Slashdot Mirror
ESA Lander's Signal Cut Out Just Before It Was Supposed To Land on Mars (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an ArsTechnica report: On Wednesday, the European Space Agency sought to become the second entity to successfully land a spacecraft on Mars with its Schiaparelli lander. And everything seemed to be going swimmingly right up until the point that Schiaparelli was to touch down. The European scientists had been tracking the descent of Schiaparelli through an array of radio telescopes near Pune, India and were able to record the moment when the vehicle exited a plasma blackout. The scientists also received a signal that indicated parachute deployment. But during the critical final moments, when nine hydrazine-powered thrusters were supposed to fire to arrest Schiaparelli's descent, the signal disappeared. At that point, the European Space Agency's webcast went silent for several minutes before one of the flight directors could be heard to say, "We expected the signal to continue, but clearly it did not. We don't want to jump to conclusions."
Live people are much better with dealing with things when they go off script.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Um, no. Niel Armstrong really did fly the lunar lander. He really did run it almost totally out of fuel, because he had to avoid a huge rock. If he hadn't done that, the vehicle would have gone splat.
By the way, the computer was completely spazzing out during the landing and was not giving good data. Fortunately it was written in a way that kept the important stuff going regardless.
http://space.stackexchange.com...
also
http://www.dickgordon.com/Apol...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
People have been dying ever since there have been people. If you're going to use people dying as an excuse to not do something, nothing will ever get done. AND people will still die.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's all well and good. Now explain how it would have prevented a thruster failure. Or a metric-english conversion error on the entry trajectory calculation. Or a failed parachute. Or a launch vehicle failure. Or virtually any of the common ways that unmanned probes have actually failed. You might be able to salvage ~20% of them with humans aboard. Might. Meanwhile, humans are a massive added source of additional risk to a mission; they dramatically increase spacecraft size, complexity / part count, consumables, and just in general make things far more difficult. And you can build and launch numerous unmanned missions for the cost of one manned mission.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."