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NASA Morpheus Lander Test Ends In Explosion
First time accepted submitter DishpanMan writes "For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story, like today's Morpheus project test flight at Kennedy Space Center. The project is trying to build a low cost Moon and Asteroid lander using clean fuels on a shoestring budget. While tethered flight test were successful, today's actual flight test ended in a crash and a ball of fire followed by a spectacular explosion. Initial feedback points to hardware failure, but the investigation is still ongoing."
Waaaw, nice video of the crash! And immediately the action in the first 10 seconds of it. Well done!
Too bad for the money and work that went into it. But then again, this is what tests are for, this result helps progress forward as well.
Sometimes I hit the parking lot.
or
Silence is a state of mime.
But then, they can name the next lander "Neo" and see if they get better results...
Morpheus: to build a low cost Moon and Asteroid lander using clean fuels on a shoestring budget.
Curiosity: Mars landing, high dollar, big budget, traditional components (similar to previous Mars Landers), unlimited time.
I guess one could conclude "faster, better, cheaper" doesn't work in NASA's case?
A "Failure" means loss of the mission. This is an unsuccessful test and is part of the process to ensure the hardware will work with a high degree of confidence so that the mission won't "fail" in its actual landing on the moon.
Something to learn from and move forwards on.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"This is the Captain. There's a little problem with our entry sequence; we may experience slight turbulence and then explode."
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
"5...4...3...2...0" BOOM!
"For every success story from NASA like Curiosity, there is a failure story"
Yes, and if you never try you'll never fail. Bravo for you.
Those of us who explore and push the boundaries do have failures, learn (if we live) and try again. Failure is the norm. Success is the wonderful exception.
I didn't know something so small could be *that* on fire.
It looks as though the thrust was really unbalanced; it just sort of wobbled in the air before keeling over. I shouldn't have laughed... but I did.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Did I hear it correctly, around 0:23 in video someone says "Pam, call 911"?
well worth the fast-forward =D
There is another ( well actually there is a third one as well ) less publicized lander project at NASA, check out the flight videos at http://nasa.gov/roboticlander
Coincidentally, it just did a successful untethered test flight today, see http://twitter.com/nasamightyeagle
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
That was kinda silly actually, and yes... a bad omen.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Congratulations everyone!
We have discovered a folding chair that will hold up while watching failed test flights.
Order a hundred and we can sell tickets for the next launch.
Next test: Goggles for the enjoying the view at the 2:00 and 6:20 mark.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
An unsuccessful test isn't "failure", it's "data".
sic transit gloria mundi
The KSC firefighters are currently on strike.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Fire-fighters show up at 8:30 after crash. Is 8 minutes good for response time? It does seem awfully slow, especially considering that they had to have been on standby just in case of something like this happening.
King Arthur: One, two, five!
Sir Galahad: Three sir!
King Arthur: THREE!
Why would anyone want to approach a burning spacecraft? Let the fuel burn out, then extinguish the flames of what's left for disposal.
On the moon. And on the asteroids. Safer for the chipmunks living there. Good thing they are using cleaner fuels.
Spirit and Opportunity were both "faster, better, cheaper" concept vehicles that did amazingly well, so your conclusion based on just one point of data would be wrong. At this point I don't think there's enough data to make any conclusions about the project's value.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm still waiting for the "failure" part.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The moment you start engineering in compromises -- e.g. Clean Fuels -- into the design you are setting yourself up for less than optimal results.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As always, the only honest answer is "Pick two."
Fire-fighters show up at 8:30 after crash. Is 8 minutes good for response time? It does seem awfully slow, especially considering that they had to have been on standby just in case of something like this happening.
Then another 7 minutes to put it out. Very stubborn fire.
Bob, I'm going to go ahead and ask you to move our helium tanks a little further away. And don't forget that laptop on the chair. That would be terrific, OK?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I imagine they'll figure out what went wrong. I bet this didn't cost $2+ billion. That's why you do tests like this. Better to make a $10 million fireball on Earth someplace, then spend a few years waiting for a $2 billion fireball on some other planet.
Well if they'd shown up immediately, then after 2:00 the second team would have been scraping firefighter parts off the scenery. And so, after 6:21, would the third team.
There's just no way to get a burning rocket fuel tank under control. Also no point; the craft is a loss anyway, and there's nothing else close enough to be in danger.
Okay, so there was a crash and an explosion?
Initial feedback points to hardware failure
D'you think?
Yeah! Make sure you move the highly reactive He!! :/
Such as, LOX/LH2?
It would be nice if the fuel and the reason why was specified in the summary. I can only image that it has something to do with expansion rations versus LH2, although I'm not sure how liquid methane (thankfully called-out in the linked Morpheus page) represents a vast improvement. If you can use kerosene, you can use alcohols, which are much much more biodegradable and don't have nearly the greenhouse gas power of methane.
But I was surprised to hear the countdown skiping the ONE and going straight to (ie launch).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
No, leave that stuff there, just move the 2500 psi tanks further back.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The rocket itself didn't seem like it caused much hazard, but that explosion did set off a small grass fire. Watch it creep along. Next time they do this, I hope they have the good sense to hose down the grass around the test pad beforehand.
Remember, that video is shot with a telephoto lens so things appear foreshortened. But yeah, it looks a bit .... close.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No doubt the fire trucks were standing by a safe distance away, that 8 minute delay was so the operators could analyze the fire and ensure there weren't any follow-on explosions that could harm the firefights. The explosions at 1:58 and 6:27 are *exactly* why they won't start spraying on it immediately. Better to let the craft burn off its flammables safely on the pad and away from people than to send firefighters in to spray down an already burning bomb.
+1 Disagree
Does anyone know why the fire crew approached from downwind?
You can hear the tech asking the dispatcher to warn the fire crews about those "tanks on the trailer" in the video.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They're out in the middle of a pestilential swamp, miles from no where. That's why they picked Cape Canaveral (aside from it's location at the edge of the water). For all we know, the trucks were sitting back in a safe radius and they knew there was no specific hurry. What's going to happen? Some pissed off snakes?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
People will wonder why a moon lander has extra code in the control software allowing it to compensate for wind gusts.
WHOOSh...
And yet it took more than 8 minutes for the Fire truck to arrive at the rocket test site.
I wonder how long it would take if they didn't expect this sort of thing...
Rule one of firefighting: don't put anyone needlessly in harm's way. This was an unmanned test flight, with nobody in any imminent danger.
After the initial crash, the craft still had fuel and oxidant tanks on board that hadn't yet blown up. You don't move the fire crews in until the hazardous materials are accounted for. The crews were quite obviously sitting in their fire rig at a safe distance, waiting for the signal from the range safety officer to tell them that the rest of the fuel was gone. That explosion at the 6:20 mark was the signal they were waiting for. At 8:00 the camera zooms in as they examine the wreckage for any potential surprises. At about 8:17 you could hear the diesel motor of one of the trucks as it approached the pad. At 8:40 you can hear the report from "10-1" (I assume that was the range safety officer) at gate 7 that he had advised the fire crew that there were four pressurized tanks, they believed two were gone, but there were potentially still two tanks with pressure, and that the fire crews had proceeded downrange anyway.
The crews handled the situation exactly as they should have. They expected this sort of thing.
John
OT, but thanks for putting that in your sig. One of the cool things about /. is learning about things like that as I read. I found out about Lilypond here and who knows what else.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It wouldn't have taken quite so long if they had arrived from UP-WIND and knew how to AIM those foam-cannons they have strapped to their trucks. Seriously, it was like watching a 3 year old trying to hit the toilet bowl from the hallway!
Judging by the smoke flow, there was a pretty stiff breeze, and the lander crashed in the direction of the wind. Presumably the lander is not designed for these conditions, since there is no wind on the Moon or an asteroid. Could it be that they simply chose a bad day or location for the test?
Did you say "insightful" or "inciteful"?
I guess I was more pointing out that you can hear them say "call 911" as opposed to, i don't know, "code blue" or something. My line of reasoning was that preserving the craft to determine it's mode of failure could warrant a dedicated team with special training and/or equipment, and that budgetary concerns might have led to the lack of such.
Of course I'm not super familiar with NASA's internal workings and especially not this project specifically. It could be that they figure out it's cheaper to just add enough sensors to determine any likely failure modes from the telemetry and just let the thing self destruct if it goes down.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Why would they need to lift that much beer on the moon??
Drop a keg or two and it might fly.
This is how we get things done by learning.
If you call 911 from within Kennedy it is probably their own emergency control you are calling. Many facilities are set up like that. Then the internal 911 makes the decision about whether to handle it themselves or call the county emergency services.
In this day and age when we have Segways, balancing robots, and quadrocoptors, this sort of thing should be a "solved" problem. I mean, check out what they were doing in the 1990s.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Rocket fuel generally sits very close to it's oxidizer on the craft, no point in trying to put it out early. There were probably fifty people on the island where that happened, all of whom were wearing safety goggles and behind a barrier of some sort at a safe distance. It's not like dousing the fire ten minutes earlier would have somehow avoided the forest fires in Colorado.
moox. for a new generation.
Crash, ball of fire, *spectacular* explosion ...I'm still waiting for the "failure" part.
The failure part was that it wasn't supposed to do any of those things.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Looking through a few other Youtube videos of Morpheus tests, I found this video entitled " This is why we test". It looks very similar, except the tether kept it from flipping completely over and crashing.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
But that's one yummy helping of spectacular engineering fail. And this coming from a guy who saw his rocket execute an un-prescribed loop-da-loop right out of the launcher, so I know the bitter taste of test failure on tape first hand. Not the same amount of money was involved in my case, though. Looks like this control system was determined to diverge as soon the legs stopped making contact. Tether saved us from a few failures in my day, but based on the history looks like they had done enough tethered testing and were ready to go free. Feel sorry for the team who had to get data the hard way. Hope you had telemetry, because there's nothing left to diagnose or debug.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
if there gonna do what armadillo aerospace are doing, then they should use a tether.
