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Mars Polar Lander Remains Silent
dante773 writes "ABCNews is reporting the Mars Polar Lander has missed it's primary windows of opprotunity to signal Earth. They still have a few options left to establish contact, though. Hopefully this isn't another failed Mars mission." Other sites carrying regular updates on the Mars Polar Lander that you might to check in with now and then: Offical Mars Polar Lander site; Discovery Channel's continuing coverage.
it's in my head
That's four in a row! The climate surveyor, polar lander and the two impact probes, all shot down by the Martian Air Force.
The question still remains: for what purpose are we exploring Mars? Sure, knowledge about other planets is good, but would Mars be a viable colony, or Yet Anther Dusty Rock? Even the discovery of water molecules in the subsurface of the planet doesn't speak much of its possibility as a future base. I think the best we can hope for out of this mission is just a better understanding of extraterrestrial environments. *sigh*
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
No response from the lander? Hmm... maybe it was running NT, anyone think of that?
The martians keep shooting our stuff down!
Here is a page at JPL about what starts to happen since the signal is not being heard.
They are still trying to contact the lander on X-Band, but there is still a UHF radio on board and there is still the matter of redundant radios, plus the little matter that the lander will start swapping out it's own components after six days of not getting commands from Earth. There is still a long way to go before one can start being worried.
So don't give up hope for a few weeks.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Could be double the trouble of Hubble...
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
It's quite obvious, at least to me, that there are hordes of giant red spacecraft-eating Martian beast gobbling these things up like candy.
If we STOP sending things over there, then maybe we can starve them out. Maybe we should try some sub-atmospheric observance? That way we could keep tabs on them until the died of starvation, then start sending things back over.
Well, sounds good to me at least...
In their little timeline at the bottom it says:
11:30 p.m.-1:45 a.m. If the lander had entered "safe mode" after touchdown, this is when it would wake up and try to contact Earth.
That's the problem right there... the damned thing's running Windows...
*Drivers Version
***WARNING: FILE NOT FOUND: MPLRLNDR.VXD***
***CANNOT CONTINUE BOOT SEQUENCE***
---Press F1 to continue booting in *SAFE* mode---
Next we'll have to launch a microsoft tech to Mars... grrrrr
*insert pithy sig here*
...why in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s you could send all kinds of trash up there and it would just reach the destination at least somewhat all right? Isn't the overall technology level higher now?
I'd say it is, but to take a look at what has happened recently: The metric conversion hulabaloo ("probe lost"), some malfunctioning electronic gadget with the Mars Observer ("probe lost"), antenna deployment malfunction with Galileo ("less information"), Russian Mars probe exploded after takeoff ("probe lost") and whatnot. All these are recent events from the top of my head, there might be more.
Following the footsteps of Spock and Tuvok: "There are two possibilities: there's something out there or there is nothing out there." IMO in either case the people of Earth deserve to know, even if it means admitting to the fact that new technology sucks. If NASA found aliens from Mars most people wouldn't give a damn anyway, they'd be too worried with their jobs, taxes, finding food and all sorts of everyday problems.
As a side note: is it possible to receive spacecraft signals other than in with huge NASA antennae? Is this feasible? Or does the data always have to go through some preset channel before it pops up in the media?
Apparently the "smaller, cheaper, better" NASA directive is not successful. They should go back to the big and expensive missions. Like Gallileo, Cassini and the ones before them (Chandra, Viking, Voyager, etc.). At least they don't fail(I think from the big ones only Mars Observer failed by exploding before landing). Also, I've noticed that too many Mars missions are failing. The Russians lost all 3 of theirs (one returned some data about Phobos) and NASA is not doing much better. It must be the Martian Air Force as a previous poster said.
Find an empty channel on an AM radio, point
the radio at Mars and you might hear the
signal before NASA.
And if both water and any microorganisms are found, it would be good and bad news. The presence of water means it might be possible some sort of human colony there (within a pressurized, heated structure, of course). However, the microbes would be something isolated from Earth for billions of years. They may be thoroughly deadly to Earth lifeforms who's immune systems are totally unprepared. The presence of life may result in a permanent quarrantine on Mars.
There is a secondary method of communication through Mars Orbiter, that can be made with relatively insignificant effort, after Mars Orbiter finishes communication with two other probes over there right now. This secondary method of communication will relay various signals through the orbiter back to earth, and should such a signal make it, we will likely discover the problem with the primary direct-link comminication method.
Statistically, Americans have been successiful in probing Mars, losing about 1/3rd of their probes into deep space. Of all the (albeit relatively few) Russian attempts, not a single probe made it to Mars and completed it's mission.
Through trial and error, we will eventually come to minimize failures. Automation and higher-level logic/understanding on the parts of the probes is necessary, but perhaps more important than that is the intercommunication between probes, that allows dependence on prior successes to help reduce failures in the future.
I know that a great deal of people love NSAS (myself included) however this would seem to be justification in the minds of washington political leaders to cut funding.
This would be like shooting ducks in a barrel. People in the up and up positions like to have the chance to get returns on investments they make so0 they can get re-elected. I think it may be time to do more advertizing on their rocksts ad such.
Hmm.. a red hat logo is the first thing that the martians see.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The problem is that the gravity on mars is approx. 1/3 that of earth, meaning that the atmosphere is incapable of sustaining oxygen. The atmospheric pressure is less than 1% of earth's and what is left of the atmosphere is escaping at 1 to 2 kg/sec.
t m
All the lighter gases like oxygen and nitrogen evaporated off of the planet long ago. We would need to produce a lot of oxygen constantly in order for mars to sustain life.
Temperature gradients play hell there too, on the surface, the difference in temperature between your feet and chest would be 15 degrees C.
There is a possible scenario for the terraforming of Mars at:
http://personalwebs.myriad.net/tgunn/teraform.h
I haven't read through the entire thing yet, but it seems to be pretty interesting.
All things considered, I think it may be easer to try to convert the atmosphere of Venus to something more suitable to us, as its mass is much closer to ours, although I haven't actually done any research into it, and I am very far from being a chemist with the knowledge required to change the atmosphere of an entire freaking planet =).
This lander consists of 3 landing vehicles. The main landing vehicle (which they tried to communicate with last night) was suppose to make a 'soft touchdown' on the mars south pole. This main lander has a high gain communications sub-system that was suppose to land, and contact earth 20 minutes after touchdown.
After this failed, they sent out a signal to ask the main lander to 'raster' it's high gain across a large area of the sky (sending a signal out, then turn 5 degrees, then send another). sooner or later, in theory, the high gain would eventually align itself with earth, and lock on.
This procedure, so far, did not produce the desired results.
What's more disturbing is, while the main vehicle was descending, it split off 2 small 'impact probes' that were going to impact the mars surface at ballistic speed and dig into the mars soil.
The impact probes have there own UHF communications sub-system and act independently of the main lander. The impact probes (with a much weaker UHF ) relay there signals through the orbiting surveyor that passes overhead every 2 hours.
What's disturbing to me about this development is that even if the main landers high gain has it's own problems, the 2 impact probes act completely independent of the main lander, and should be able to relay there signals home.
What are the odds of both the main lander, and the impact probes having communications problems at the same time? Very slim. This leads me to believe that perhaps there was a problem during decent.
When the mars rover (remember that little dune buggy lookin thing?) descended into the atmosphere of mars, it send out a 'beacon' signal as it descended (allowing everyone here to track it's decent in real time). This decent of the polar lander was done in 'radio silence' thus, we have no telemetry on the decent and landing an any of the 3 landing vehicles.
