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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."
Seriously? This is a joke... I mean, who thought sending a mission to Mars would be this hard?
Breakfast served all day!
Can't the aliens leave our spacecraft alone?
That's the orbiter.
The lander is what is in question, and there's been no sign that it has been successfully acquired by the orbiter or anybody else.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
darn, read it wrong in my excitement, still fingers crossed the lander is OK too
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
I think the little green men on Mars heard that the the Europeans have a long storied history of bringing diseases to the New Worlds and they blew it our of the sky with their ray guns.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
Nothing on the lander I can see.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
USA/NASA has had many successful landers and the Soviets had a lander survive for 14.5 seconds after touch down. That's not great, but considering the ESA lander lost contact after firing the retro rockets before touch down, I wouldn't celebrate just yet.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The metric system isn't necessarily superior...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
After a lengthy discussion with the ESA, I've been assured that the lander has definitely landed! On a side note, no word as to if it was a soft type landing or the usual hypersonic-impact-crater-forming type. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Successful? Maybe it did, but we don't know that it did--unless you define "success" as to include crash landings. I don't think that's what they meant. It may have landed with no other damage than to the radio or antenna, but since they want to communicate with it after all trouble of building it and launching it, I still would not call it success. They'd better hurry--the only power source they have is a battery that is not projected to last more than 8 martian days.
As we've seen, Mars is a hard destination.
1. Putin
2. Chinese
3. Trump supporters
4. Hillary Clinton campaign and/or DNC operatives
5. Israelis
6. Iranians
7. American contractors using English units
8. Superintelligent space alien overlords
9. Arithmetic overflow bug
Yes, I did! By the way, have you seen around there my Samsung smartphone ?
. . . Except Mars, apparently.
Did anyone see that article on here the other day about Americans working 25% more than Europeans?
Btw, this further confirms my theory that our accomplishments in space go down as the number of countries forecast putting targets in space.
People in the 1960's had a different mentality when they put someone on the moon. Everyone (globally, including Americans) have really mushed into a pile of fecklessness since then.
All your Mars base are belong to us?
Mars seems very difficult. NASA has had its failures there too, but on the balance, NASA seems to have a far better track record at doing complex things on Mars than anybody else out there.
Which leads to the question: does NASA not share its magic recipes with the ESA? They have done shitloads of research into how to successfully land craft on other planets, and even run rovers. It's very hard from an engineering perspective. Do they not share the fruits of that research and labor with agencies like the ESA, so to improve everybody's odds?
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.
. . .especially if an ESA Mars Lander crashes onto them. . .
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Beagle 2 from 2003 the last attempt by ESA to land an orbiter on Mars? This one seems to have suffered a similar fate in landing. Hopefully not, but if it did then this probably doesn't bode well for public confidence in the ESA.
They'll find something else to die of - my guess, radiation poisoning (although freezing, suffocating and starving to death are all still on the list).
The ESA just has to intentionally aim for people to guarantee a miss.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes, and that is also why the all time favorite solution is deflectors.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I'm sure it got to the surface... now... functional or in a jumble of pieces... that's yet to be seen.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
That's because it'll be in medium light grey text on a light medium grey background.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Mars '98 Lander suffered a similar fate; in that case the rockets cut off too soon:
Mars Polar Lander
It's just temporarily restricted.
I'd say Rosetta was at least a partial success, you have to be impressed by what the Ruskies and the Yanks did back in the 70's though, it proves that all the technology and managementt in the world will ever make up for a dedicated driven team.
Don't forget reversing the polarity.
Anything can be fixed by reversing the polarity.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I think it just want some alone time. I know I do after doing a long journey...
They had a problem converting inches to millimeters.
... looking for his potato shipment.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, "success" is really more of a continuum than a point.
nine hydrazine-powered thrusters arrest its descent to a few meters per second. A crushable structure will absorb the impact force at the planet's surface.
The primary role of Schiaparelli will be to demonstrate this landing technology so that a planned follow-up mission in 2020, complete with a rover, can also safely reach the Martian surface.
So, we've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we're pretty sure that the crushable structure was crushed as intended.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
As I understand it, the unexpected fuel usage was a combination of avoiding the boulder field (more than one rock), AND the fact NASA miscalculated the shape of the moon. (Scientifically, that very boulder field later produced some of their best rock samples.)
The size calculations were calibrated based on the gravity of the moon, but the moon is gravitationally lopsided compared to the location of its surface. If you spun the moon on a giant table-top like a child's top, it would appear to wobble slightly.
If you notice, the Earth-facing surface of the moon looks different than the back-facing side. The materials near the surface also have a different density between back and front.
This difference was not fully accounted for, and is at least partially why the fuel estimates were off.
Lesson: if you go somewhere new: leave plenty of margin for contingency. You are likely using flawed or imperfect assumptions.
Table-ized A.I.
If I'm not mistaking, it could have attempted to land on its own even if the astronauts had not intervened. They could have left it on autopilot. Whether it would have been successful is another thing.
Neil was avoiding a boulder field. But it's possible the landing could have still been successful even it if had landed among boulders. Obviously its highly risky, though.
There was a giant rock near Viking 1's landing site on Mars that would have toppled the craft had it landed on it. It lucked out. Viking 2 did land on a foot-sized rock and the craft was titled. But that had only a minor impact on the mission.
And since unmanned probes are cheaper, you can afford more losses (including lower national embarrassment). Thus, while humans are better at handling contingencies, they are also protecting more expensive hardware.
(It's possible to put boulder avoidance tech on auto-landing systems, but that does add to the cost.)
Table-ized A.I.
What I think is easier than either of these, is selling conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats to morons.
Uh, damn . . .
You have no chance to survive make your time.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL: VICTORY! The Council of Elders has confirmed the blueworlders' resumption of aggression upon our noble red sands. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thusly: OKAY. Okay, so I'm K'Breel (even though anyone on Slashdot can assume the mantle merely by declaring themselves Speaker for the Council), and I'm late, but I'm merely chronologically late, not as in the Late Second Adjunctant to the Council Formerly Known As G'Ranee.
But domestic politics is beneath us tonight -- just take a glance at the blue world beneath us for a look at how bad that can get -- and let us focus on what's important: over the past sol or so, our Planetary Defense Force has been so good at pre-emptively distracting the blueworlders with tasks like landing comets, grabbing their prospective mates by their genitals, low-planetary orbit missions, and just general tribal infighting that we haven't had to shoot down any robotic invaders in quite some time. But when the opportunity presents itself, we take advantage of it, and so, we did. Hence the trivial elimination of yet another putative invader from elsewhere. We'd do it every day, except that the blueworlders lack the gelsacular fortitude to send us more targets. Now as to gelsacular fortitude, on to Second Adjunctant G'Ranee...
When a junior reporter pointed out that the destroyed invader was merely a technology demonstrator built on the cheap to see if a landing was possible, and that the blueworlders' actual payload was safely in orbit, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs launched into orbit alongside those of G'Ranee for a closer look.
Aha, there we go. No Slashdot Mars rover story is complete without a report from K'Breel and the Council of Elders.
Thank you for keeping this up, Tackhead.=)
Jees man, a few phones burned up, from the way you people go on you'd think they were selling people live grenades.
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Morons..... People are dying here in hospitals and you fly to fucking mars.
Seriously, if people dying is your hook, and you complaining about the money spent on space which is a fraction of that spent on war. How about you start by sorting out the hospitals themselves and get their own money back on track before you go off on one. Also, people die, that's part of the package.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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I'm with rsmith-mac. Thanks, Tackhead.!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.