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New Curiosity Rover Landing Target May Save Months Travel to Prime Destination
coondoggie writes with an update on the Mars Science Laboratory. From the article: "Even as it hurtles towards an August 5 rendezvous with the red planet, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is being fine-tuned for a more precise landing and better operations once it reaches its destination. NASA today gave a status report for the MSL which was launched November 2011, and is still over 17.5 million kilometers away from Mars. Of major interest today was the fact NASA said it has narrowed landing target for the Mars rover, Curiosity letting it touch down closer to its ultimate destination for science operations, but also closer to the foot of a mountain slope that poses a landing hazard, the agency said."
From NASA: "The larger ellipse, 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) by 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) was already smaller than the landing target area for any previous Mars mission, due to this mission's techniques for improved landing precision. Continuing analysis after the Nov. 26, 2011, launch resulted in confidence in landing within an even smaller area [handy diagram], about 12 miles by 4 miles (20 by 7 kilometers). Using the smaller ellipse, the Mars Science Laboratory Project also moved the center of the target closer to the mountain, which holds geological layers that are the prime destination for the rover. ... 'We're trimming the distance we'll have to drive after landing by almost half,' said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager ... 'That could get us to the mountain months earlier.'"
...if you smash land into the damn thing.
Just remember to convert your units correctly!
Silence is a state of mime.
Why risk it?
Its not like curiosity will be doing anything that is time sensitive. Who cares if you arrive at the site a few months early?
It definitely is not worth the risk of destroying the lander.
Ellipse? I love how the world is really Gaussian.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oops too late.
Or the on the ground survey's that will be missed by the rover not traversing them. Even the Hubble examination of seemingly empty sky produced incredible results.
I thought they had somehow found a way to get to Mars months sooner.
Imagine my disappointment upon learning that they are landing closer and so just ended up with a shorter drive. (end sarcasm)
In all seriousness, this rover has some amazing hardware that has the best chance yet of finding microbial life on Mars.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
I just wish we could actually watch it land... That is going to be a spectacle.
Will Opportunity be in range to take pics of the decent through the atmosphere? Cuz pics or it doesn't count...
Is a 6-wheeled rover really the most efficient shape for a land vehicle on rough terrain? I've seen videos of robots that look like snakes or caterpillars that can land in whatever direction, landing first as a ball before unwinding in the proper orientation. The "caterpillar" will be modular, able to combine and recombine like a Japanese cartoon robot. Should a module be stuck, the mission operator will have the option of abandoning the module so the rest of the robot can proceed with rest of the misson.
A transforming robot would also be nice, but that's too much sci-fi already.
A redacted version of the cyberweapon has been reproduced below for public analysis:
Upon reading the phrase "h3lp from the M@rtians", K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, immediately collapsed into fits of laughter and promptly laughed his gelsacs off.
When a junior reporter asked for comment on the Speaker's Condition, K'Breel, still wracked with peals of laughter, snickered "I once had a podmate who lost his olfactory organ... How did he smell? AWFUL!"
Citizens are reminded in this time of heightened concern to be aware of security risks associated with transmissions from the blue world, but are reassured that they do grow back.
I am curious what specific techniques they have refined - how is navigation towards the surface of Mars performed? Is there optical tracking of visual features on the surface (ala Buzz Aldrin or a robotic pilot?) Do they navigate with respect to satellites in known locations around Mars (ala GPS), or celestial navigation? Or is it largely ballistic (based on conditions well ahead of time and predictions based on orbital mechanics, leaving little to final steering corrections?)
Even for a computer.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Actually, we have the world's largest economy and a populace that is by and large so affluent that *obesity* is our epidemic instead of starvation, and people think the sky is falling when they have to choose between netflix and starbucks. I'd rather see this money going to Mars science than to somebody's second SUV, and while it'd be nice to provide for the poor that money could more appropriately be taxed out of your home theater system or the like.
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1. Programmers want to do a few quick tweaks to the software just before landing the thing. Normally this type of thinking would be quashed by management...
2. Mission fatcats who have known for years that the thing would crash now have a scapegoat.
3. Space profiteers with a vested interest in proving robots do not work, eager to get funding for hugely expensive human missions.
4. People with a vested interest in Biblical teachings not being refuted, who may or may not inhabit the NASA bureaucracy, or who may be allied with group 3 (after humans land on Mars who is to say that any life we find didn't originate here and hitchhike along?) (P.S. I know they didn't sanitize this rover, possibly for the same reason).
From the political end this is either the Republicans setting up the current administration for a big pre-election failure, or the Administration eager to get the rover onto the mountain before election day, call it either way, there is a lot of nasty politics on both sides unfortunately. (For example: "The first shuttle disaster was caused by launching in the cold on the day of the State of the Union address, and the second may well have been caused by using a steeper-than-necessary glide slope due to Cold War-era constraints on overflying enemy territory.")
Regardless, it will be fantastic if we find fossil life in the mountain, that will throw the bible belt into a big enough tizzy. The mountain has the least atmosphere and the highest radiation, so is about the least likely place to look for living things on Mars. Landing in a deep depression, akin to the bottom of the ocean if Mars had any, gives you the highest atmospheric pressure, making landing easier, and puts you closer to whatever habitable zone Mars may have today. Presumably the higher up the side of the mountain you try to land, the less margin you have for sufficient atmospheric drag, and the closer you are to hitting something hard before you have slowed down enough.
[Recalculating...]
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
In this case they are directing the thing to crawl around in the least likely area to find life. There are lots of people who want to be able to say 'we looked and didn't find any current life' so they can proceed to endanger any life in the (more likely) places we never looked in, with impunity, for the value of the huge contracts, the dead heroes, and the retro approach: blast everything that goes to Mars from the surface of the Earth (such 20th century thinking!) , instead of learning to build ion-drive spaceships on the Moon and launch them with rail guns from there.
Umm, you still have to blast an object from Earth to the moon, you might as well just continue onto Mars and save the hassle and expense.
Amen.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You are missing the point. The moon has the raw materials for making fuel and space ships, and we could even grow food up there. The only thing that has to be blasted off Earth is the relatively light crew. This isn't your grandfather's space age. The scale of human missions to Mars or wherever makes this approach cost-effective.
That's true, but it takes a long time and a lot of money to build up an infrastructure like this on the Moon or on orbit. Building living compartments, science labs, factories, rail guns on the Moon probably will take decades up to a hundred years or so, given that we start right now with this goal in mind.
So far no nation can put enough resources in to space exploration let alone space colonization. Hopefully it will change soon...