 1000's of things that could go wrong are obvious as they are not the only ones who deal with predictable failure rates. All engineers (including me) do... Also since hundreds of millions of us tax payers dollars are at stake on every missions, I dont think it is unreasonable to hold people accountable for obvious failures....
I had no idea I was more than one person.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Is it me or do the solar panels on the Phoenix lander look remarkable like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_CorporationUmbrella Corporation logo? What with the reputation of Mars (Ghosts of Mars, The Red Planet, Doom, that one outer limits, etc) I'm not too sure I like a resident evil probe up there....
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
There is some nonzero chance that it will land on or near enough to a rock so as to not be properly operational. If it lands on a rock it can roll off of it and end up upside-down. Or even if it's not on a rock, but just next to one, it can't deploy its solar panels.
There is little that can be done about this practically. It's just they hope it won't happen. They chose a landing site that has few if any large rocks, and they are just hoping for the best -- but there still is a nonzero probability they will get horribly unlucky and land on a rock.
This is one example of something beyond anyone's control and that isn't an obvious failure.
I am pretty sure that OSHA would completely disagree with you...
Safety is built on putting together good procedures that you follow every time. It is only when you get careless and remove these procedures that people get hurt... Countless industrial and aircraft accidents back this up...
This is also the reason why flying is safer than it used to be, I might add... Meaning, checklists and safety procedures is what makes things reliable and safe to use...
All I am saying is I am having a hard time seeing why it is so much harder than it was in the 1970's when they landed the Viking missions, and it was the first time they ever touched down on the planet. Also, did I mention that both missions were successful...
I am not saying the job is easy, but many jobs are not. With the amount of money at stake on each mission, however, failures must to be rare, and not part of doing business. The groups in the 1960's understood this, and it is not because they had more money. It is because they accepted accountability...
Here is a great scorecard of all missions to mars showing which have succeeded, which have failed, and why: http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marsscorecard.html
Space and Computers.
Being an engineer myself, I would say that this looks like a serious design flaw to me... Meaning, if a little rock could ruin the work of thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars in project funding, and years of work, I am left scratching my head of why this landing strategy was a good idea?? I mean, as the Viking missions showed, there are more than one way to land a craft on a planet...
In short, scientists study, but all engineers are very comfortable with the idea of managed risk. It is part of nearly every design that is built. Yes, mistakes do occur from time to time, but I continue to see on every mission they do people jumping up and down whenever their craft successfully lands. The first couple of times they do this it is understandable, but after a couple of times you really have to start wondering if they are not designing their systems by looking at all the things that could go wrong, but rather just with the number of things they need to get it to get right...
Using the Alaskan crab fishing as an example is laughable at best... The only reason these guys are able to pull off the stupid things they do is because OSHA has not decided to put an end to it...
Meaning, no job is just accepted to be risky by nature, because there really is no reason for it. As OSHA has shown time and time again, safety is always built on the procedures put in place that you follow every-time. It is these procedures that keep people safe. It is only when people get lazy, and stop following the procedures that they get hurt...
Not bad; better than Apollo 17's. Mod parent up, please. For the curious, here's the Moon version: http://www.maniacworld.com/Apollo_17_Strolling_Through_The_Park.htm
it is not because they had more money Phoenix cost 520 million $ in 2008 dollars. Vikings cost 935 million in 1974 dollars (was nearly $3 billion measured in 1997 dollars, more in 2008 dollars) http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/the_actual_cost.html
It's those darn Martian death rays that are really the cause of so many lost spacecraft. You want your proof of life there it is, 50% loss of spacecraft.
wouldn't there have been at least half as many trips to mars if they weren't so hell bent on trying to figure out if there is life there? could we get on with the process of making it a habitable place instead of waisting trips on "theological i told you so" science projects?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Don't say I didn't tell you so. Enjoy the MERs while you still got 'em (you do check what they're up to every now and then, right?) and keep your fingers crossed for Phoenix at 00:30 UTC on the 26th. (Personally I will be glued to NASA TV and crapping myself at that point. Not a good combo.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
If "success" is defined as "slam something, anything, into the ground somewhere, somehow, that can still send a couple pictures back afterwards". Sure. Phoenix, of course, weighs an order of magnitude more, has to hit a landing spot chosen from science reasons (and not for "make it easy on the lander" reasons) and carries sensitive scientific instrumentation that still has to be able to do quantitative chemistry analytical work after the landing.
...and suddenly the whole thing becomes a whole lot harder. Now you tell folks that they have to do it on a fraction of the budget of Viking and you've just made it riskier.
There are four dimensions to systems engineering and at most three of them are free. Once you decide to do something fast, good AND cheap, the fourth dimension, risk, will go wherever it damn well pleases.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
The funny part with all Bush bashing is that it do make me wonder what kind of people would vote for a moron as president ;)
But then I guess most partys and leaders and such gets their share of bashing no matter who they are, and Bush may be a moron extraordinaire so I guess it's appropriate and understandable.
You use abbreviations way to much, I started with looking up LEO:
LEO - Low Earth Orbit
But then I found MSL, "lunar pie-in-the-sky" and MER.
What does it all mean?
IANAAS.
Just more euro pricks rattling the cage against nasa.. Same old garbage...
P.S. I hope they 'nasa' succeed so the euro pricks can suc-seed too!!!
This project didn't cost hundreds of millions of dollars, or anything close to that.
Yes, there is more than one way to land on Mars. But those other ways cost more money. The Phoenix project wasn't designed from scratch; it was a reasonably cheap way to get some use out of the aborted Polar Lander hardware, which otherwise would have gone to waste. So they designed it as cheaply as possible consistent with a reasonably good chance of surviving the landing. If it works, great. If not, the hardware was going to waste anyway and trying this didn't cost that much.