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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.
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.
Oh look. A Mars mission with an excellent chance of success, well-planned, by NASA. Whoda thunk it? Detractors will of course point at any detail gone wrong because they don't want NASA to succeed. smh.
Wow, didn't we already landed there like 20 years ago first time?
Viking, 1976: 42 years ago.
Should be easy with current tech?
Easier, perhaps. But not easy.
NASA's been successful with Mars landings since the loss of Polar lander, and that was 20 years ago. But Mars landings are not easy. For the entire planet Earth, the success rate for missions to orbit or land on Mars is 50% successful, 50% not; with the most recent failure the ESA Schiaparelli EDM lander. So, don't take Mars landings for granted.
Or it was all massive BS and a lot of Photoshop?
You know, that isn't really funny, because millions of people actually believe that shit. There really doesn't seem to be any possible satire conspiracy theory so extreme that people don't believe it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
I assume that the AC here thinks that he is being witty.
tens of millions of people believe this, though.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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
And give it all to SpaceX.
Which is funded by NASA.
Slashdot commenters seem to forget that the entire reason SpaceX didn't go bankrupt after the third failure of the Falcon-1 is that NASA believed in them and stepped in to fund them to design and build the Falcon-9, at a time when nobody else in the world saw anything in them other than a fringe company that tried to make a rocket and failed.
If you're asking what NASA has accomplished since the 60s: well, this is one thing.
Without NASA there would be no SpaceX.
Give the contract to Hollywood, they have decades of experience with reboots. Coming in 2021: NEONASA.
#DeleteFacebook
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
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?
Budget.
NASA's budget is quite small, and NASA only gets to use a fraction of that on planetary probes, with the preponderance consumed by congress-mandated SLS and ISS manned programs.
Let NASA shut down the SLS, and spent that money on landers, and you'll see them dropping landers on the other rocky planets.
They do also plan this hopper lander for Titan.
p>You know, that isn't really funny, because millions of people actually believe that shit. There really doesn't seem to be any possible satire conspiracy theory so extreme that people don't believe it.
Stanley Kubrick filmed the fake moon landings, but he was such a perfectionist he made NASA go to the moon to do it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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?
Yes there are some people who are genuine kooks, and will believe anything but the truth.
But there are a lot more who just troll for the LuLz.
Gotta remember that the best way to deal with the trolls, is to laugh with them. And the best way to deal with the kooks is to give them even crazier shit to believe.
That said, I have to get heading off through the Pizzagate tunnels to Area 51 (that pedophile stuff was just a cover story for Elon Musk's real purpose, a boring tube, to provide a safe transit for the idle elite when the meteorite they have known about for 20 years hits the earth), and where Oblama hides his Kenyan Birth certificate, and he and Hellery are meeting with the Illuminati in the warehouse where the chemtrails and poison vaccines are stored. Wake up America!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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?
How's your Chemtrail research coming along?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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
We made heat shields that did a much harder job in the 60's, bringing Astronauts home; this is something harder?
If you understand the process of EDL on Mars then yes. It's much harder to land spacecraft on Mars than on Earth. It would be better if Mars did not have an atmosphere. The problem is that Mars has just enough atmosphere to where you have to deal with it during EDL. This means you need a good heat shield that problem is basically solved like you said. Because the atmosphere on Mars is so thin it's difficult to slow down the spacecraft unlike on Earth. This requires some atmospheric gymnastic for the spacecraft to perform during EDL in order to slow the aircraft down in the atmosphere of Mars down to ~1000Mph in which case a supersonic parachute is deployed. As you can imagine deploying a parachute that has to be extremely light yet handle 8000+ pounds of load at 1000Mph is no small task. However given that Mars atmosphere is so thin the parachute alone will only slow the load down to 200 Mph. What do you do then?? Well retro rockets have to kick in and slow the craft down to landing speed but it's not that simple, you have can't land the load with retro rockets because the massive amount of dust will be all over the newly delivered load. So you need to use retro rockets in a sky-crane configuration attached to the sky-crane that will lower the load down to the surface from the sky-crane then detach the sky-crane and fly it away so the landing site is not disturbed. And you have to do this with a very delicate science laboratory on wheels and get it there on one piece with out any shock damage what-so-ever.
See here for more information
Whoosh.
It appears they're not using a sky crane for this landing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lwFLPiZEE
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.
Meh, if you've seen one dusty gray crater you've seen 'em all.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They are actually accomplishing something, besides cost overruns.
I guess I imagined all those rovers that NASA successfully landed on Mars.
What has NASA done since the 60's?
You mean apart from Hubble, many mars rovers, Dawn, Kepler, the X43, and a bunch of other stuff?
Fucked up the concept of a Reusable Space Plane
Firstly, space is hard. Secondly, the shuttle had one of the best safety records of all rockets. If you look at the number of passengers lost versus the number carried it did very well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
SpaceX is expecting to bleed off 99% of energy by atmospheric braking with its Mars rocket. It might be thin but it can still be useful.
Like this?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Like this?
By golly, it is!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
NASA didn't want SLS, Congress did.
After the disaster that was the Lockheed X-33, NASA crafted a competition between private companies to launch cargo to the ISS. SpaceX and Orbital (now Northrop) won.
NASA basically funded and fueled the development of SpaceX.
So instead of venting at NASA, turn your anger and frustration to Congress.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Couldn't the payload land with a fairing that's only deployed once the dust settles? Et voila, no dust on the payload. You could probably even use a soft fairing (e.g. vinyl bag) that unzips or whatever, if you need to save on weight..
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Couldn't the payload land with a fairing that's only deployed once the dust settles? Et voila, no dust on the payload. You could probably even use a soft fairing (e.g. vinyl bag) that unzips or whatever, if you need to save on weight..
Actually the Mars Pathfinder(MER) rover mission EDL sequence is basically what you described. see here for the video animation with explanation it's quite informative.
For comparison here is the video with explanation of the Mars Curiosity(MSL) EDL sequence.
Here is the full animation complete with cruise stage without narration or explanations.
Also notice in the MER video how they still keep the retro rockets away from the landing site.
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