It's my hope that the dedicated efforts of the many skilled people on the team pays off, and the rest of the mission is nominal.
It is also my hope that (because they are the only ones that have proven results for there work) the mission planers and engineers that did the "Mars Rover" mission get promoted, and there ideas get more funding, attention and authority.
I mean, they're just sitting there enjoying a Martian barbecue and all of a sudden this great bloody thing falls out of the sky and everyone's gotta duck so the primative pink things on the third planet don't know they're around right? So they just start lasering these things before they hit the ground. Problem solved.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Anyone know why they didn't use the "bounce it like a beach ball" landing technique instead of trying to set down the probe using constant thrust engines? At least the beachball technique had the advantage of actually being done before.
Didn't Pathfinder run on VxWorks? I think a scheduling glitch caused some problems.
Anyone else think there are a bunch of green guys with two heads laughing their assess off saying:
"BWRRRRP!! ZZZZZPT! HAHA! We got another one! Hey, BLappht***ty! Can you use that one for a car or a spine massager?"
This whole thing reminds one of 2001. Probes and spacecraft "disappearing" into space, the recent metric/english conversion problems. Yah right! That's the kind of stuff that college freshmen mess up on, not NASA scientists. This is a conspiracy.
Something is up there and they know it. NASA lost a $1 billion ship up there in 1993. Do people actually believe that? Something has been found and the government doesn't want us to know. Why would NASA face the critisism it has just to keep a secret? Easy, they're a government agency, they made a deal to retain a constant stream of funding. Those blustering Senators who want to cut NASA's budget are hapless pawns in the hands of the NSA, CIA, MI8 (or whatever it is now), Red China, ex-KBG officers, Saudi secret service, and Red Hat operatives.
I am reminded of my favorite Engineering Axiom
Good
Fast
Cheap
Pick any Two
-- cary
I think it is important that we remember that NASA said it wouldn't be totally unexpected if they didn't hear from the MPL after 2 or 3 windows of opportunity. I don't think we can expect everything to go right. However, we should keep an optimistic attitude until pessimism is warranted.
Rajiv Varma
It is probally sitting there with a blue screen waiting for someone to reboot it.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Warning - conspiracy theory - dangerous if inhaled
What greater way to boost publicity to have it malfunction for about a day or two and then BOOM all around the world: "It works!"
Although that seems unlikely. (oh really)
Although Murphy's Law does state that the further away a computer is from humans, the more likely it is to hang on a reboot. (Which explains why whenever you restart a computer over the network, it never comes back up ;)
"Your computer was not properly shutdown. Press return to run scandisk on your drives."
Better send that technician.
"Darn, my winmodem won't work with Linux? I'll have to recompile it... with my blowtorch."
Colonizing space and neighboring planets is the best way to insure humanity's long-term survival. We'll also have to go interstellar eventually, as even the sun won't live forever.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If life has evolved on mars too that means the probability for life could be huge. And think about the enormous amounts of suffering evolution has led to when life got complex enough.
If there is life around most or many of the stars in the universe that would/could be really, really bad.
NASA didn't even know when they sent this thing for Mars if the impact probes would even survive the impact. They just might have been blown to bits, and that was always a probability. So don't let the failure of the impact probes lead you to believe that the whole thing is a total loss. There are still a lot of options left.
This luser is so stupid he cant se past his nose for the snot. KILL KILL KILL
We've got enuf trouble with Natalie Portman NAKED AND PETRIFIED. This karma whore isn't even funny. Moderators: close in and destroy.
possible explanation from NASA: "After further review, we found that a slight miscalculation of the location of Mars occurred. For some reason, a NASA engineer mistook the Sun for Mars. Oops."
Yesterday i dropped my tv remote control,quite accidentally,about 3 ft.
Its hencho en mexico electronics just couldnt take the shock.Therefore it comes as no surprise to me
that sophisticated electronics after going through
severals Gs of launch force,the harsh environment of space and crashing into a planet wont send a
puny radio signal all the way to earth the first time its called.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
That's what your comments boil down to. I think you watch too many movies.
Earth:
Those two hunks of metal in the 70s
The little rover the could
Mars:
Polar and 2 probes
Climate burnup
Two russian
Statistically its bullshit, 33% success?
If you buy into some consipiracy theories, the rover was faked in a Arizona desert, and maybe the two hunks of metal too. If you buy ANOTHER theory, anything that lands near a Martian Monolith and sends back pictures has an 'accident' so the undesevering public will not panic. What freq was it supposed to trasmit on? Oops the masses aren't supposed to know that either. Making a big antenna that recieves isn't too hard or ex$pen$ive, but one that sends is.
This is what happens when you send machines to do a mans job. One manned mission could have achieved the mission objectives of all the previous failed probes and then some. Instead NASA wasted a lot of time, money and credibility sending complicated toys into oblivion. Just my $0.02
Considering there are three landers--the polar lander and the two deep-space 2 probes, and NONE of them can be contacted, I think it bodes poorly for the success of this mission. Control should be given to the Air Force. They have the resources and technology to carry out these missions, have better cameras for projects like the Global Surveyor, and some ass would get kicked badly when something failed. Not only that, but congress isn't cutting their budget and staff constantly.
Next time they send one, they should just let it trail a long copper wire linking it back to earth. Better yet, they could use a CAT-5 cable and set it up as the first extra-terrestrial web server.
getting to another planet obviously isn't simple work. 1960 October 10, A2-e (Vostok) (Mars 60A), also Koralb 4 (USSR): Failed to achieve Earth orbit 1960 October 14, A2-e (Mars 60B), also Koralb 5 (USSR): Failed to achieve Earth orbit 1962 October 24, A2-e Sputnik 22, also Mars 62A or Koralb 11 (USSR): Failed to leave Earth orbit (blew up) 1962 October 24, A2-e Mars 1 (USSR): First probe to pass Mars (at about 190,000 km), but contact lost on March 21, 1963 1962 November 4, A2-e Sputnik 24, also Mars 62B or Koralb 13 (USSR): Failed to leave Earth orbit (blew up) 1964 November 5, Atlas-Agena D 1964 November 30, A2-e Zond 2 (USSR): Passed Mars at less than 1000 miles (1500 km) on August 6, 1965, but communications was lost on May 4 or 5, 1965, so no data were returned. 1967 March 27, A2-e (unnamed Mars ?) (USSR): Launch Failure 1969 March 27, D1-e (Proton) (Unnamed Mars 69A) (USSR): Failed to achieve Earth orbit 1969 April 14, D1-e (Unnamed Mars 69B) (USSR): Failed to achieve Earth orbit 1971 May 8, Atlas-Centaur Mariner 8 (Nasa): Due to second stage failure of the launcher, fell into Atlantic. 1971 May 10, D1-e Cosmos 419 (USSR): Intended orbiter/lander mission, failed to leave Earth orbit 1973 July 21, D1-e Mars 4 (USSR): Intended Mars orbiter; arrived at Mars on February 10, 1974, but failed to get inserted in Mars orbit, and passed by the planet at 2240 km. 1973 August 5, D1-e Mars 6 (USSR): Lander spacecraft; crashed on Mars on March 12, 1974. 1973 August 9, D1-e Mars 7 (USSR): Intended lander, missed Mars by 1280 km on March 9, 1974. 1988 July 5, D1-e Phobos 1 (USSR): Intended to investigate Mars' moon Phobos, this craft lost contact midway on September 2, 1988 because of an erroneous control command sequence.
