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Mars Deep Space 2 Crash Program
NYFreddie writes "ABCNews has an article on NASA's Deep Space 2 program where two basketball sized probes will be dropped from above the Martian atmosphere to crash into the surface at around 400 mph where they are expected to continue operating and transmitting data. "
UPI (United Press Interplanetary) - Amateur astronomers report monitoring two spacecraft obviously orignating from outside the Mars local orbit crashing into the atmosphere and landing near the remote town of Marswell, New Olympus. UMAF (United Mars Air Force) spokesmen claim to have retrieved the debris, and have issued a press release claiming that the phenomena were in fact due to two weather balloons released at high altitude during some test flights. This account is hotly disputed by three Marswell residents claiming to have reached the impact site before the UMAF.
In an interview, local resident "Creepy" Pbtbtwzxk told this reporter that the capsules had strange markings on the exterior surface resembling markings found on other artifacts previously recovered by MUFOS (Mars Unidentified Flying Object Society) which have been the subject of several denials of authenticity by the UMAF. Pbtbtwzxk, waving all six blue tentacles stated emphatically that "The UMAF knows what is going on, but they are trying to keep it secret from the honest citizens of the United States of Canopis."
Meanwhile several other residents of Marswell are in the process of constructing a small meseum and gifte shoppee to commemorate this mysterious event.
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They're crashing on purpose, right? Not like the previous metric/imperial blunder...
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I noticed after the Climate Orbiter was launched to much hoopla, the polar lander was launched with neary a web page about it. It was buried on their website all year but never linked to the main page like all the other missions. Meanwhile they were advertizing the hell out of the climate orbiter, which eventually crashed. Are they already hedging the bet on these inexpensive missions by not advertizing them?
(Me? Cynical? Why would I by cynical? After all, I worked for them.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
they are probably using Windows to run this because crashing is what Windows does best :)
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How do you think they first classified the Ranger and Apollo missions? No one knew in 1961 if it would be possible to land a human on the moon and bring them back. As a species we had never been in a high orbit, let alone to the moon. This mission is a testbed for later missions. It would be very expensive energy wise to build a probe that would soft land onto the martian surface and drill down three feet, where it would be very cheap energy wise to crash a hardened probe into the surface to get it down three feet. It's not easy to run a space agency on the paltry funds that space agencies today are run on. On the contrary it is very hard yet they still do it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
MONKEY! Great Sage, Equal of Heaven and Eater of the Lemon Cake!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You use "dd", base 10 numbers. Ie. Number 44 is written 44, 5 can be written 05 (or just 5) for clarity. Because base 100 is far too difficult to manage in terms of individual symbols, it's interpreted by using 2 base 10 digits, one to the power of ten, the other of no power. (ie. 65 = 6*10^1 + 6, as in digit1*10^1 +digit2).
Ps. happy birthday ...
The show is available in RealAudio from here .
This program also includes a story about a Planetary Society project to send a microphone to mars..
Pentop
of seeing all the posts berating NASA. In space exploration probably the most important factor in any mission is energy. With no energy you can't launch a probe, send it to its destination, land it, take measurements, ect. Whenever an engineer can save energy he/she will. The more energy you have the more things you can do. On a spacecraft the energy available is limited because we don't have an infinite amount of money and time to build a system with next to unlimited energy. It's MUCH more effective to use the probes momentum to bury it three feet into the ground than it would be to soft land it and then have it drill down three feet. NASA could feasibly build a space craft with huge energy reserves but that would cost a good deal of money, one thing NASA no longer has. It seems to me NASA served its political purpose, it got men to the moon and returned them safely home. After Apollo NASA saw it's funding cut more andmore. Had it not been cut we would probably have moon bases and permenant space stations by now.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
No idea, but if you check back issues of new scientist you can see some interesting effects of animals falling from heights.
When a cat falls from a great height (block of flats etc) its usually when its alone, accidental maybe, or perhaps suicidal. Dogs however tend to either be tricked into the jump by vicious children, or just damn stupid.
