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Getting the Latest Rover To Mars
derGoldstein writes "New Scientist has a great video up detailing every step of how the latest Mars rover will reach its target and get deployed. It's drastically different than the bouncing air-bag delivery system previously used (YouTube video)."
Won't all that extra propellant for the various deceleration stages add up to a lot more than the bouncing airbag thingie in the end?
"Hey, you realize that input field is in meters, right?"
Yeah, well.. first, "Get your ass to mars!"
I thought NASA learnt that a small number of complex and expensive projects wasn't the way to go in the 90s. Smaller, cheaper, faster, but more of them, makes more sense.
I hope it works, I really do. But there are so many single points of failure I can see which could kill or severely limit the success of this mission.
I see that it has a laser. I hope that laser is beefy enough to let it make like a land shark and defend itself if the Martians stumbleupon it.
This rover is FAR larger the current ones, those tires? Not cute cart wheels, they are roughly the same size as a car tire. The entire vehicle is easily the size of a large SUV although far more open. (Hey nasa, if you want to make things understandable how about instead of adding sounds in space, maybe project a human next to thing so we get a sense of scale)
A bouncing ball for this vehicle wouldn't need to be far to large. It is the old story of how spider won't even notice a 4 meter fall, a human would shatter bones and an elephant would go splat.
There are a lot of risks with this method, so many parts that can fail, but if you want something big to land safely...
Not that this is new. There are airdrop uses on this planet that involve just wrapping what you want to drop in something bouncy and throwing it out of an aircraft, works for small supplies in remote areas where a parachute might drift to far and the russians have used rocket decelerated chute systems for dropping tanks out of aircraft. Because finding enough bubble wrap for a tank is a hard.
Did I complain yet about the sound in space? Yes? Well, it is a pretty big fucking issue. Everything you need to know about the US can be summarized as a NASA science video having sound in space... why not go the whole way and include cute green aliens on mars to show the life you might have found if Mars wasn't the hell hole it is?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's not the size, it's how you use it. ;-)
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I bet it will crash. Too complex, too many points of failure.
If the chance of failure of a part of the system is one in a million, in a system consisting of a million parts something WILL break. --Stanislaw Lem.
Also, did they do away with solar cells? I guess they don't want to risk another runaway project that extends a decade beyond schedule "because it failed to break".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I never understood what is so exciting about Mars. It's fairly far away. Start close. We should have a small colony on the Moon by now. We should be there learning how to do it right now. Once we get it figured out close to home, let's actually go to Mars instead of just sending rover after rover.
How is this powered? Not the landing stages, the rover itself? The video doesn't show any solar cells on the rover. Are they omitted from the simulation for simplicity, or is it using some sort of radiosotope battery. The video mentioned it had a planned life of two years. If that's the case, and given the size of the thing, then it almost has to be. That makes perfect sense of course, it's the ideal use of the technology. But don't they always run into political obstacles when they launch anything with "nuclear" in the name?
Back in the 1970s the Viking probes had experiments to determine whether there was life on Mars. The answer was, depending on who you talk to, negative or inconclusive. You might think by now one of the landers we sent would have carried something to make that a definite positive or negative. Instead, it seems to be more experiments that are relevant to the question but not clearly answering it. Surely on a truck-sized rover we can afford to address this? Or are there political issues?
When did New Scientist start using the Facebook font in their logo ?
Almost as complex as Apollo 11 supposedly was. Maybe someday we'll make it to the moon.
I spent half the time thinking how freaking cool and the other half thinking isnt that MANY points of failure?
I thought the beauty of the cushion landing was so few moving parts.
that hover entry vehicle lowering the rover to the ground is straight out of a video game!
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Could this thing, if equipped with a small rotary brush or air-blasting tool and a grasping tool of some sort, dislodge the Spirit and make it as good as new?
Although the Spirit is small and less advanced by comparison, surely it would still serve some purpose as an auxiliary to Curiosity. Right?
I am in absolute awe after watching the video about the new rover. As people bicker over whether NASA's miniscule budget is worth it, because "space isn't important", it's nice that NASA can still bring out that child-like wonder in me. How can you not be amazed that we can send a robot like this to another planet, land it safely with precision, and study the composition of the planet from millions of miles away? Isn't that awe worth a few billion dollars a year, even if "it doesn't benefit me"?
(Also, it has a laser tricorder. I mean, come on.)
The landing procedure look entirely too complex to me. It is one thing to let something crash in a controlled way, but quite another to land it in the way they desscribe. There is a host of things that could go wrong, like failing thrusters, frozen fuel lines, malfunctioning controllers, etc etc... And all that after months in space, having survived a launch and re-entry and then completely automated, with only seconds to react if something fails... I will be really,really impressed if they pull this off...
NASA has not come up with a better way to get anything to Mars without jettisoning large amounts of space trash as the rockets go. This is unacceptable.
NASA's new goal needs to be able to create a space plane that can take off and land like a plane and make it to mars without dropping any metal trash.
(I'm not talking as anyone who cares about the environment either, I am talking as someone who sees space trash as a waste of taxpayer money), and don't take my point of view the wrong way. I want to see a human land on Mars, but unfortunately we don't have a boogey-man like Russia in the Cold War to get the motivation to make it happen. Technology funding has taken the backseat to social programs.(Grrrr)
The landing consists of dropping hacked together buggy with slow moving robot arms from a parachute...essentially drawing from late 1700s technology (hot air balloons).
Perhaps ruggedizing the systems and using space guns would be the better approach seeing as humans aren't in the payload.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun
Back to the drawing board, please.
