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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.'"
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....