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Schiaparelli Mars Probe's Parachute 'Jettisoned Too Early', Whereabouts Still Unknown (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday. Telemetry data recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early. The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time. The European Space Agency (Esa) has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive. Experts will continue to analyse the data and they may also try to call out to Schiaparelli in the blind hope that it is actually sitting on the Red Planet intact. In addition, the Americans will use one of their satellites at Mars to image the targeted landing zone to see if they can detect any hardware. Although, the chances are slim because the probe is small. For the moment, all Esa has to work with is the relatively large volume of engineering data Schiaparelli managed to transmit back to the "mothership" that dropped it off at Mars - the Trace Gas Orbiter.
. . .there were two failures: the parachute release and the burn length. But both were likely set in the software on the lander, so I suspect parameters got borked somehow.
Additionally, if the burn was shorter than planned, that would put significantly more fuel on board when the catastropic 'landing' occured. Which, depending on the propellant, could have caused an explosion at the crash site. That would likely scatter the remains, but should leave a notable mark on the soil. . .
/s
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yeah, I do this all the time in Kerbal Space Program. From my experience, they just need to make sure the parachute icons aren't red or yellow when they deploy them. It always sucks to go through a whole mission only to mess up your landing and waste everything. I suggest they revert to launch and try again.
Isn't this essentially what happened to Mars Polar Lander? Incorrect sensory interpretation leading to the computer taking the wrong actions, thinking it was on the ground when it wasn't?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Hey, everyone "jettisons too early" once in a while.
Billions of dollars spent on hardware, and some fuckup software dude sends the whole thing crashing to the ground
The proximal cause of failure is unknown at this time. There are people smarter and harder working than you working on it.
This pisses me off.
Oh well then I'm sure they'll care more now that you are "pissed off".
Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
Ok asshole... For what crime exactly? What law was broken that justifies jail time? How about you tell that to them in person Mr. Anonymous Coward. Actually never mind since you aren't brave enough to put your name to your idiotic rant. Grow up you pathetic twit.
The Martian society salutes you. Job well done.
I was very disappointed and angry at the ESA Press Conference this morning. Last night when they suspected (knew) [There is no way this landing was designed to not return a success signal immediately] the Lander had crashed they silenced everyone and announced a press conference at 10 AM the next morning.
At the Press Conference they emphasised the success of the orbiter and mentioned NOTHING at all about data from the lander. They left that all to questions from the Press. Basically all questions from the Press were about the lander and the data (and they were good questions - no stupid questions came), and they drip fed a piece of info at a time to the journalists.
I believe the suits at ESA were in damage control because they are scared about losing funding for the 2020 lander so they mentioned NOTHING about the crashed lander, so that when politicians check on the press releases/conferences in months to come there is NO info on the crash, but in a few days the world will know anyway, especially if NASA gets a photo of the impact and debris.
They did not make any statements at all (e.g. yes we got data from the Lander, the rockets fired for only 3-4 seconds, something went wrong with the parachute and we suspect a very hard landing) in a controlled and orderly way, they forced the journalists to extract it from them relunctantly.
I was super disappointed about scientists playing politics and covering up what they obviously knew the audience wanted to know. It was sickening.
And, yes, I live in Europe and yes, I want my tax Euros to fund the 2020 Lander, but I'm angry at scientists playing politics and ignoring the audience who wanted to know what happened last night and they deliberately said nothing.
This was the worst.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
And you can probably blame the metric system since the landing rockets fired for only 3 seconds instead of 30 - that 10x stuff makes everything look too simple
for some the rocket can't lift off
That happens.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Breaking News: SpaceX offers Jeff Bezos a free ride.
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An Italian probe named after Schiaparelli... Maybe the probe's visual system got confused because it thought it had identified canals on the surface.
It's too bad budget cuts in the US forced JPL to back out of the program. While the US has several spectacular failures, they also have even more successes. The fact that they got the Rube Goldberg landing device for the Curiosity lander to work is an engineering wonder in itself. Hopefully Europe has the same tolerances for learning from mistakes as the US.
Yeah, whoever signed off on it. Who's head of the ESA these days? Maybe 'jail for a very long time' is a bit harsh though.
Anyone who seriously believes that sending people in the space program to jail for a failed mission is a good idea is an idiot. If you want to kill a space program that would absolutely be the fastest way to make it happen short of completely defunding one. What engineer or program manager is going to risk going to jail for making an innocent error in a calculation?
Some missions are going to fail. Get over it. It's the cost of doing business if you want to go into space. Only a complete imbecile would treat that as some sort of criminal act.
Maybe start with the Beagle 2, maybe they are cozying up together? ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Don't worry. They won't feel a thing during the landing.
It may be a problem with the Matrix
Table-ized A.I.
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Real engineers go to jail when they fuck up.
People who pretend to be engineers go to jail. Did you actually read your link? It's nothing but people with forged documents and other fraudulent acts. Nothing about sending people to jail for honest errors where nobody died.
Maybe a little accountability for you "coding is an art" folks would be a good thing?
If someone is willing to pay for the proper quality control structures then fine. Most software engineering quality control is severely budget limited. There are folks out there who know how to write incredibly robust software but doing that isn't cheap and it isn't merely a matter of throwing money at the problem either. It's not a secret how to do it but it isn't cheap and it isn't easy. If you want people to do a better job then you need to give them the resources and organizational structure necessary to make it happen.
Answer this. Would you do a job where you could go to jail for making a error in a calculation? Especially if no one was injured?
If MRO sees it, it should be a smouldering wreck, the kind you'd expect from mostly full hydrazine tanks slamming into a surface at high speeds
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Only thing crazier, would be to put balloons around a lander and let it bounce to a landing. Could you even imaging such a thing?
Ahh yes, Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity :-)
So what if the parachutes deployed too early? So long as they deployed, one would assume they they would do their job regardless (eventually). Unless of course there were also parameters to detach and eject the parachutes just prior to landing or rocket burn. Perhaps having the Parachutes deploy so early slowed the craft so much that only a very short burn was even required to land safely.
The optimist in me likes to think that in doing so, about the only thing that might be causing the "delay" is that I believe Mars has wind, sometimes considerable, within its atmosphere which if it loitered in too much could be conceivably off course and land someplace else. Which on the negative side of things could have had it land in a crevasse or something, but more likely it could just be causing some communication trouble because they are pointing their communication efforts at the wrong location.
Indeed. Rube Goldberg called NASA and wanted Curiosity's landing mechanism back.
When I first saw all the steps involved, the WTF light on my forehead was flashing red. I was surprised it actually worked and had mentally prepared for a failure just before it landed. Good thing I didn't go to a betting site.
Curiosity's landing system was partly a test of "hovering" technology that will allow finer-tuned positioning in the future so that rovers don't waste time and wear roving in boring areas to get to the "good stuff".
Table-ized A.I.
Bubble wrap is a mature (and fun) technology used for safeguarding fragile objects from damage suffered by falling to the ground. Wrapping a lander in balloons is just a generalization of that technology ;)
OP seemed to be implying find what the specific error was, find who made it and punish them harshly, I was just pointing out it doesn't really matter who made the actual error, who ever approved it is ultimately at fault.
Incorrect. The fault lies in the system that permitted the error to occur. It's (probably) not the fault of a person but of the structure in which that person works. Assigning fault to an individual is generally a waste of time and usually counter-productive. To use a crude example it's like shooting your dog because it peed on the rug. It technically solves the problem in a sense (the dog won't do it again) but it won't result in the outcome that is truly desired.
My day job is to to run a manufacturing company. When we have an error occur the first thing we look at is whether the production system was set up to prevent the error. Maybe the work instructions weren't clear. Maybe the inspection procedures were faulty. The error is almost never because an individual was being irresponsible. You can say that the responsibility falls to management and that is true but it misses the point. The point is that mistakes are not systematically fixed by just finding the proximal or authorizing party and punishing them. Fix the problem not the blame.
So the emergency lithobraking maneuver didn't do the trick then. This sucks. Really.
You know, Deimos is nice this time of the Martian year
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Viking 1 in 1976 landed exactly like Schiaparelli and it worked fine, at the first try. Heat shield, parachutes, landing rockets, touchdown. Worked for years, too.
Mars is hard, but it seems to be harder for some than for others.
It's strange, though, because Italians are usually pretty good at delivering disc-shaped things.
Being closed means no one points out your mistakes. I see this kind of thing time and time again. People hide problems. This is always fatal to any engineering endeavor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_%28spacecraft%29#Critical_design_flaw_partially_resolved
When I saw the video of the "7 minutes of Terror" and the crazy landing system for Curiosity, I thought, "Seriously, all of these mechanisms are required?".
Then I saw the Schiaparelli, landing, and I thought, "can the do this successfully in what appeared to be a more 'straight-forward' approach?"
We now, it appears, know why Curiosity had the landing system designed the way they did. Only thing crazier, would be to put balloons around a lander and let it bounce to a landing. Could you even imaging such a thing?
Yes, that's the trouble with the Martian atmosphere, enough to make landing by rockets problematic but not enough to slow things down. I remember reading an article where a guy that works specifically on parachutes for re-entry vehicles said that a parachute only landing on Mars was not possible. Keep making the parachute bigger and you end up with deminishing returns for weight and other reasons before it will slow things down enough. Likewise, supersonic entry into an atmosphere with rocket tech at the time wasn't possible either. Also, this is just for fairly small craft of just a one ton. When dealing with a human landing on Mars and you are talking something like 40 tons and much, much harder to land. Currently, the hope is that SpaceX can use their technology for first stage re-entry and landing to Mars and use it there for similar rocket based re-entry.
"Whatâ(TM)s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ⦠ow ⦠ound ⦠round ⦠ground! Thatâ(TM)s it! Thatâ(TM)s a good name â" ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
TFA has a graphic showing landing locations for the various probes. From an analysis of the pixels, it appears that Opportunity and Schiaparelli landed in the same location. Of course, by now Opportunity is halfway up Olympus Mons, but maybe it could look behind itself and find the hydrazine cloud.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I thought that was the Americans? (Along with movies, music and microcode?)
Ezekiel 23:20
Also, look at the bright side: it will go down in history as Shrapnelli :)
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Where's Matt Damon when you need him?
Beagle 2 didn't involve, as mentioned, " a smouldering wreck, the kind you'd expect from mostly full hydrazine tanks slamming into a surface at high speeds"
Shiaparelli ditched its parachutes and stopped thrusting while moving at high speeds at high altitude. There's a lot we don't know, but among the things we do, is that it's not just standing there in the sky, Wile E. Coyote style, waiting for someone to point out to it that it should be falling.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
When dealing with a human landing on Mars and you are talking something like 40 tons
This obesity thing is really getting out of hand.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I am sure Europe is being sabotaged because Musk now looks Chinese and the Chinese do not have to engage in traditional wars only to please our advantages. Do not take my word on this eh? I am sabotaged to the point of missing Nobel prizes, plural.
If it had been a Belgian probe, we would have laughed even harder. You obviously don't know any Belgians.