Dogs tend to just land, whilst cats experience secondary bouncing.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I know you're trying to be funny...but... :-)
Most of the first space probes were impactors. The soviets started with Luna 2 in '59. The US followed in '62 with Ranger 4. The first soft landing didn't occur until Luna 9 in 1966.
Anonymous Coward wrote
> 3) Put a thick layer of weak concrete around the probe...
Concrete: just one small problem - mass!!
To get a thick layer of concrete into space in the first place takes energy - to get it to Mars takes energy - I assume they're trying to make the various probes as small and light as possible for this reason.
If they were going to use a material for that purpose then I presume they'd settle for a similar material to the Space Shuttle coating, which IIRC is quite light and very heat tolerant.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I was always of the impression that the cat righted itself with the tail flick, via conservation of angular momentum.
:/)
I do know, however that a cat with 2/3 of its brain missing can still perform this feat (I'd hate to meet the guy who tested this tho
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
There IS a reason that the SI units have been adopted by all but two nations of the world (I think it's the same two nations that haven't adopted the Rights of a Child, just out of irony.) However, what you have said is good insight into the problem with the base for our number system. The SI philosophy is more intuitive for superscalar things, but as you say, imperial is great for everyday things.
Although, I must say, feet, yards, and inches may be a bit misleading at times. (Some feet are bigger than others ...)
No, there's only one non-metric nation left. IIRC, Brunei Darussalam went metric a few years ago.
The other country that failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child is Somalia, which has no effective government at this time. Somalia has been metric at least since the Marxist coup in '74.
I'm a Canadian who grew up in an imperial measurement - based society until high school, so I have a feel for miles, inches and Fahrenheit. In university I was exposed to metric (actually SI for Systeme Internationale) and Canada converted to kilometers, centimeters and Celcius. With all due respect, and having had experience with both, imperial grew while SI was planned, and it shows in terms of convenience. I don't want kids to think it sensible that there are 16 ounces to the pound, 12 inches to the foot, three feet to the yard and God knows how many feet to the mile. It's madness, pure and simple. I can explain everything you need to know about SI in five minutes, but I can't believe you're expecting anyone to remember there are 180 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water in Fahrenheit or that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees above zero. In SI, it's a hundred degrees and water freezes at zero, mass is in grams or some ten-based derivative, volume is based on the volume of a kilogram of water at sealevel and Bob's your uncle. The reason that we don't use metric time is because we do have to care about the duration of the day, month and year as these affect us directly (the week and millenium are arbitrary conventions). I expect one reliable clock to use in space will be the exact length of time in seconds since the launch of the first human in space (Gagarin Universal Time, anyone?) or the number of seconds since the first human object to reach orbit was launched (Sputnik Standard Date?) or the number of seconds since Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first humans to land on another heavenly body (no Baywatch jokes here). We only need to use nonmetric time as long as we are associated with planets rather than living in our own artificial habitats in open space. If we do this, each habitat can pick its own unique daylength. My personal day tends to run about 28 hours, which is similar to what people who lived in mineshafts for months found in their Circadian rhythm studies in the 1970's and 1980's. Metric time will come once it is useful. There is already a metric date used in spreadsheets and by timekeepers- called the Julian date if I'm not mistaken. Anyone else know?
The goal of this mission is to have part of the probe stay on the surface, and part of the probe dig beneath the surface to search for water. The two parts will be connected by a cord, and the surface part will (hopefully) transmit data gathered by the part inside the Martian soil back to earth. It should be able to determine if any water is left in the soil of Mars. The truly amazing thing about this speed in which it is going: 3 times the speed of a free-fall decent on earth. Imagine the force of a airplane crash times 3! The mission will be considered a success if ANY data is transmitted. From a earlier USA Today article, it didn't sound like NASA was supremely confident that this thing would work.
Sig goes here
...Off the valleys, around Mt. Olympus, over the Phobos, under Deimos, nothing but soil.
