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Mars Express Beams Back Images of Ice-Filled Korolev Crater (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The stunning Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars is filled with ice all year round owing to a trapped layer of cold Martian air that keeps the water frozen. The 50-mile-wide crater contains 530 cubic miles of water ice, as much as Great Bear Lake in northern Canada, and in the centre of the crater the ice is more than a mile thick. Images beamed back from the red planet show that the lip around the impact crater rises high above the surrounding plain. When thin Martian air then passes over the crater, it becomes trapped and cools to form an insulating layer that prevents the ice from melting. The latest picture is a composite of five strip-like images taken from the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe, which swung into orbit around the planet on Christmas Day 2003. On the same day, the orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, a British probe built on a shoestring budget, which touched down but failed to fully open on the surface. Mars Express photographed the Korolev crater with its high-resolution stereo camera, an instrument that can pick out features 10 metres wide, or as small as 2 metres when used in super-resolution mode.
What does this have to do with SpaceX landings? (They're still more successful than Martian probes, BTW.)
Ezekiel 23:20
That's one of the sweetest pictures of Mars I've ever seen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So how long until corporate exploiters destroy it for profit, as retarded-growth-economic paradigms dictate as the only suitable outcome?
I'm sure plenty of Martians won't want their domestics and ice miners to be robots. /s
As far as destroying Mars for profit, it's way closer than Earth to the asteroid belt which is much more useful for raw materials.
A composite picture of the Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars, made from images taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera overlaid on a digital terrain model.
Anyone know why they had to, or chose to, use a digital terrain model, rather than just give the complete real pictures?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
sublime away?
What a cool picture, even if it is a bit fabricated. Also, thanks to whoever posted/accepted the article. This is much better than the latest political horror show and more reflective of "News for nerds, stuff that matters."
Successes at powered landings on other bodies of the Solar System predate successes at powered landings on Earth from space, so you'd expect the landings on other bodies of the Solar System to be more successful today. But in fact, even though the landings elsewhere got better over time, they're still not perfect. Meanwhile powered landings on Earth have gotten better withing years instead of decades. It might have something to do with the frequency of attempts, though.
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Now I'm eager to read some of the next wave of "man on Mars" books from Kim Stanley Robinson and others.
The video claims the LLTV had no computers. In fact, it had a fly-by-wire computer system.
Also, it's not a space-bound launch vehicle re-entering from hypersonic velocity at Mach 8, which is the novel aspect here. I don't think that anyone ever claimed that it was the first time someone shortly hovered for a while.
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So how long until corporate exploiters destroy it for profit, as retarded-growth-economic paradigms dictate as the only suitable outcome?
No, you people believe that we'll never get there, and that if some team miraculously achieves a flags-and-footsteps landing, we'll never colonize the place because of the impossibly difficult conditions.
You can't have it both ways, dammit.
No, I realized instead that distance is not a factor for landing success.
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Good thing. Those shots of your mom dick-riding a orangutan were frighting. It's reassuring to know they were fabricated.
Yeah it does take more technology to make a plane go further actually. But beyond that, one is Earth and ONE IS MARS. There is no difference between Tokyo and Melbourne, but a big difference between Earth and ANOTHER PLANET. Musknuts!
Also, cosmology has nothing to with contemporary space travel in any case. Cosmologists are not concerned with such puny items as solar systems, not to mention out Solar System's planets.
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Yeah it does take more technology to make a plane go further actually.
And so does making upper stages inject their payloads onto higher energy trajectories, but neither of those things has anything to do with landings.
But beyond that, one is Earth and ONE IS MARS.
That's exactly the point. The procedure of landing on Mars and it comparative difficulty is determined by conditions on Mars, not by how far away the conditions are located.
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Statement from NASA spokesman Mark Watney, "Now you tell me. If I had known this earlier, I might not have lost my eyebrows."
I'm not "pretending", implying, spelling out, or in any way saying that the two are comparable in any way. If you re-read what I wrote, it becomes obvious.
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Interestingly, local conditions on other interesting bodies of the Solar System such as Moon or Mars are also much more boring and easier to pre-program for; hence the difficulties lie elsewhere. But congratulations for completely missing the whole point yet again (I can only assume that you're trolling, since it's the most flattering explanation), given how I was NOT comparing a plane landing to a Mars landing, but rather two plane landings from different distances. In exactly the same way, a Mars landing does not care about Earth's distance at any point.
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If we could just as easily send a spacex rocket to mars as we can send one to an earth orbit, then I'd agree.
So that makes the top-level comment meaningless, as I immediately pointed out in my first comment.
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Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that involves the origin and evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang to today and on into the future. According to NASA, the definition of cosmology is "the scientific study of the large scale properties of the universe as a whole."
Exactly, NOTHING to do with operating planetary probes, as I already pointed out.
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Delta IV is also unsustainable and won't fly anymore after April 2019, with the exception of the Heavy version that will have a few more remaining flights still until Vulcan can replace it.
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Those are simple facts known to anyone interested. I'm not the one who's ignorant here. The Lunar Module, for example, didn't have to deal with aerodynamics at all, so it had much simpler control logic and didn't need a heat shield or even thermal protection of the engine section necessary for a soft touchdown.
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Why would I do something so nonsensical?
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Wrong, Newtonian mechanics work fine for getting a craft to Mars. Cosmologists use General Relatively and other more difficult maths
what bullshit, no relativistic corrections needed for Mars trip. All of us who studied orbital mechanics for our physics degree know this, you want proof pick up any of the standard texts.