Well guess this shows you can only strip your budget so much before what you want to achieve can no longer be done. I predict either an electrical malfunction disabled the communications systems or a mechanical malfunction prevented the antenna from deploying. Electrical malfunction is the most likely. Maybe if they had more people on the team or spent more money on hardening these things they would have succeeded. You really need actual humans on the scene to fix these things when they break.
http://www.spaceref.com
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
To the sentient beings of Earth life clearly has been (and still is) bad.
As I said, think about evolution (without which there would be no life). It depends on most (or at least a large portion) of the beings dying before they can reproduce. And everything is 'designed' to do that at all costs. So for conscious beings everything that could cause death is generating extreme suffering. Therefore (almost) everyone suffers, a lot. And that's bad.
I hate most movies. I possibly think to much about ethics...
You're bound for some failures when you launch a piece of tin to another planet. If they can't make contact, I'm sure they'll say that the probe was most likely damaged, or there was an error in the probe's systems, or something like that. There are tons of things that could happen to the probe in the process of reaching Mars that have nothing to do with aliens, monoliths, conspiracies, the KGB, or whatever else some people would have you believe. When there is a successful mission, some people say "It was a conspiracy, they were really taking photos of the Arizona desert!" When there is not a successful mission, the same people say, "It was a conspiracy, they found alien life and now are covering it up!" Seriously, will most people really care if they find any type of alien life forms? If they do, it'll probably be some type of very primitive, simple, single celled organism. If they find evidence of a long dead high technology martian civilization, does it make a difference? I don't see a reason to cover anything up. I mean, if there was a hostile race of Martians bent on taking over earth with their far superior technology, wouldn't they have done so already? What the most concerning thing is that if NASA keeps failing, they might actually start to lose some of their funding, which means we might not actually be able to send a group of humans to Mars anytime soon.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Look, I'm getting really tired of all of you misinforming one another. If you can't even communicate, what *can* you do?
The MPL attempted to make a DESCENT into a DESERT, not a DECENT into a DESSERT. Got it?
Talk sense, for goodness sake! Thank you.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
Oops. Accidentally pasted my email address into the subject box. ^_^ The real subject should say "Screw-ups are expected" or something like that.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
On the official site, a picture of the landing site of the Polar Lander is prominently displayed, taken on December 2. The picture was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor.
Now, is the resolution of the Global Surveyor great enough that it could see the Lander?
I remember hearing that Mars was mapped out better than Earth (Might have been Venus, might have been both.) It would be *very* interesting if we could see a new picture of the landing site, with/without the lander.
Adam
Er...and not even a billion nowadays either...
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
Pick any two.
DNA just wants to be free...
Hmm... colonizing Mars, eh? Colonizing those planets out there that we only see as wobbles in their parent star right now. My question is, will humanity even last that long for technology to take us there??? Humanity might have collapsed under the weight of its own problems before that time comes.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Apparently, the bounce technique turned out to be almost as expensive and complicated (i.e. error prone) as a parachute landing. They're trying to come up with a technique that is cheap and reliable, so they're experimenting with just dropping the watermelon from the top floor. ;-)
remeber this thing wad originally supposed to talk to the mars climate surveyor. Since it died they are now using the backup plan of talking directly to earth and/or MGS.
I think we should launch ALL of Microsoft's techs to Mars!
>people wouldn't give a damn anyway,
>they'd be too worried with their jobs,
>taxes, finding food and all sorts of
>everyday problems.
Actually, I disagree. I think (and agree with the many who've said it before me, this is by no means an original thought), that the discovery of life somewhere else may well be one of the larger ticking time bombs there is for *Christians*. Now, while admittedly, the world is much larger than Christianity; in America, all sorts of hubbub could erupt....and all from one little line. "Made in his image". The chances of life elsewhere being (as in Star Trek) just like us, with a funky thing on the forehead, is really *not* a reality. And it will lead to all sorts of questions that for people who are used to NOT questioning.
I'm all for it. Shake them suckers up.
I do have to admit, ludicrious as it is, I keep thinking of Ray Bradbury's MARTIAN CHRONICALS and how the martians kept earth away for so long, when I read things like this
Good reply! I heartily agree! Hear hear!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The AIR FORCE?????????
... is because of accidents/failures like this. Although everybody loves space travel, colonizing other planets, and all that, the economic nightmares occurring on Earth will stop it all. NASA is already short on funding, and one more Mars mission failure like this one may provoke the government to finally cut off funding for NASA. After all, their political agenda was already fulfilled decades ago when NASA put men on the moon. Today, I think people are more worried about economic crisis, job insecurity, and other Earthly troubles than whether it's possible to colonize another planet. Today people have been reduced mostly to either trying to survive, or, on the other side of the spectrum, how to take advantage of their competitive edge to line their pockets more. Nobody has time to worry about better, higher things.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
If there's no water on Mars, and colonization is the prime goal of our exploration there, then we might as well colonize the moon first. Cheaper, closer, and all the alumninum we want.
What makes the exploration of Mars so interesting is that we don't know that there aren't actually large quantities of water there. We should really know definitively that there is no appreciable water supply there before we discount it as a possible colonization sight.
Aside from colonization, which is one hundred years away at best, there are a multitude of scientifically interesting reasons to explore Mars.
1) What caused the climate of Mars to change? Is Earth in danger of a similar change, and can we be taking steps to prevent that?
2) Did primitive life exist on Mars, and if so, how does it compare to primitive life on Earth?
3) Are there natural resources on Mars worth mining and returning to Earth?
Basically, learning about Mars gives us something to compare our study of Earth against, and may give us a source of resources (and real estate) to help us overcome our rapid depletion of Earth's resources.
Just think, this never would have happened if nasa had sent a beowulf cluster.
NASA sent a probe over there. Unfortunately their experiment appears to have failed. Perhaps Americans need better skoolin' =)
Wouldn't it be more efficient to figure out how to use this mass of resources to educate the people already here on how not to make a bazillion more?
>From a species standpoint it's really not a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket
Especially when you keep sh*tting in the basket. We need to get our act together here before we can go out there and not f*ck things up.
And while homo sapiens probably wouldn't survive a major bolide event (although the Dark Ages may have been caused by a minor one), life has survived dozens of them. How warped our thinking has become, when we think we are what must survive, when we cannot possibly do so without the rest of the critturs.
We're only just beginning to realise how complex a selfsustaining ecosystem is. It's going to take a very long time to build such a thing elsewhere and have a second basket that's independant and not some teetery technotower. If we dont get our own house in order tout de suite we're not going to be here to get it done.
Most places on Earth have abundant life, and it'd be a shame to destroy such ecosystems, even most deserts. But there's one desert that has such a small amount of life that I think we should make the effort to "terraform" it: the Sahara.
I propose that we first use radar etc. to do all the examinations of ancient things under the sand that we'll ever want to do, then begin adding water and removing sand to make the Sahara more hospitable to a wide range of life. We may lose a few desert species, but we'll make room for many thousands of other species to survive in the terraformed Sahara when they would have otherwise gone extinct.
It's currently too hot for people to live comfortably in the Sahara, so during the initial states of terraforming I propose that we use remote control such as telepresence. We'll have to use high-temperature semiconductors, which are more expensive than regular semiconductors, but they are far less expensive than setting up lots of air-conditionned habitats for on-site humans. We already have satellite telecommunications available to link the on-site robots with their controllers nearly anywhere on Earth.
I propose that we start to build infrastructure to lift seawater (from the Mediterranean, or from the Atlantic, depending on logistics and politics) and spray it on the sand near where the prevailing winds are entering the desert. With enough water evaporating from a single local vicinity, as the steam rises it'll form clouds, which will shade the down-wind part of the desert and thereby cool it. Sunlight could be focussed to heat sand enough to make it fuse together (or actually melt), to consume sand at the same time as manufacturing crude canals for transporting water from one place to another. To move water uphill, first lift it using a solar-powered archimedes helix, then let it flow slightly downhill along a fused-sand canal to the next archimedes helix pump. (To do the excavation necessary that the canal is sloped opposite to the general land, it's probably easier to dig away sand from under the up-hill end of the canal, rather than try to prop the down-hill end up above the ground.)
Once we get a few pumping stations chained, so that saltwater is being pumped several miles into the desert, we can start growing saltwater life in fused-sand ponds. Miagrating birds will be attracted to the new food supply, dropping fertilizer for free.
Given the worldwide remote-control network, we could hire our own unemployed people (including disabled), and aliens we'd otherwise give humanitarian aid to, and of course we'd hire people of the countries where the work is being done and the land is being modified. The infrastructure we'd develop would later prove useful when we start setting up habitat on the Moon and/or terraforming Mars.
--ac
You know, Pathfinder. This was the mission that touched down on Mars on July 4, 1997. This was the mission that gave us spectacular panoramic views of the Martian surface, and allowed NASA scientists to actually drive a rover around on the surface of another planet to do remote science. This was a mission that far exceeded its projected life expectancy. Pathfinder will go down in history as one of NASA's most successful missions ever, and it was one of the first Better, Faster, Cheaper missions.
:-)
.. not by a long shot.) These four missions combined have still cost less money than the failed Mars Observer mission.
.. but if it does, let's hope that it doesn't serve to further fuel to fire of the "get rid of NASA" crowd out there. When the U.S. government is spending $350 million on an aircraft carrier that the military doesn't want, it seems kind of petty for these folks to be pointing their fingers at NASA.
By the way, the Pathfinder mission cost less than it did to make a standard Hollywood big-budget blockbuster. I've seen Waterworld. Have you? We put a human-controlled rover on Mars for less money. Which do you think is the bigger waste?
Let's consider the four Better, Faster, Cheaper missions to Mars so far: the Pathfinder, the Global Surveyor, the Climate Orbiter, and the Polar Lander. Of those, two were successful, one was a failure, and one is still in doubt (though as others have said, there is no reason to believe that the Polar Lander has failed yet
NASA's on the right track. Let's just hope that the Polar Lander mission hasn't failed
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I think we may see some sort of to-ground telemetry devised in the future, or more interesting protocols like:
catch (CruiseStageNotDetachedError e) {
}I'm interested in what steps were taken to prevent such failures. Clearly there could have been better mechanisms to get around such problems. Though, I am no expert and I know nothing of what they'd done .. so I can only assume :)
To shoot off into a tangent, the reason the population will be pushing 10 billion is because we are getting better medicine, more health care, and better prevention of diseases. An unfortunate consequence of our technology is that we are saving too many people. I'm all for exploring the universe and any other strange phenomena. However, we also have to solve the problems here at Earth too.
Also, the sun won't expand into a red giant for another 5 billion years, so we will have enough time to colonize other planets in our galaxy. I just don't think our main reason for exploring the universe should be to populate it. We should enjoy the information we can extrapolate from it.
Rajiv Varma
What's wrong with "Funny"
This seems a little misleading, given that it takes so long (14 mins?) for the radio signals to travel in each direction. So it doesn't seem likely that there'd be quick enough response time for the craft to "align itself" or "lock on" on automatically. More likely, the JPL engineers would wait to hear something during the sweep, determine what the proper orientation was, and then send an explicit command to the lander to orient its antenna with those coordinates. In other words, JPL would know before the lander if and when the sweep crossed Earth's path.
I failed to type out the how this lock-on procedure actually works. It is very time consuming. Usually the high gain will raster from horizon to horizon and keep repeating, until it recieves an explicit command from JPL telling it where earth is.
I just hope the thing isn't upside down in a ditch somewhere. :)
There are only a few places in the solar system that are habitable without major terraforming: the moon, mars, the asteroids and some of the moons of the outer planets. Yes, you'd need a protected environment and wear a spacesuit every time you go out, but you can live that way and there are resources to be utilized.
For the other planets:
Mercury is so close to the sun that it fills most of the sky, a major bummer if you try to live on surface.
Venus is a hot oven full of high pressure poisonous gasses. No landers on it survived very long, despite extreemly rugged construction.
Earth is already taken.
The outer planets are gas giants, except for Pluto which is too far away and *really* cold. Some of the moons might be inhabitable, but traveltimes are impractically long.
Which leaves us the moon, mars and the asteroid belt.
By space standards, Mars is actually quite attractive. It's day is close enough to 24 hours that we'd able to adapt. There is an atmosphere, although an extreemly thin one and mostly CO2. But you can get oxygen out of CO2, compress in to get 3psi pressure and fill a 60s style bubble with it. If you can get a good source of water you have most of the resources to support life in those bubbles. If you have water you can also make methane and oxygen out of water and CO2, which can be used as rocket fuel. Given low gravity and a thin atmosphere getting back into space is relatively easy. Mars is cold, but if you stay in the warmer places it isn't too bad, and the thin atmosphere doesn't cool you down to much - in fact for designers of mars suits getting rid of body heat is a major issue.
The main problem is radiation - no magnetic field like earth to protect anyone on the surface. You'd have to spend most time indoors with a thick roof above your head if you're going to live there permanently.
But living on Mars is definately doable with todays technology, and their are most likely enough resources available to be independent from earth after a while.
It's probably worthwhile too. As somebody put it: the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program.
Ok, I'm going to get scored down as flamebate but I really mean this: NASA has lost it. They keep burning up dollars in the Martian atmosphere and they can't even get the shuttle running so they can go on yet another repair mission to the Humble telescope. WTF? And they complained that the Mir was a rusty bucket of bolts. Well that thing has more miles on it than the entire shuttle fleet and it is still in orbit and fully functional. The only reason it is not inhabited is lack of funds. NASA, with it's bottomless budget, isn't doing a whole lot better. How much you wanna bet that NASA looses another shuttle before the Mir is deorbited? I certainly hope they don't but I for one am nervous. Those things are beond their useful lifetimes.
I have somehow accidentally moderated a few posts as offtopic. I don't know how this occurred; my conjecture is that I scrolled the list with my wheel mouse. I am posting here so my moderation is cancelled. My apologies to those who were raped by my clumsiness! I did mean for #25 to be rated up, oh well.
1 (Offtopic) Re:Mars probe failsafes (99/12/04/1111243-103, 4 points left)
-1 (Offtopic) Re:Sure.. (99/12/04/1111243-110, 3 points left)
+1 (Insightful) Re:However... (99/12/04/1111243-25, 2 points left)
-1 (Offtopic) Good idea! (99/12/04/1111243-81, 1 points left)
sorry all.
scudder
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
-Parallel
Well, I suppose it depends on where you think exploration ends and colonization begins, but they ARE planning a manned mission for the 2020s, possibly even earlier. And colonization by non-governmental interests isn't in the realm of the impossible, with cheaper technologies, such as reusable rocekts, and microwave propulsion, in which, essentially, they superheat (super-excite, to be anal-retentive) a gas, and then blast it out of the rocket. It's really quite cool, like leaving the chicken in the microwave so long that it vaporizes and explodes out the side, shooting your microwave out the window, and possibly out of state. Commercial colonization certainly has interesting implications. I mean, hasn't every Science Fiction story about mars been about how it's crushed undere the bootheel of some inergalactic mining corporation? I'd go there just to push someone into that 7 mile deep gorge. Burning up on impact indeed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You always see the probes sitting there on flat land with rocks strewn all over the place. How do they get it so that none of the 'feet' land on a rock? Could the probe have landed, becone unblanced and fallen over?
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
what about Titan?
Humanity has always had problems and will always have problems. That is not a reason to stop progress.
I agree that there are many issues on earth requiring attention and resources; however, those issues will not go away even if every dollar spent on space exploration was diverted to social and environmental issues.
If we were to wait until Earth is a utopian paradise before investing in scientific and technological prgress, none would ever occur. Utopia is unattainable.
Earth : 12:39 p.m. PST on Friday, December 3: OK, we're listening...
Hmm, another conversion error, perhaps? Just kidding...
Why does everyone seem to assume that water is necessary for life?
NASA had TONS of failures. You only read about the successes in the history books. The very first US probe to Mars was lost, and lots of others, including a few unmanned Apollo tests. This stuff is hard. It's IS rocket science, with a whole bunch of other complex technology thrown in. If the probe fails, I'm not concerned. $165 mill is way cheap compared to what we spend on other stuff. Mere pocket change to the US, and I'm glad to have my tax money spent on this project whether it works or not. W0rd.
Some people seem to think the new cheaper space probe is root of the failure. However, space explorer is always a risky business. There is no guarantee that we will have more successful with a more expensive spacecraft. For the price of an expensive Mars Observer (~1 billion US$), you could have built 6 Mars Polar Landers. Considering the current success rate for Mars is 33%, using multiple cheaper models could spread the risk rather than putting all eggs in one basket.
If I remember correctly, the resolution of the images taken by the global surveyer is about 10 meters. I don't think the polar lander is quite that big.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
IMHO a failure is the best thing that can happen for the space program.
I love the idea of the space program, but NASA should be in the courtroom next to MS for being charged with having a monopoly and -especially- hindering "innovations". After making such a careless mistake as last time, and now this, I predict private space programs will really see a boost in popularity and hopefully funding.
D.I.Y. Space Program!
These were told to me in the last two weeks, but before the Mars Lander encounter.
The more paranoid one and more of a "rumor": This was told to me by a UCLA postdoc who knows some other people in the UCLA planetary science division who are deeply involved in the mission. {As part of Faster Better Cheaper, many missions are being run in large measure from universities}.
There was a construction defect. They forgot to install the heaters on the fuel lines for the retrorocket. In 9 months in space, the fuel freezes in the pipes. They found the heaters on the ground after launch. As a result they were going to have to try to "blow" the lines clean with the pressure from the tanks at the appropriate time. Risky.
Second source: an orbital mechanics scientist at JPL. He said the first story is pretty unlikely, but that the rockets did involve some new technology that hasn't been used before.
Mars Polar Lander may be the Mars Polar Crash Site.
What if NASA was actually able to communicate with the satellite, just wanting to keep its findings secret. Seems so weird that we've had so many projects fail, maybe they have reasons to suppress any data they get from the Red Planet. Just a thought...
http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/i ndex.htm
They're the only site I've seen with updates posted minutes after important developments or press conferences.
Very nice.
Also, for high bandwidth video (300kbps) of NASA TV see:
http://www.broadcast.com/events/nasa
The ABC article:
I'll say. But they won't get too many more chances, if indeed any. There are too many senators and congressmen who see NASA as the ideal whipping boy through whose persecution they can advance their own careers. They won't care if the amount of money wasted is "only" $200m. "Failure after failure" they'll howl. "How much more are we going to stand for?" they'll demand. And no-one will wish to be seen supporting a program that delivers successive failures.
It's not fair, but it looks like NASA's days are numbered. Even by the time I was finishing high school (around 1979) it was trendy to be against spending money on space exploration and for spending it on politically correct causes instead. How much truer is this now?
Without widespread public support the space program is going nowhere. Remember the "smaller, faster, cheaper" philosophy wasn't an end in itself, it was the only possible response to a budget declining year-on-year.
I wish it weren't so. It's a crying shame that there was no proper followup to Apollo. We could've and should've been to Mars and back several times in the last 20 years. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is as far as we'll ever go. doesn't that prospect frighten you? It scares the hell out of me. No space travel=no point in going on, in my book. Might as well head back for the trees.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Why do we waste so many resources trying to do research on Mars? Would the most logical next step not be the colonization of the moon? I suspect that scientists believe a wealth of natural resources exist on Mars not to mention microscopic life.
I love the idea of the space program, but NASA should be in the courtroom next to MS for being charged with having a monopoly and -especially- hindering "innovations". After making such a careless mistake as last time, and now this, I predict private space programs will really see a boost in popularity and hopefully funding.
What sort of space program would we see with only private funding? These things don't tend to pay off in forms of profit. The only people I could see doing it would be monopolies, which almost always come about because of government interference. If we only go to space with private endeavors, the only things we'll see for a while are communications satellites and tours for the wealthy. Most of the science which fascinate me so don't have an obvious application for profit in the near future, and as such are generally done by universities, which benefit greatly from government funding. How many countries don't have government space agencies, and how many of those countries have a space program worthy of admiration?
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
dood, it took like billions of dollars and years of planning to get 3 people to the moon, sending an entire population is totally out of the question.
Hey guys!!
Check out the Planetary Society's website. They have tons of info on the Mars Polar Lander and other revelant topics. They also have their Planetfest convention today and tommorow and there are lots of interesting video streams and pages.
ftp.slashdot.org
The europeans and chinese are quickly catching up to the US. Maybe the first man on Mars will be from Beijing.
If 11:30 PM EST, it still hasn't responded, it will probably mean it's gone.
Why?
Because NASA is basically going to send a command telling to to wake the hell up and start talking to us. If it doesn't respond, it will start looking pretty bad.
Tomorrow the probe should wake itself up and start transmitting no matter what. If that doesn't happen, you can pretty much count on it being gone.
This sucks. NASA really has to start having more success exploring. I also really hope that private industry steps up. There's a fortune to be made in space vacations. And once companies start battling for people's money, that's when the real technological leaps, and the real price cuts will occur. I hope it's soon.
Interesting. But would we actually do anything? Sure, all the environmentalists would come out and tell us what has to be done, and there would probably even be a few governmental meetings about it. All the governments would go in there and try to get away with doing as little as possible, much like the Kyoto conference. Nothing major would change. A 5% reduction here, a promise to keep emissions at 2000 levels there. They wouldn't be willing to do whatever it takes.
And this will continue to happen while people are greedy. I'm greedy. I'm sure most of you are too. People will always be greedy. It would only be when the majority of people recognise that something must be done that we might actually get actions of substance. And I'm not talking the majority of Americans, I'm talking the majority of people worldwide.
Really, what hope to we have? We're too smart for our own good.
A rather bleak view, but I think it's realistic.
harshbutfair: you know it makes sense
www.harshbutfair.org
Spacedaily claims, that there could be some problems
with the descent engine.
That could explain, why the two ballistic
devices didn't phone home, despite they would use
their own transmitters.
--
YOU BASTARDS JUST DROPPED SOME HEAP OF JUNK THROUGH THE CEILING OF ONE OF OUR UNDERGROUND CITIES.
HATE TO COMPLAIN, BUT YOU KILLED ABOUT FIFTY PEOPLE WITH THAT P.O.S
LOOK, DON'T MAKE US OPEN A CAN OF BIO-GENETIC WARFARE ON YOUR ASS. STOP THE MISSIONS OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.
---
NOT AN AC, TOO LAZY TO LOG IN.