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. (Heck, I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)
... there are 2 dead robots sitting close to each other on Mars ... there are strange devices hurtling towards the stars ... whoa, lyrics!
About the only reason I log on to the various mainstream newssites these days is to catch the space news - who launched what, what blew up on the launch pad, who has the latest mass-market space stuff in experimental stages, etc.
And I love hearing about the exploration of Mars, and the moon, etc.
But one thing that keeps bugging me is that we're littering all this Earth trash all over these external bodies - there's a Hasselblad sitting on a Lunar Rover on the moon, pointed at the stars
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
What if we come to an early demise as a species, and in a few millenia the 'roaches or whatever evolve a Space-faring Caste and they start making their way out to distant rocks, and they find all this crap - and some half-wit 'roach from the Religious Caste holds it up as evidence proving that life once existed on these foreign planets!
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In the past both the US and the USSR crashed probes or stages of spacecraft into the moon in order to obtain geological data about it. What we did IIRC was use laser interferometry to establish the distance to the moon to within a few wavelengths, then we crashed parts of the lunar landers into it and saw what kind of disturbance we got. Again IIRC it rang like a bell, indicating an essentially homogenous sphere of rock instead of a seismically active body with a molten core.
If NASA carries through with this experiment they will surely discover something that has intrigued mankind for ages. The lair of the Purple Monkey.
Little do most people know, but the lair of the Purple Monkey lies below the martian surface. It is here that the Purple Monkeys live in harmony, programming Amiga software and writing for Amiga publications.
Some say Amiga is on the decline, but the hyper-intelligent Purple Monkeys know otherwise. They know that they were put on Mars for one purpose. Total Galaxial Domination.
After the Purple Monkeys enslave humans they shall wage war on the Green Pandas of Mercury. It is only a matter of time before us humans are used as projectile weapons against the Green Pandas of Mercury. See.. the Green Pandas have a weakness.. and that weakness is their inability to NOT eat humans. The Purple Monkeys will use this knowledge to hurl us at the Green Pandas, rendering them unable to resist the temptation of human flesh. While the Pandas feast, the Monkeys will take over Mercury and drive it in to the sun.
Only the great Monkey god of Naditz-7a knows what shall follow.
Just thought I'd give everyone a heads up on whats to come.
-rdogg
Tonight, on News at 11....
Earlier today the tiny Deep Space 2 probes crashed into the Martian landscape. Shortly after they landed NASA called the project a resounding success, and proof the Millennium Program works. However, later in the day after analyzing the data from the probes the project was termed a "successful failure".
It has been reported to News At 11 that while the first probe returned all of the expected data, the second only transmitted on word then stop responding.
"Ouch"
I just hope NASA doesn't become too focused on a pure crash landing.
/., the posting here, and responses to it focus in on the first few lines of the article and does not examine the topic in any depth.
Unfortunately, but in what seems to have become a rather typical event on
The actual crash landing probes are hitchhiking on a much larger probe that will (hopefully) be making a soft landing at the south pole and be doing all sorts typical stuff like grabbing soil samples, listening to the wind throug a mike (run by Linux), taking pictures and doing it's best to disturb the local population.
Humans produce very little garbage. We should look at the material in landfills as an untapped resource, not garbage.
Likewise, all that space junk, drop in the bucket though it may be, is just some stuff that is slightly more organized than the stuff that was there before, but really little different than the rocks and sand that are also there.
In the future, when you refer to the Moon and Mars, and envision the possibilities for exploiting the resources there, remember that a small amount of steel, aluminum, and plastic might be available for you to work into your plans. Might as well break an old habit on a new world.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Check out the DS2 mission flipbook.
Do you think we should have a Linux installation flipbook???
-JT
Do you fit the Mad Scientist Profile?
I wonder if these little babies carry high-speed accelerometers to infer the mechanical characteristics of the stuff they're plowing into... could be useful information.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
... it was more of a commentary on the fact that our space program has become a "Galactic Trash Program" more than a "Woohoo, Vacation on the Moon" program...
Guess that was missed a bit.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --