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NASA's Next Mars Rover
An anonymous reader writes "In August 2012, the NASA rover Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on the surface of Mars. The size of a small car, it's four times as heavy as predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, and comes with a large robot arm, a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven meters, a percussive drill and a weather station. Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. Wired has some high-resolution photographs from lab that is putting the next rover together."
Curiosity's destination on Mars has reportedly been chosen: Gale Crater. The 150-kilometer wide depression 'includes a tantalizing 5-kilometer-high mound of ancient sediments, [and] may have once been flooded by water.' The Planetary Society blog has a couple of additional pictures and a time-lapse video of the delicate, lengthy process of preparing the lander for transport. Curiosity will launch near the end of 2011. No cats were harmed during its construction.
Oh, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238
Oh goody! My explosive space modulator has finally been delivered! Now I can blow up Mars. Because it's obstructing my view of Jupiter!
From #4:
"If it works, it will be spectacular,"
If it doesn't , it will probably be more so, but we won't see it.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
...a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven meters...
I soooo want this on my car.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"no cats were harmed during its construction".
Well of course not. That would obviously come after activation. Good thing they are planning to send the malevolent entity to a feline-free Mars.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mars eats orbiters for lunch and landers for dinner, unfortunately. It's called "rocket science" for a reason. If we limited our efforts to sure-fire bets, we'd still be squinting through telescopes and wondering who dug the canals.
I'm confident that if anyone can pull off a project this ambitious, the JPL folks can. If they fail, I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
AT LAST, the denizens of the blue planet expose their true intentions! No mere "explorers", these foul robotic beings. Despite their deceptive code names, these invaders from the blue world are no innocent space-mariners; they're Vikings! All they seek is an opportunity to wipe not only us from the world, but the spirit of our world itself from the solar system.
I have in my tentacle one particularly threatening communications intercept; hear the enemy in their own words.
Despite what you may have heard from certain circles of subversives, their own words betray them. They are not just here for the sake of curiosity!
K'Breel went on to confirm reports that the expected invader would indeed by powered by an advanced Pew-238 power source to extend its range and lifespan, K'Breel reminded all citizens that its expected capabilities would still be vastly inferior compared to their own recreational vehicles: "Our hot rods get a million klorbs to the frelpor; the blue planet ain't just across a minor tributary from Valles Marineris!"
When a junior intelligence analyst suggested that the intercepted transmission in question was merely referring to an animated cartoon that was more than thirty years old, there was a gelsac-shattering kaboom. (It was described as "lovely".)
A small robot dutifully removed the dust from the remains of the Speaker's disintegrating pistol and performed a short piece of traditional music while the Speaker exited the stage via an iris-shaped door after concluding his address with a brief "That is all, citizens."
As an engineer, that skycrane contraption sets off my alarms of being an extremely complicated and scary solution. It lacks the simplicity of earlier landers with a sequence of chutes, retro rockets, and airbag expansions. Though still being single point failures, they were not actively controlled and could use simple backup timers to make sure everything deployed if at all possible. (Full disclosure: I'm a JPL engineer, but not in EDL and not working on MSL, and of course my opinions are purely my own).
Of course for a mobile vehicle that large, I can't think of a better solution that could fit on a launch vehicle, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
Given that, though, if it fails, i doubt it would be resurrected. MSL already has a bad track record of delays and problems, and a reputation as a money sink (though not as bad as JWST). Also, I have a bias towards more smaller and cheaper missions (and as a deep space navigator, rovers are quite dull for me professionally) so I would actually rather have the money spent on more New Frontiers and Discovery class missions.
Heh, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because I haven't followed his work since the Cassini episode. But before that, he actually was a decent science writer, someone who could bring leading-edge physics down the mountain and talk intelligently to the people who are asked to fund it.
That's why I was so disillusioned when he went off the deep end. Science desperately needs good communicators like Kaku... and it needs them to not go full retard.
"I'll be happy with raising my taxes by the $1.50/year it will cost to try again."
So would I. Unfortunately they're going to cut our taxes by $1.50 and spend the money anyway.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Sadly, Six cats are used as parts of the foot(Paw) control mechanism, since feedback from Earth would be too slow to enable the needed precision.
Not to mention it's the only way to ensure it lands upright!
While every step has been taken to keep these cats happy and well fed, there are no provisions for these cats to be repatriated Earth...
Believe me, when they see how much sand is there it will be just fine with them. Imagine a whole world, where you could pee as much as you like with no-one to complain.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, it runs VxWorks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers
My understanding (slight as that may be) is that the vehicle is too heavy to land by parachute in the thin Martian atmosphere.
BTW, what did you think of the DIRECT architecture?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, I get butterflies thinking about this thing landing. I'm told that the skycrane has been tested extensively on Earth and the engineers involved are not any more worried about that than about the chain of other more mundane things that can go wrong between launch and instrument check-out in situ. As to previous elegant solutions, I think I would have been just as antsy about the beach-ball landing scheme of the MER had I been in the biz back then (disclosure: I'm a scientist at JPL).