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Cutting Edge Tech Slated For Next Mars Rover
oxide7 writes "NASA is pushing the boundaries of technology as it readies its next mission to Mars, loading up its 4th Mars Rover with nearly a dozen instruments and deploying an innovative but risky landing procedure. Scientists and engineers were piecing together some of the final components to the new rover, dubbed Curiosity, on Saturday as it ramps up for a high-stakes launch in November."
wonder if there is a cat at the landing site?
From TFA: Parachute, followed by retro-rockets, then lowered by a tether.
Yes, it's new. How do they measure how risky it is?
That's a really advanced waste of money. Great huh.
Not so much when it gets there though, trips to Mars take a while.
Oh well, at least the opportunity comes across fairly often. When's the next window to launch a probe to the Outer Planets?
Who comes up with these names? These generic names that are alleged to be primary characteristics of the capitalist are just frickin' lame. Left out of the pool are Greed, Disparity, Externality, Exploitation... Can't we go back to using the names of famous astronomers, or other noteworthy scientists that have positively contributed to humanity's understanding of the universe? Even if their underlying motive for their accomplishment was in pursuit of financial self-interest that only had the side benefit of expanding our knowledge of the cosmos, at least, naming the spacecraft after them would be recognition and memorialization of their achievements.
Why not deliver this rover the same way the other rovers were delivered?
Piece of cake.
This is an incredible approach at landing if it works everybody involved should and would feel proud of their work.
If it fails you'll never hear about it anymore.
Galileo Spacecraft it's never publicly mentioned in relation to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter.
Yet it had a front roll seat, it watched the impacts, the fact it's high gain antenna wouldn't deploy
meant it couldn't send pictures back.
I watched one of the Mars bots do it's beach ball landings, they keep saying "still rolling" until there was obvious
problems in the faces of those involved; Once they figured the problem was due to doppler (Mars was going away from the earth)
the rolling stopped, and it had landed.
Good Luck NASA
So the Phoenix 2 will have Firefox 9?
However, in February 2009, because of the late delivery of several critical components and instruments, NASA delayed the launch to a date between October and December 2011.
This delay and the additional resources required to resolve the underlying technical issues increased the Project's development costs by 86 percent, from $969 million to the current $1.8 billion, and its life-cycle costs by 56 percent, from $1.6 billion to the current $2.5 billion.
So roughly two thirds of the cost of the entire mission is in developing the technology and building one vehicle. One thing that is routinely ignored in discussions of space probes is the trade-off between cutting edge development and actual output of the space probe. For example, instead of building the Mars Science Laboratory and its gear, we could have sent around 8 Mars Expedition Rovers (the actual cost of building and launching a rover is somewhere around $300 million). You might not have gotten quite as nice a variety of scientific output for any given location as the MSL, but you'd get up to (counting the possibility of mission failures!) eight different locations and the risk per mission would be lower (since the MERs are proven tech).
My view here is that technology development has taken over the business of NASA's space science division. Yes, you do need on occasion to develop new technology in order to explore. But these missions have somewhere around two-thirds the cost of the entire mission in developing and building new, unproven technology. Then if the mission succeeds, they'll go on to more new, unproven technology rather than use the platform further.
Fifty years from now, what of this whole stream of technology development will still be useful? Will it be like NASA's atmospheric science of the past where decades down the road, some entrepreneur might come along and pick and choose from the pieces of debris (mostly reports) that remain?
From the linked article: An instrument named ChemCam will use laser pulses to vaporize thin layers of material from Martian rocks or soil targets up to 7 meters (23 feet) away.
I have this mental image of thousands of tiny terrified martians fleeing their homes after the "heat ray" vaporizes the town square.
No-one would have believed, in the first years of the 21st century, that martian affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few martians even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this planet with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Please tell me they have a way of getting dust off the solar panels. Every time I read about dust buildup on Spirit and Opportunity's solar panels causing problems all I could think of was why didn't they install some type of simple vibration mechanism or air jet or any number of possible solutions.
How are they going to manage if the tethering is right over a large boulder? Do they have software / radar to detect such things?
They want to explore a crater, not make a new one.
NASA engineers and 'rocket scientists' have already determined that the 5 ton rover is too heavy for that method.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
http://xkcd.com/695/
So...why the fuck are we still shooting rovers to Mars? Why aren't we going ourselves yet? We've seen it, sampled it, measured and tested every aspect we can...it's time to pay the rock a fucking visit, not shoot more meters and probes at it.
Pull your heads out of your asses, government, and send a fucking human being to Mars already.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
It'll be sold at Costco.
"It looks like you are trying to explore Mars. Would you like to explore Earth on Bing Maps?" - Clippy
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So I suppose I'm right in thinking that this won't be produced by Africans, what with them being just as intelligent as white people, right?
I just can't understand it. Surely all the Africans living in previously all white countries are 'just like us', and making our countries a BETTER place, right?
Because we can't possibly suggest that they go and live in AFRICA, can we? That would be 'racist', right?
(How apt! My CAPTCHA is "welfare" !!!)
From a link posted above
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/building_curiosity.html
The Girl and her essay that got it it's name.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/essay-20090527.html
Will NASA *ever* put at least one sound sensor on probes they send into atmospheric environments? If they have done it, why is it never published?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Sending humans, fucking or not, would cost 100 or 1000 times as much as this alleged waste of money.
They want to explore a crater, not make a new one.
NASA engineers and 'rocket scientists' have already determined that the 5 ton rover is too heavy for that method.
I think you misunderstand me. People fixate on Curiosity's skycrane, and think that it's new and overly complicated. It's not new. Everybody seems to forget that Spirit and Opportunity ALSO used a similar Parachute-Retrorocket-Tether system. All they seem to remember is the airbag part of it. Spirit's and Opportunity's "skycranes" brought them to a hover in mid air and then cut them loose. They had to endure a drop equivalent to jumping off of a fourth floor balcony. This is why they needed the air bags.
In contrast, Curiosity's "skycrane" is going to lower it gently to the ground, not drop it from 50 feet in the air. There's much less risk involved with Curiosity's landing than Spirit's or Opportunity's. So, given that the MERs not only survived their riskier skycrane descent, and plummet to the ground, but thrived, odds are high that Curiosity will do the same.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Space Truckers. Gotta havem. Cut rate, too, yet with year's of experience.
Launch your own racist, political or sexual joke here.
Hard to argue with that.
Yep, let the rich ones subsidize it. Gets the money into circulation, gets the unit price down.
Can't wait 'til the competition improves. The US needs something to charge it up.
sr
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
shouldn't everything Nasa deploys have cutting edge technology on board?
Someone at NASA been watching too many Terminator and or Alien movies. It truly breaks my heart to say this but it looks like this one just might crash and burn.
Hey guys over at NASA, i hope you are reading this....here is what you need
WINDSHIELD WIPERS.....to get the crap off the solar panels when it builds up......maybe add a special weight caliper that lets you know when some stuff is getting on the panel, then use the wiper to push it off......
seriously.....
also - please send another unit that has
a) booster cables (for boosting the old one and getting back another rover)
b) a broom, to wipe off the soot off the other rovers....
c) wide range metal detector, to help find the other mars rovers on the planet...