Sucks that it went out like that, but you're going to have setbacks on the way to achieving great things. Does anyone know if NASA has other landers to test of was Morpheus the only one of that model.
...like a Guy Fawkes effigy on bonfire night.
That's because you always assume a 'bird' is going to explode and park the fire trucks far enough away that they don't get damaged in the explosion. That way, you don't have to wait for half an hour for their backups to arrive from the fire station.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Helium is a nobel gas, it doesn't combine with anything. Thus, it won't burn.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I guess I was more pointing out that you can hear them say "call 911" as opposed to, i don't know, "code blue" or something. My line of reasoning was that preserving the craft to determine it's mode of failure could warrant a dedicated team with special training and/or equipment, and that budgetary concerns might have led to the lack of such.
Of course I'm not super familiar with NASA's internal workings and especially not this project specifically. It could be that they figure out it's cheaper to just add enough sensors to determine any likely failure modes from the telemetry and just let the thing self destruct if it goes down.
No need to save the craft unless it's something the telemetry doesn't watch and report. And with a test flight, it watches and reports on damned near everything practically up to the hat size of the range safety officer. The debris will tell them what happened after they lost telemetry.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I believe the complaint here lies in the semantic ambiguity of "the test failed". Does that mean the test 1) was improperly designed such that it could not possibly prove that which it was commissioned to prove (test design was sound/flawed) or 2) was perfectly designed, the proof of which is that a failure mode of the device being tested was demonstrated (test device passed/failed)
As an engineer I take great pains to say what I mean as unambiguously as possible, because I know that failures happen quite often due to miscommunication. I read the summary above and am left in no doubt what happened, without even having seen the test results.
What I find truly interesting is how many people, upon seeing a test that passed all of the designed criteria say "the test passed" rather than either "the test was unnecessary" or "the test was insufficiently comprehensive". There are no flawless systems. If your test didn't result in some kind of failure you should immediately question whether you designed your tests correctly.
2500 psi tanks as long as a semi trailer punctured by flying debris can ruin your whole day.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I found the problem. She skipped "one" during the countdown.
Whether a space mission is a (smashing) success (pun intended) or not, I could not care less!
Assume 'curiosity' was to discover something truly amazing, do you think they would
tell you? Are you expecting to see CNN suddenly interrupt their programming for
"BREAKING NEWS! CITY ON MARS DISCOVERED BY CURIOSITY!" and talk about
it for weeks?
If you are, keep watching television :-) For the rest of us, this is just not going to happen anytime
soon. The only thing the scum who lord of us fear is a loss of control. They like the completely
predictable and conversely they viciously hate the unknown and unpredictable. Something
as paradigm shattering as a city on Mars could very well upset the equilibrium they maintain.
Have you ever given thought to the white-black symbolisms found in many in Freemasonry?
If there were such a city, they would certainly want to know everything they can about it, there
would be even more secret follow-up missions, but YOU would never find out except maybe
from a few far- and in between whistleblowers that are easily silenced. Not with a gun, but simply
by standing these whistleblowers in a spotlight pointing a television camera at them and telling
a few jokes about them. You have been well trained.
Did you forget to take your medicine again?
Also: there is *no* way in hell something like "a city on mars" would not get leaked, seriously man, they could not even keep accidental kllings of civilians a secret.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=368
Helium is a nobel gas, it doesn't combine with anything. Thus, it won't burn.
You meant to say Helium is a noble gas.
If Alfred Nobel went to Taco Bell for lunch, then that may have caused "Nobel" gas.
Warning: sarcasm ahead. Ahem....that's what you get when you do it on the cheap and use "clean" fuels. (I'll bet if they used dirty fuel, the assplosion would have been better)
but there I tagged the article "troll". There are only results in science no success or failures. And those results are used to understand and better explain what we observe.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Well there was Nobel Prize awarded for the production of liquid helium so I guess one could call it a Nobel gas.
Thanks! Please pass it on if you can. We could use the traffic.
Components Fail. Methods Fail. Programs Fail. Even Test Objectives Fail.
But the product of rocket testing is data. Only when you loose the data is the test a failure.
You might not like the answer or the cost of the test, or the inability to run more tests on the hardware, but if you have the data, you accomplished your mission.
Back in the day, I was the lead instrumentation engineer on one of NASA's test stands. Loosing the test article, and sometimes a portion of the test stand was just part of a day's work. But have a key instrument fail (and its back up) or have a recorder not work... well lets just say I don't remember those particular days fondly.
But one of my best memories was the day I was the first to hit the "pickle switch" as a rocket motor began to consume itself. I may have saved the facility. (Except several other people hit their's a fraction of a second later.) The owner of the rocket, on the other hand, wished for a few more seconds of data, rather than a more intact motor.
Agreed.
Which is precisely why my industry has, for over 30 years (possibly longer) installed pre-placed, remotely operated "monitors" (including A.F.F.F. ones) oriented to dump water (or foam) into the middle of events that you don't want to turn into (yet another) 100+fatality bomb.
But then again, we don't do rocket science. There might be a very good reason for not having pre-placed firefighting equipment. Which would be an interesting reason to hear.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Alligator toastie?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"