BALDAR THE MAGNIFICENT, MAYOR MARS POPULACE 3
The Purple Monkeys of the martian underground have taken over the lander, equiped it with Amiga hardware, and are planning on using it against the Space Turtles from sector I9Z-ecto.
by first inclination is that someone needs to jiggle the handle at NASA, and flush some management to clean things up.
Then again, look what happened in the early rocket program -- rocket after rocket either blowing up on the pad, or veering off on strange trajectories shortly after launch -- forcing them to be destroyed by the range safety officer.
i thing the engineers aew having real problems visualizing and implementing the tasks at hand. thus we get failed missions.
The USA went through a long period of basically doing nothing, so my guess is that there is a disjoint between the quality engineers that were born in the fifties and the newest crop -- the TV generation.
Never thought I'd be grateful for the Chinese.
Could this spawn another space race?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
NO amount of radio contact can work if the damn thing is in a million pieces over the surface, even if it did land, it may have landed on a big ass rock and be completely sideways or upside down.
Cannot they use the Surveyer mapping satelite to take the most detail photos of the landing area to see if they can spot it where its landed or to see if there is a splatt of wreckage?
That is NOT the current Slashdot source. WE WANT THE CURRENT SLASHDOT SOURCE! Are we FOR OPEN SOURCE, OR NOT?
And maybe it will be a woman
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Cameron Park - November 17, 1999 - Given the embarrassing failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter, there is a good deal of nervousness -- both inside and outside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that its companion spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, might also fail during landing this Dec. 3.
After all, a soft landing is a good deal more complex than a "simple" braking burn to go into orbit around another planet -- and that's not even taking into account the uncertain ruggedness of the landing site terrain itself.
JPL insists that it is taking the advice of the NASA investigative board that looked into the MCO accident, and that -- largely through greatly augmenting the size of the spacecraft's operating team, and particularly its navigation team -- any risk of repeating that appalling incident is over.
But even so, in addition to the standard unknowns of any landing attempt, there are at least three specific problems that have been mentioned over the past week as perhaps endangering MPL. The question is how worrisome are they actually?
(1) On Nov. 7, Keith Cowing's "NASA Watch" Website quoted JPL inside sources as saying that an even more horrific mistake had been made during the assembly of the Lander: the heaters had accidentally been left off the small pyrotechnic charges designed to separate the lander from the "cruise stage" that had supported and guided it during the long trip to Mars, and which was supposed to be separated 5 minutes before the Lander entered the Martian atmosphere!
As a result, these charges would be so cold that they might very well fail to detonate -- so that the Lander, still attached to its cruise stage, would crash uncontrollably onto Mars. The report stated that a JPL "tiger team" had concluded that the decision might well be made to leave the cruise stage attached until entry into the Martian atmosphere had actually begun, in the hope that the heat of air friction would warm the pyrotechnics to the point that they would then fire when commanded -- which, if true, would have been a tremendously risky maneuver.
However, when the MCO Board report was released on Nov. 10, JPL stated that this report was actually just a garbled version of another possible problem that the Board did uncover.
Indeed, Mars Surveyor Program spokeswoman Mary Hardin personally assured SpaceDaily.com on Nov. 15 that this is indeed the case, and that no known problem exists with the pyrotechnic charges.
(2) But what are the real problems that the MCO Investigation Board has turned up?
It involves the main "descent engines" that the lander will use to carry out the final 1800 meters of its final descent to the surface of Mars' after cutting itself free from its parachute, since even a huge chute cannot brake the craft below about 300 km/hour in the thin Martian air. These 12 thrusters burn hydrazine propellant, which is ignited when it contacts a bed of chemical catalyst that causes the hydrazine to break down explosively into ammonia and water vapor.
But the Board raised the possibility that, if the catalyst was chilled below 0 deg C during the long trip to Mars, it might be chemically sluggish in igniting the hydrazine, making the thrusters unreliable.
"...The cold catalyst bed-induced ignition delays, and the resulting irregular pulses on startup, could seriously impact MPL dynamics and potentially the stability of the vehicle during the terminal descent operations, possibly leading to a non-upright touchdown" -- known to the average person as "crash and burn".
Moreover, the MCO Board also noted that if the lander's fuel lines were comparably cold, the hydrazine might freeze solid in them before it even reached the engines.
Having decided that JPL had underestimated these dangers, the MCO Board recommended that the electric heaters for the fuel lines should be turned on earlier than had been planned to ensure that they were properly warm -- and it also recommended that JPL should consider firing the descent thrusters in a series of extremely short bursts during the first few seconds of engine startup, to ensure that the catalyst beds were warm enough to work properly afterwards.
JPL agreed to turn on the fuel line heaters several hours before the lander arrived at Mars, which would raise the temperature of the engines themselves to 8 deg C at the time they were started.
It also stated that its tests showed that the engines' catalyst beds would work properly at temperatures as low as -20 deg C, making those short startup bursts unnecessary -- although it added: "More ground-based test firings are scheduled to better characterize engine performance at various temperatures." At any rate, the odds look good that these particular problems have been dealt with.
(3) However, the Board also expressed another worry. Every previous soft landing that the U.S. or the Soviet Union has ever carried out on the Moon or Mars has involved the use of throttleable rocket engines whose thrust can be controlled over a wide range -- allowing the craft to control its descent speed in response to the data coming in from its radar -- and each engine has also been separately throttleable, allowing the craft to tilt itself in order to cancel out any horizontal drift that the radar detects.
But MPL uses a new "pulse-mode" engine system. Instead of three smoothly throttleable engines, it carries three clusters of four thrusters each whose thrusts are rigidly fixed at 27 kg per thruster -- and it controls its descent rate and its tilt by rapidly flicking the 12 separate thrusters on and off for as little as a small fraction of a second in order to control the craft's overall thrust level.
The Board noted: "This type of powered descent has always been considered to be very difficult and stressing for a planetary exploration soft landing" because of the vibrations it produces -- which is why it has never been used before.
"The concern has been that the feedline hydraulics and water hammer effects could be very complex and interactive. This issue could be further aggravated by fuel slosh, uneven feeding of propellant from the two tanks, and possible center of gravity mismatch on the vehicle... Under extreme worst-case conditions for feedline interactions, it is possible that some thrusters could produce near-zero thrust and some could produce nearly twice the expected thrust when commanded to operate."
JPL had concluded that enough was known by now about these possible problems that computer guidance software could be written that would deal reliably with them -- and since it is much cheaper and easier to develop a fixed-thrust rocket engine than it is to develop and manufacture a new throttleable engine, JPL decided to go with the pulse-mode landing technique this time.
The Board noted: "It was stated many times by the MPL project team during the reviews with the Board, that a vast number of simulations, analyses and rigorous tests were all carefully conducted during the development program to account for all these factors during the propulsive landing maneuver. However, because of the extreme complexity of this landing maneuver, the EDL [Entry-Descent-Landing] team should carefully re-verify that all the above described effects have been accounted for in the terminal maneuver strategies and control laws and the associated software for EDL operations."
Given JPL's blunders in navigating the Mars Climate Orbiter -- and the similar problems the Board uncovered in the management of the MPL, due largely to an inadequate number of personnel and a poorly designed control organization -- this author is not greatly confident that this has been adequately done.
Unfortunately, by this time there isn't much time left to do it thoroughly, or to change the landing software in response. It is therefore reasonable to assume that because of this fundamental problem, there is a distinct element of a risky gamble in the MPL landing, even apart from the unknown terrain features of the exact landing point.
This area of Mars was thought to be one of the smoothest on the planet -- but recent photos by the Mars Global Surveyor's high-resolution telescopic camera have shown that it is somewhat rougher than expected.
