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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.
That's four in a row! The climate surveyor, polar lander and the two impact probes, all shot down by the Martian Air Force.
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
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...
*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*
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.
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.
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?
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?
http://www.spaceref.com
License: By reading this you are agreeing that you agree with me.
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.
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
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.
Cheers!
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...