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Mars Climate Orbiter AWOL
Moose2000 writes " The BBC reports that NASA has lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter.
If it doesn't get back in touch, it's not just the immediate science stuff lost - it was supposed to stay in orbit as a communications relay for future missions too.
" Communication has been lost for almost 3 hours now, it appears - so there's still hope. Update: 09/23 01:36 by H :It now appears that a steering problem may have caused it to crash into the planet.
Scientific Reality:The ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe during an Earth flyby, (with the probe within a few light-seconds of the transmitter), is a hell of a lot higher than the ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe near Mars, (i.e. at a distance of many light-minutes). Thus, the probability of an MCO-style worst-case scenario happening to an RTG-based probe on Earth flyby (I don't recall even the most ardent eco-dude worried about the Venus flyby :-) is still negligible.
(You'll also note that I'm assuming, deliberately and incorrectly, that the dispersal of Cassini's plutonium in Earth's atmosphere would be the catastrophe the anti-nukes told us it would be. It wouldn't. Before they were banned, above-ground nuclear weapons tests had already dispersed many Cassinis' worth of plutonium into the atmosphere, and we're still alive.)
Political Reality:Unfortunately, the naive analysis, which is the only thing the media will propagate, and the only thing the politicians will understand - will read something like this: "We told you so! This is exactly what those eeeeeevil scientists said could never happen with Cassini! But we KNEW! We knew that NASA can't be trusted to fly its probes perfectly, but nobody listened to us! Well, yer gonna hafta listen now! MCO burned up in the atmosphere just like we feared Cassini would! We were right and the eeeeeevil scientists were wrong! Ban all RTGs now before NASA does this with an RTG-based probe in Earth's atmosphere!" And the politicians will obey the screaming hordes.
The loss of MCO is bad for Mars science, but not catastrophic, given the redundancy NASA is putting into its Mars program. Lots of small ships is better than one big ship. The political fallout from the preceding naive analysis of MCO's fiery demise, however, will be much longer-lived and carry a much higher price than the loss of one probe.
If we're lucky, it'll be limited to a ban on Earth flybys for any future RTG-based probes. If we're unlucky, it'll spell the end of RTGs altogether.
While you can easily explore the inner planets on solar power, and maybe even Jupiter if you're careful and advance solar technology somewaht, the mass penalty for larger-and-larger solar panels increases dramatically as you move away from the sun. If one of the side-effects of the MCO failure results in a ban on RTGs, we can basically forget about exploring the outer solar system for at least a generation (i.e. until we can come up with a better technology). That would be a major blow to space science.
Anyway, for those interested, if they do manage to make contact again here is a link to the real time telemetry of the orbiter.
something wicked this way comes...
Please continue sending your crunchy satellites on a bi-annual schedule. This corresponds nicely to our feeding and breeding schedule. Failure to comply would be bad.
*Big Martian dude out.*
Obviously, it requires a much more precise heading to get into orbit around a planet than to simply flyby, and consequently the Martian probes require more course corrections than the Voyager probes did.
Also, and this factor cannot be forgotten, Voyager dates from NASA's "rich" time, when they could spend billions of dollars on a probe. These modern probes have had an order of magnitude less money spend on them. This means less redudancy, less testing, and therefore less reliablity.
Pluto is again the furthest planet out. It passed outside of Neptune's orbit last year.