Even if MPL does fail, though, at least we'll know why -- right? Wrong. For the first time ever, a spacecraft will have no radio contact of any sort with Earth during its landing sequence -- even the rudimentary kinds of signals that Mars Pathfinder sent immediately on "bounce down" were able to indicate that its landing had been successful.
However, as the landing site is so near Mars' south pole, the Lander's low-gain antenna isn't properly aligned to allow even simple low-power signals to be sent to Earth -- let alone any engineering telemetry on the functioning of the craft's systems.
After separating from its cruise stage, the craft won't reestablish radio contact with Earth until fully 20 minutes after the landing (set for noon Pacific time), at which time it is scheduled to finish pointing its small dish antenna at Earth to allow direct contact.
Later, it will start using its low-gain UHF antenna to communicate larger amounts of data to the Mars Global Surveyor, which will in turn relay it to Earth -- but, for several reasons, MGS can't be used for that purpose until several days after the landing.
If MPL's landing fails, we'll never know why -- whether it's a design flaw in the craft, or simply an unavoidable landing on bad terrain. It will be a replay of the loss of the Mars Observer spacecraft during a brief planned period of radio silence, which forced its accident review board to come up with several possible failure causes and try to guess which was most likely.
Again, this is not reassuring. It's too late to do anything about this with MPL; but for this author it is hoped that by the time of the next landing mission in 2002, NASA will have modified the lander so that it can send engineering data to one of the Mars orbiting spacecraft that are already scheduled to regularly receive data from it after the landing.
In any case, given the number of unknowns in MPL's landing, there will be even more reasons than usual for us to hold our breaths until that confirmatory signal comes through -- or not.
1) Screw Mars for now. Build a moon base. Put a big shipyard thing in orbit of the moon. Fly resources from moon to shipyard. Build Good probes . Send them to Mars. Build colony on mars. Build shipyard in mars orbit. Send probes to asteroid belt. and so on... Go in steps, and of course the moon is closer to Earth than mars, but possibly less water.
/.ers think?
2) Privatization. If we found some way to make space travel PROFITABLE and some subsidies to encourage it, private companies generally do better than the government. For example encourage some company to make a moon vacation colony then the gov't could use that as a stepping off point for a research base. NASA quality has been going down since maybe the Voyagers or so (we got Voyager 2 OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM and still working for a while- ne1 knows when it gave out? but now we cant go to mars.)
3) Have a great big fundraiser. $20 x 270 million (approx us population) = $5,400,000,000 should be enough to make some pretty nice missions. Of course not everyone will give $20 but hopefully rich people will give more. Bill Gates could pay for the whole thing out of his pocket. Offer discounts on moon vacations to everyone who donates, and put their names in a book that will be taken to moon/mars/titan/europa/pluto/alpha centauri or wherever.
4) Manned missions. Maybe cost more but people will be around to take out the floppy disk some engineer left in thats making "Non-system or damaged disk error. Replace disk and strike any key to continue" when the computer tries to reboot. Of course we'd need to make sure we got our inches and centimeters right so the thing doesn't fall apart around them.
What do you all
Tim Bolbrock
They wouldnt trust a woman in space with guys for 7 mnths, imagine how many tampons they would have to carry....
And the nagging tooo, eeeeeeeeeeeeeek
Cameron Park - November 17, 1999 - Given the embarrassing failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter, there is a good deal of nervousness -- both inside and outside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that its companion spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, might also fail during landing this Dec. 3.
After all, a soft landing is a good deal more complex than a "simple" braking burn to go into orbit around another planet -- and that's not even taking into account the uncertain ruggedness of the landing site terrain itself.
JPL insists that it is taking the advice of the NASA investigative board that looked into the MCO accident, and that -- largely through greatly augmenting the size of the spacecraft's operating team, and particularly its navigation team -- any risk of repeating that appalling incident is over.
But even so, in addition to the standard unknowns of any landing attempt, there are at least three specific problems that have been mentioned over the past week as perhaps endangering MPL. The question is how worrisome are they actually?
(1) On Nov. 7, Keith Cowing's "NASA Watch" Website quoted JPL inside sources as saying that an even more horrific mistake had been made during the assembly of the Lander: the heaters had accidentally been left off the small pyrotechnic charges designed to separate the lander from the "cruise stage" that had supported and guided it during the long trip to Mars, and which was supposed to be separated 5 minutes before the Lander entered the Martian atmosphere!
As a result, these charges would be so cold that they might very well fail to detonate -- so that the Lander, still attached to its cruise stage, would crash uncontrollably onto Mars. The report stated that a JPL "tiger team" had concluded that the decision might well be made to leave the cruise stage attached until entry into the Martian atmosphere had actually begun, in the hope that the heat of air friction would warm the pyrotechnics to the point that they would then fire when commanded -- which, if true, would have been a tremendously risky maneuver.
However, when the MCO Board report was released on Nov. 10, JPL stated that this report was actually just a garbled version of another possible problem that the Board did uncover.
Indeed, Mars Surveyor Program spokeswoman Mary Hardin personally assured SpaceDaily.com on Nov. 15 that this is indeed the case, and that no known problem exists with the pyrotechnic charges.
(2) But what are the real problems that the MCO Investigation Board has turned up?
It involves the main "descent engines" that the lander will use to carry out the final 1800 meters of its final descent to the surface of Mars' after cutting itself free from its parachute, since even a huge chute cannot brake the craft below about 300 km/hour in the thin Martian air. These 12 thrusters burn hydrazine propellant, which is ignited when it contacts a bed of chemical catalyst that causes the hydrazine to break down explosively into ammonia and water vapor.
But the Board raised the possibility that, if the catalyst was chilled below 0 deg C during the long trip to Mars, it might be chemically sluggish in igniting the hydrazine, making the thrusters unreliable.
"...The cold catalyst bed-induced ignition delays, and the resulting irregular pulses on startup, could seriously impact MPL dynamics and potentially the stability of the vehicle during the terminal descent operations, possibly leading to a non-upright touchdown" -- known to the average person as "crash and burn".
Moreover, the MCO Board also noted that if the lander's fuel lines were comparably cold, the hydrazine might freeze solid in them before it even reached the engines.
Having decided that JPL had underestimated these dangers, the MCO Board recommended that the electric heaters for the fuel lines should be turned on earlier than had been planned to ensure that they were properly warm -- and it also recommended that JPL should consider firing the descent thrusters in a series of extremely short bursts during the first few seconds of engine startup, to ensure that the catalyst beds were warm enough to work properly afterwards.
JPL agreed to turn on the fuel line heaters several hours before the lander arrived at Mars, which would raise the temperature of the engines themselves to 8 deg C at the time they were started.
It also stated that its tests showed that the engines' catalyst beds would work properly at temperatures as low as -20 deg C, making those short startup bursts unnecessary -- although it added: "More ground-based test firings are scheduled to better characterize engine performance at various temperatures." At any rate, the odds look good that these particular problems have been dealt with.
(3) However, the Board also expressed another worry. Every previous soft landing that the U.S. or the Soviet Union has ever carried out on the Moon or Mars has involved the use of throttleable rocket engines whose thrust can be controlled over a wide range -- allowing the craft to control its descent speed in response to the data coming in from its radar -- and each engine has also been separately throttleable, allowing the craft to tilt itself in order to cancel out any horizontal drift that the radar detects.
But MPL uses a new "pulse-mode" engine system. Instead of three smoothly throttleable engines, it carries three clusters of four thrusters each whose thrusts are rigidly fixed at 27 kg per thruster -- and it controls its descent rate and its tilt by rapidly flicking the 12 separate thrusters on and off for as little as a small fraction of a second in order to control the craft's overall thrust level.
