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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.
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
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.
Currently, there have been 33 missions to Mars from Earth, 8 of which have been mostly sucessful. Fully two thirds of the missions to mars have been 100% unsucessful, and most of those that have returned some useful data have failed at some point earlier than expected.
If you thought the navigation error (damn those English units...) that led to the demise of the Mars Climate Orbiter was embarrassing, just remember that the Viking landers 1 and 2 were both rendered useless far before the end of their operational lifetime when the Viking 1 lander, acting as a communication relay for the other lander, was mistakenly shut down.
I think the Smaller, Cheaper, Better paradigm is a commendable one, and deserves more of a chance. Why Mars seems to be such a difficult planet to get to deserves a closer inspection as well. Our success rate in every other space endeavor has been an order of magnitude higher, but it has nothing to do with NASA's attempts to make its new spacecraft more economical.
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.