How did anyone miss a 50 mile wide lake on Mars? WTF. Open our fucking eyes I guess. lol
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Distance has nothing to do with it. All that travel is completely passive, barring the odd correction burn. You need energy to establish an orbit but not to maintain one. Mars could be right next to the moon or out past the orbit of Jupiter and it would be exactly as hard.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's more difficult (and expensive obviously) to land on a foreign planet than on Earth.
Are you sure? Earth has one hell of an atmosphere to deal with. As for expense, most of that is fuel cost and rocket engines.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
>No, I realized instead that distance is not a factor for landing success.
Actually it is - in two big ways:
- The lander is subjected to much longer thermal and radiation stresses during the long slow flight to Mars (since for whatever reason we haven't landed on the moon much), which means more probability of hardware failures.
- Since we've abandoned MAnned spaceflight beyond orbit, the lander must be pretty much fully autonomous - since any human interaction is subjected to light-speed delay - 2.6 seconds round-trip to the moon, which is difficult to deal with for any but the most minor of problems, and 6-45 light-minutes to Mars, which makes any intervention during the landing routine completely impossible.
It's also a major factor in the cost and frequency of the attempts, and well as the demand for them. There've been a grand total of 48 launches to Mars spread across 56 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars), several governments, and multiple generations of scientists, engineers, and administrators. Not all of those launches even included a lander, and of those that did, they couldn't learn anything from the previous several landers launched, since those hadn't yet reached Mars by the time the current one departed.
Contrast that to the 46 Falcon 9 booster landings SpaceX has attempted in just the last six years, all under the guidance of one man, by one mostly-coherent team. All completed sequentially, so that any lessons learned from one landing attempt could be immediately applied to the next.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, it really isn't. You don't even need relativity - plain old Newtonian mechanics is quite sufficient for navigation within the solar system by anything yet built by Man. You'll get some discrepancies if you pay close enough attention, but nothing that wouldn't be corrected by dead reckoning, if not lost in the noise of other imperfections in your rocket.
You need orbital mechanics to hit what you're aiming for, but that's still simple stuff, and it'd be a real stretch to call that "cosmological maths" (what exactly do you mean by that phrase?) - neither dark matter, dark energy, nor any other cosmological-scale factor manifest noticeably in something as tiny as a solar system. And very little in cosmology cares about things that happen on human timescales, other than the explosions.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's a matter of terminology. The actual question is "is/was there *liquid* water on Mars" - but water is relatively special in that there are common names for its gaseuos and solid phases, so that "water" often implies "liquid". We've known for a long time that there's water-ice on Mars - the polar icecaps clearly contain both water and CO2. Now we're mapping and characterizing particular deposits that might be of interest to future researchers and colonists.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly. It is easy to bring enough fuel for a suborbital flight and a powered landing, it is far more difficult to reach escape velocity and still bring enough fuel for braking and landing on another planet.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So they found a first landing place for humans?
It's more difficult (and expensive obviously) to land on a foreign planet than on Earth.
If it is, it's because of local conditions. Not because because of distance, as some "cosmological" moron above tried to claim.
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I never compared Mars to Melbourne, so you're barking up the wrong tree.
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Cepheid measurements have nothing to do with Solar System navigation. Distances to Cepheids are immaterial since we don't travel over interstellar distances.
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Obviously, equipment lifetime is the one thing that can be a factor here. But I don't see how how non-autonomous nature would have helped you here. Pretty much all time-sensitive operations such as vehicle ascent and reentry are pre-programmed and under computer's control. Even on manned vehicles, even on Earth, where real-time ground control *could* be an option, we still opt for pre-programmed scenarios, since you don't want to entrust anything more complex than an abort switch to people under the circumstances of time-critical flight sequences. Frequency of attempts I already mentioned above - it's logical that we'll gather it more quickly here.
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Kyosuke claimed it was EASIER to land a craft there than in Australia
I claimed no such thing. I said that places don't care about the distance from which you arrive to them. Mars won't make you landing easier just because you're only departing from Deimos either.
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Just because the pilot is probably a robot, doesn't mean there's no use for a human captain.
Even if it's only an abort switch under the control of human judgement, that's still a potentially big improvement over full autonomy, since even the best-programmed/trained AI won't have the same understanding of abort-worthy situations as a human.
And in reality, it's quite likely that other things benefit from human judgement as well. For example, landing on unfamiliar territory where additional information is becoming available with every passing moment. Maybe best to let the computer do the flying, but quite likely an advantage to have a trained human at a real-time landing-target adjustment screen e.g. displaying the rapidly improving terrain map of the potential landing zone overlayed with the rapidly shrinking potential landing zone and current target, along with both AI and human-flagged hazards to avoid and most-promising landing points.
It will be interesting to see just how much the landing experience gained here will actually help elsewhere. I'm strongly hopeful, I mean it *should* be a lot easier to land on Mars, the moon, etc. where atmospheric variability isn't a confounding factor. Whether it actually *is* or not? We shall see - reality has a way of laying bare unsuspected assumptions and oversights. I'm sure the experience will translate to a much better starting point - but I still wouldn't want to be on board the first BFR to try landing on the moon. But hey, sign me up for the companion BFR in lunar orbit, serving as a micro-lag orbital "ground control".
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.