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NASA Will Land InSight on Mars With Cunning -- and Lots of Cork (wired.com)
On Monday, November 26th, NASA will attempt to land the InSight spacecraft on Elysium Planitia, a vast plain just north of the Martian equator. If NASA is successful, InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) will be the first mission to investigate Mars' deep interior with thermal probes and seismometry, an approach scientists think will address questions about the red planet's formation and composition. But first, the spacecraft must land. From a report: Getting to Mars is hard, but NASA engineers consider entry, descent, and landing -- the seven-minute period in which mission planners are helpless to intervene, due to the tremendous distance between Mars and Earth -- the riskiest sequence in the entire mission. Here's how NASA plans to pull it off.
For InSight, the action will begin Monday, November 26th at around 11:47 am PT (2:47 pm ET). That's when the lander is slated to hit the top of Mars' atmosphere, at an altitude roughly 43 miles above the planet's surface. On contact, the spacecraft will be blazing along at a not-so-cool 5500 meters per second. That's 12,300 miles per hour. At those speeds, the primary concern for NASA's engineers is friction. Mars' atmosphere, which is roughly 100 times thinner than Earth's, plays a vitally important role in InSight's arrival: Bleeding the spacecraft of its kinetic energy. Yet the atmosphere poses a significant threat, as well. The resistance it exerts on InSight's heat shield, a 419-pound enclosure composed primarily of crushed cork, will drive the temperature of the protective barrier to temperatures greater than 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt steel.
For InSight, the action will begin Monday, November 26th at around 11:47 am PT (2:47 pm ET). That's when the lander is slated to hit the top of Mars' atmosphere, at an altitude roughly 43 miles above the planet's surface. On contact, the spacecraft will be blazing along at a not-so-cool 5500 meters per second. That's 12,300 miles per hour. At those speeds, the primary concern for NASA's engineers is friction. Mars' atmosphere, which is roughly 100 times thinner than Earth's, plays a vitally important role in InSight's arrival: Bleeding the spacecraft of its kinetic energy. Yet the atmosphere poses a significant threat, as well. The resistance it exerts on InSight's heat shield, a 419-pound enclosure composed primarily of crushed cork, will drive the temperature of the protective barrier to temperatures greater than 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt steel.
Wow, didn't we already landed there like 20 years ago first time? Should be easy with current tech? Or it was all massive BS and a lot of Photoshop?
They won't be landing on Mars, because they haven't EVER landed on Mars. Mars Curiosity is on Devon Island. Or rather, photographs of Devon Island, taken with other rovers (that aren't the same as Curiosity) are being Photoshopped to make them look like they come from Mars.
We will NEVER put men back on the moon, not in your lifetime - or should I say "we will never put men on the Moon" not "back on the Moon", because we never went there in the first place. Otherwise we would have EASILY gone back there since the Apollo missions, wouldn't we? Don't tell me, "The public aren't interested", yadda yadda yadda. Of course the public are interested, especially with 4K televisions, just think of looking at beautiful, awe inspiring 4k footage of the Moon every day, as the astronauts explore more and more of it.
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And give it all to SpaceX.
They are actually accomplishing something, besides cost overruns.
We made heat shields that did a much harder job in the 60's, bringing Astronauts home; this is something harder?
LOL.
The SLS is overbudget, behind schedule, and will need Billions of dollars to finish.
What has NASA done since the 60's?
Fucked up the concept of a Reusable Space Plane to the point we lost Two Sets of Astronauts for Trivial reasons, and are riding to the Space Station with Russia, maybe?
It should be disbanded, and restarted by new people.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Thus far, NASA is the only organization to have much luck with Mars EDL.
There were a series of Soviet probes in the 1960's and 70's, but the only one to live on the surface was Mars 3, and then only for 20 seconds before it stopped. They also had two probes in the late 1980's, Phobos 1 and 2, but both quit before successfully landing on Phobos. Also their Phobos-Grunt mission in 2011 failed. They did have some luck with flyby missions however.
Likewise Europe's Beagle 2 lander was never heard from again after it touched down on Mars. However the orbiter portion of the mission worked. Europe's 2016 Schiaparelli lander attempt also failed before touchdown and was never heard from again.
NASA had the first full lander success (beyond a few seconds of operation) with Viking 1 and 2 in 1975. Since then they've had a few failures such as the Mars Climate Observer and Mars Polar Lander, but many successes too, even including rovers. NASA seems to be the only space exploration organization adept at landing probes on Mars and making them work. That's no guarantee however, and there are many, many things that can go wrong, some of them unpredictable.
Mars EDL is hard.
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APK
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Lockheed Martin has produced an animation of the entry descent and landing. Go ahead and watch it, once, then forget about it. It unfortunately is not nearly as informative as, say, the 7 Minutes of Terror video from Curiosity, or the whimsical bounce landing from Spirit and Opportunity.
If this doesn't work it isn't a big deal. They just have to wait a few more years and SpaceX can send somebody to walk over and place a seismograph on Mars by hand.
Reentry heating is primarily caused by rapid compression of the air caused by the speeding vehicle. A bottle of aerosol gets cold when its contents are released and decompressed. Well, the reverse process of compression causes heat to be emitted. And that's what causes most of the heating during reentry, not friction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry
NASA has had much success at exploring Mars. But what about some of the other rocky planets? Why do they only get flybys or orbitals?