With pessimism like that, how to you do walk outside? You might fall in a manhole or get hit by a bus. Did it not occur to you that just maybe, the landing method used was deemed the best chance for success? Well then again, you're no rocket scientist are you?
I would love to see the landing parts.
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I thought there was no sound in the vacuum of space.
But then maybe all that manmade global warming New Scientist likes to report is causing air molecules in our atmosphere to heat up and expand into the other reaches of space, causing all that whooshing noise as the mars lander speeds by the camera.
Or maybe they consulted with George Lucas before making the video...
Mars has a very thin atmosphere. It's nearly a vacuum. To generate enough lift to be worth anything, the wings for any spaceplane would have to be enormous. Atmospheric braking can work at high speeds, but once it slows down, there isn't enough drag for a parachute to slow it down to a survivable speed. If a parachute won't work, wings won't either unless they can make some sort of incredible high speed horizontal landing on very flat ground.
With the technology currently available, they seem to have made the best choices they can. Dumping parts all over the place may not appeal to you, but it's the best way to have, for example, a heat shield for atmospheric braking that you don't have to spend fuel on lowering gently to the ground afterwards. The lowering mechanism, where the rover is lowered from the hovering section is the oddest seeming part of the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's meant to lower the rover gently because the thrusters wouldn't be able to make a gentle landing, or if it's simply meant to keep the thruster section clear of the rover. If it's the former, then I suppose it makes sense. If it's the latter, then I think it would be a better idea to have the rover land with the thruster section attached, then have it detach and fly away. Then again, maybe they're worried about high speed grains of dust and rock kicked up by the thrusters. In any case, I'm not sure that anyone here criticizing the design actually has a better idea. I mean, you could imagine some sort of Voltron style rover that assembles itself from multiple independent pieces that land via airbag, for example, but it wouldn't exactly be less complicated.
The Apollo astronauts commented that the mission's lander kicked up a tremendous amount of dust from the lunar surface; so much so that the blast radius was visible from the command module in orbit.
Judging from the video, there seems to be a significant risk of:
- bits of Curiosity getting fried by the descent engines
- the lander covering Curiosity with a massive amount of dust
Now, given that there are massive duststorms on Mars anyway, the team has hopefully prepared the rover to deal with being absolutely covered with martian dust, but it seems a shame to me to have to start the mission off that way as a result of the landing technique.
Perhaps they could test it in the worst part of the sub-Saharan Harmattan season?
Isn't there a write up somewhere? Wouldn't it be better to link to a write up? I don't want to spend 4m19s watching some dumb video with sound in space and fancy graphics. Spoken narrative is too slow. A write up and a diagram or 2 is enough to convey principles, which is what interests me.
I counted 8 systems where any problem at all would kill the mission:
Heatshield that has to protect, then deploy (or fall off in non-techno speak)
... and pay out slowly enough
... and detach when the lander is down safely
Guidance rockets that have to work just right
A parachute that mustn't rip or tangle
A hovering system that must balance,irrespective of any storms it may encounter
A winch that must not jam (after 40+ weeks in cold and vacuum)
and finally the hovering platform that must not run out of fuel and drop onto the lander, or think it's detached and fly off with the lander in tow (If they got that on video, I'd laugh for a week)
In short there are far too many ways it can fail, and far too many things that have to work perfectly. I think there's a bad case of hubris from having 2 landers out of 2 that not only survived the trip, but exceeded expectations. Sadly, I think this thing will even up the score.
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Wow.. A video. Thats exactly where i imagined we would be when it came to spaceflight in 2011.
As Stanislaw Lem either didn't understand statistics or was simplifying for those who don't ;-)
For an equal chance of failure = (n-1)/n, you need x=ln(1/2)/ln((n-1)/n) parts to have a greater chance of failure.
For n=10e6, that's about 693 thousand components. Quite a lot less than a million!
Correct me if I'm wrong, I won't mind.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The National Academy of Engineering had an article a long while ago about the Challenges of Landing on Mars, detailing the various merits of the systems used for Viking, Pathfinder/Spirit/Opportunity, and the upcoming Curiosity. It's a little dry, but it explains with good reasoning why the chosen landing solution is appropriate for Curiosity.
In case you haven't watched this video, I really recommend dedicating 4 minutes of your life to it.
The thing is... Yeah, it's stunning that we can but a robot to another planet and let it research the planet. It's also stunning that once I submit this message, the machine I'm using (a fast computer that runs on chemically stored energy) makes numerous lightning fast calculations and sends the data at the speed of light across the world to another absolutely amazing machine that others can access to read it... And we do that all the time. Hell, the fact that (nearly) all of us have several remote controllers in our homes is just amazing when you stop to think about it. While I don't oppose missions into space, I think that it is a valid argument to say that the same money used on research on our planet would be better spent. Oceans are pretty cool, too. And volcanoes. And everything else around us.
When a Mars mission narration refers to "miles" and "feet" it makes me shudder.
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NASA's new goal needs to be able to create a space plane that can take off and land like a plane
Perhaps they should develop something that can shuttle items back and forth into space. A "space shuttle" of some sort.
EVERY mission has "systems where any problem at all would kill the mission". It's space travel. It's hard. Cope.
I wish that they would put this on the edge of the crater, rather than in it. If Mars has water, where would it be? Not high. It would be in the ice and at the bottom of craters. At the least, I would rather that we put it there around winter.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh you simply must watch the video. It really is something out of a Bruce Willis movie. Nothing even close to simple. I can't imagine it'll make it through to the final plan. And if it does, I can't imagine it actually working. And if it does, I hope someone goes and films it happening -- that might be the easier part. Seriously, video games aren't this cool.
Im sure theres an iphone app for that fine control landing, iphone does have inertial sensors after all.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.