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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.'"
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
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.
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.