The Board noted: "This type of powered descent has always been considered to be very difficult and stressing for a planetary exploration soft landing" because of the vibrations it produces -- which is why it has never been used before.
"The concern has been that the feedline hydraulics and water hammer effects could be very complex and interactive. This issue could be further aggravated by fuel slosh, uneven feeding of propellant from the two tanks, and possible center of gravity mismatch on the vehicle... Under extreme worst-case conditions for feedline interactions, it is possible that some thrusters could produce near-zero thrust and some could produce nearly twice the expected thrust when commanded to operate."
JPL had concluded that enough was known by now about these possible problems that computer guidance software could be written that would deal reliably with them -- and since it is much cheaper and easier to develop a fixed-thrust rocket engine than it is to develop and manufacture a new throttleable engine, JPL decided to go with the pulse-mode landing technique this time.
The Board noted: "It was stated many times by the MPL project team during the reviews with the Board, that a vast number of simulations, analyses and rigorous tests were all carefully conducted during the development program to account for all these factors during the propulsive landing maneuver. However, because of the extreme complexity of this landing maneuver, the EDL [Entry-Descent-Landing] team should carefully re-verify that all the above described effects have been accounted for in the terminal maneuver strategies and control laws and the associated software for EDL operations."
Given JPL's blunders in navigating the Mars Climate Orbiter -- and the similar problems the Board uncovered in the management of the MPL, due largely to an inadequate number of personnel and a poorly designed control organization -- this author is not greatly confident that this has been adequately done.
Unfortunately, by this time there isn't much time left to do it thoroughly, or to change the landing software in response. It is therefore reasonable to assume that because of this fundamental problem, there is a distinct element of a risky gamble in the MPL landing, even apart from the unknown terrain features of the exact landing point.
This area of Mars was thought to be one of the smoothest on the planet -- but recent photos by the Mars Global Surveyor's high-resolution telescopic camera have shown that it is somewhat rougher than expected.
Even if MPL does fail, though, at least we'll know why -- right? Wrong. For the first time ever, a spacecraft will have no radio contact of any sort with Earth during its landing sequence -- even the rudimentary kinds of signals that Mars Pathfinder sent immediately on "bounce down" were able to indicate that its landing had been successful.
However, as the landing site is so near Mars' south pole, the Lander's low-gain antenna isn't properly aligned to allow even simple low-power signals to be sent to Earth -- let alone any engineering telemetry on the functioning of the craft's systems.
After separating from its cruise stage, the craft won't reestablish radio contact with Earth until fully 20 minutes after the landing (set for noon Pacific time), at which time it is scheduled to finish pointing its small dish antenna at Earth to allow direct contact.
Later, it will start using its low-gain UHF antenna to communicate larger amounts of data to the Mars Global Surveyor, which will in turn relay it to Earth -- but, for several reasons, MGS can't be used for that purpose until several days after the landing.
If MPL's landing fails, we'll never know why -- whether it's a design flaw in the craft, or simply an unavoidable landing on bad terrain. It will be a replay of the loss of the Mars Observer spacecraft during a brief planned period of radio silence, which forced its accident review board to come up with several possible failure causes and try to guess which was most likely.
Again, this is not reassuring. It's too late to do anything about this with MPL; but for this author it is hoped that by the time of the next landing mission in 2002, NASA will have modified the lander so that it can send engineering data to one of the Mars orbiting spacecraft that are already scheduled to regularly receive data from it after the landing.
In any case, given the number of unknowns in MPL's landing, there will be even more reasons than usual for us to hold our breaths until that confirmatory signal comes through -- or not.
Once we find some profitable uses for space travel, spaceship development will go into the private sector, making things more efficient. There will also be concrete reasons for private organizations/individuals to put money into developing economical and reliable spaceships.
I'm not saying that we'll all have rockets in our backyards (that's kind of like saying "geez, planes were invented 50 years ago, we should all have personal jets or helicopters in our backyard by now"), but it should definitely become less costly as time goes on.
There it is people, right there. The meaning of life : Humans, as a whole, over time, should be advancing, learning more, exploring (boldy going where no man has gone before anyone?).
People who can't see any point in exploring space piss me off. It's like: it's always going to be up there, and you have no problem looking at the planets and stars every night and never trying to get there?
Considering human history, those people should be evolutionary glitches. I hope they are. It seems right now they're he majority in the US.
Anyway, I'm watching this right now, still no communication.
Its splattered. It probably blew up when the main engines fired for 'minor' course correction. Thats splash #3 on Mars. Some saboteurs working the project?
Human beings always want to know what's over the next hill, whether geographically or more abstractly in realms such as science.
It's what we do.
Granted, there are cultures that have fossilized, where further development is taboo. Do you want to belong to one of those societies? There are several to choose from.
Also, there are vast numbers of people who essentially squat on their haunches and ridicule the explorers or dig their heels in and actively oppose them (the former usually call themselves "intellectuals" and the latter usually call themselves "progressives", ironically). When the explorers occasionally find something really good, though, they'll grab a piece of it, without thanks and without any change in attitude.
There are a lot of us, though, who want to know what's over the next hill. Only a few of us ever find anything that turns out to have significant value, but you never know who those few will turn out to be. That's why we need to nurture this drive in society. If you don't pick berries in East Africa for a living, you're a beneficiary of that drive in your ancestors.
Let's see what's out there....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
If the medium gain antenna is hosed, how does the lander receive commands from nasa? Are they relayed through the surveyor?
Ryan
Some points:
High temp semiconductors? It doesn't get that hot, even in the desert. Cheapo plastic semiconductors are rated to 70C [158F] and industrial parts to 125C [257F].
What's up with the melting sand bit? Just use concrete or dirt. Cheaper, faster, better. Right?
Helix pumps? Why not regular pumps like every other pumping station on earth?
Are you planning on paving the Sahara with bird shit? You'll need a lot of birds. Why not use dirt? Dirt is cheap (dirt cheap). Dig it from the ground, dredge it from the sea.
What's all this remote control? Just send in the workers. It isn't that hot. Drink lots of fluids and work in an air conditioned cab.
Ryan
I am not at all suprised by the apparent demise of the MPL. NASA is not at all the type of organization it was in the 60's, when boldness and pragmatic innovation were the rule. Like other screwups, the MPL probably died because of lack of oversight (i.e. unforgivable metric conversion). NASA seems too focused on PR, which is a shame since they feel that is the only way they can guarantee funding. Make no mistake; if MPL is dead, NASA will totally overhype the Hubble repair mission to perform damage control. I can guarantee, if the same budget and research mission were given to a private institute like MIT, the MPL would be safe and sound.
Hey!
What's all this talking about just listening or waiting for some kind of information? I also saw on CNN that they tried listening to many other places for the lander.
Just point the Hubble at Mars and zoom in! You can probably see every little minor detail on the polar lander!
What if there was a storm on mars at the time of the landing and it got blown off course? I mean jeesh!
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Posted by cookieman.k:
No problem man, it happens to others too.
Personally, I think /. should have titled this article "Another One Bites the Dust".
;)
If you compare the Mars Face with the coresponding features on the face of Natalie Portman, you'll come to the stunning conclusion that the Mars Face is actually only the tip o' the iceberg.
There's a whole, friggin' Natalie Portman statue the size of Mt. Everest beneath the sands of Mars!
Touch those freekin' buttocks and weep!
The latest update of the official mars polar lander site is still from dec 5.
They probably does not have much to say, but what we already know -- silence...