BepiColombo is heading for Mercury, but that's a European-Japan joint mission. It'll be another orbital. Nothing is currently around Venus, let alone trying to land there again. What, is Venus owned by the Russians and Mars by the U.S.?
I'm sure the challenges of putting a lander on Mercury, let alone Venus, are very large. But won't we learn more by doing those missions, than by putting yet another lander on Mars?
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Working of Error
NASA likes to try to force requirements on others that they don't apply to themselves.
Commercial crew MUST have less than a failure rate of less than 1/270 (loss of Mission -- not necessarily loss of crew) but Shuttle could fly with an estimated chance of failure and crew loss almost 10 times worse.
CCS needs to have multiple test flights but SLS 1b will be deemed to be safe to put astronauts in on it's first flight (just like the Shuttle).
When Space-X was planning on sending a Dragon to Mars using Falcon Heavy, there were many cries from experts at Nasa that Space-X would be contaminating Mars with terrestrial microbes (leaving aside the fact that Space-X is planning on sending humans to Mars within 15 years if all goes well at which point it'll be a moot point).
I'd be interested in just what precautions NASA has taken to make sure that the crushed cork CANNOT have any microbes that could contaminate Mars. Or is this yet another case where Nasa won't apply it's rules to themselves...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Why don't they just ask Musk? He will have a colony on Mars soon. Right after he finishes his tunnel and offers a $35k electric car. So very soon.
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APK
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I assume that the AC here thinks that he is being witty.
tens of millions of people believe this, though.
A little bit of exaggeration there Geoffrey?
Nope. Tens of millions, and probably more.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
EDL stands for "Extraderrestrial Landing".
This is not simple matter of parachuting and cushion. The weight of the spacecraft may at 38% of its total weight in Earth, but the mass is still the same regardless. There is matter of minimizing impact shocks and vibrations too
Obviously orbital mechanics is the primary factor BUT it seems a lot of the Mars craft have arrived in the holiday season.
gweihir KNOWS u IMPERSONATE me https://it.slashdot.org/commen... c6gunner proves it https://linux.slashdot.org/com... he forgot to SUBMIT as AC & using his registered 'lusrname' instead (because he tried to mock me both BEFORE & after I FAIRLY challenged him to show he's done better work - he had ZERO).
& NO WAY I'd "cry" like you "playing victim ne'er-do-wells" on /. (TROLL /.ers, not all) OR post on hosts offtopic.
YOU HELPED ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... (& you quit trying to make me look bad trying to "tell lies" on hosts as "ME" IN YOUR IMPERSONATIONS of me e.g. https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... as regards Intel speculative execution attack? Hosts PREVENT 'EM)
APK
P.S.=> I KNOW the 2nd to last link above's KILLING YOU - YOU ACTUALLY HELPED ME getting me to see if hosts stop more than portsmash (& Meltdown + Spectre too) & "lo & behold" - hosts WORK on 'em - U LOSE (& U STOPPED TRYING IT in your impersonations of me) .... apk
They make a point to mention the cork in the title, then again in the article but no mention of why it works. Is it soaked in something?
2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt steel. Unlike in 9/11, when the temperatures if the fuel was restricted to one floor and burned with maximum oxygen, around 1,100 degrees F: http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/how-hot.htm
Only 419 pounds, they missed by one but made the reference!
It is used to slow down from some 5,000 m/s to a few hundred. If Mars had no atmosphere it would require a huge amount of fuel to do that slow down.
The only issue is that the atmosphere is so thin that the last bit of slowing does need to be done with rockets. But it is 90% with heat shield and 9% with parachute.
Not going to happen, at $21.5 Trillion in debt now, The choice of Obamacare is what caused the loss of $18 Billion to be reallocated away from NASA. Palmdale is going to stay the way it is, I was there a few months ago and I wasn't impressed.
Been 55 years now since December 1963.
The story behind CIA Strategic Reconnaissance from the great nephew of Jack Branham and grandson of the guy ripped off/killed by Sinatra December 1963 ending the program. Included is email from Edwards AFB Flight Test Museum after being shown my grandfather's mechanical drawing set and advised what I was told by Jack Branham up at his place in '91, was a few months before McNamara got in my face up in Tahoe. What was said by him breached a presidential seal, but I looked into that a bit from a family member of LBJ (James Johnson).
http://imgur.com/gallery/02NgX
Just stop.
First a Tesla Roadster is launched into space, and now NASA has landed a Honda Insight.
These car ads keep upping the ante.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
At only 400 F the strength derating for steel is 0.90. And at 930 F structural steel is down to 0.50. A damage structure is unlikely to be able to handle double the maximum rated load, and will collapse.
Twisting and flexing metal creates localized heat significant enough to metal small areas, even if the ambient temperature is not nearly enough. (because air is a poor conductor of heat, it means hot spots can build up easily).
If you're interested in seeing a similar effect in action, go to YouTube and check out videos of a friction welder in action. It simply rubs bits of metal together enough to get it cherry red hot to bright yellow hot (2800 F), without any jet fuel required.
Honestly, if a structural engineer looks at this scenario, they would conclude that the buildings were unlikely to collapse from the impacts and fires. The heat and impact alone should not have resulted in collapse of the twin towers. But several factors that wouldn't have been part of a typical engineering analysis occurred, and there is no way the hijackers could have planned for things like the fire proofing material to crack and dislodge in the impact. Luck was on the hijacker's side, so maybe all that praying to Allah paid off.