90% of all computer users as soon as it is a default format in Windows Media Player (not saying that that is a likely thing to happen). Windows XP phoning home hasn't stopped it from being widely accepted, now has it?
No, it's about uploading the correct set of data to the rocket, so it uses the right flight profile when launching. Thus not a problem with the satellite. Source: SpaceFlight Now.
They did. And discovered that every possible option of keeping the solar panels clean was too expensive either money-wise or mass-wise for the mission requirements. It is rocket science, not slashdot science.
Since MEX does not need to service Beagle II communication requirements, have there been talks with ESA about getting MEX to help getting MER data to Earth? It has already been shown that it can be done, why don't we hear more about MEX being used?
My take on that would be that unmanned missions are great to chart the new territory, to indicate which parts of Mars are most interesting to visit by much more flexible human explorers. Thus making sure that the high cost of a manned mission is not wasted by landing in the (scientifically) wrong spot..
No wateron Mars? What rock have you been living under the last couple of years? No offense, but that remark just seemed off whack considering the recent discoveries.
Expected lifetime is also influenced by unpredictable conditions, such as dust build-up. Apparently the degradation of the solarpanels by dust is less severe than expected or feared.
Secondly, it's not so much estimated lifetime, but designed lifetime. Designed to last at least 90 days. Designed lifetime is a design parameter that has a big impact on cost of the project, designing for longer lifetimes automatically means more extensive (thus expensive) testing, more engineering difficulties within the same weight constraints, and possibly less room/weight available for science instruments (ie: one more battery installed: bye bye Mossbauer spectrometer. Bigger solar panels: strike PanCam).
Nothing personal, you make your submission the best way you can, from the sources you read. But I'll bet my karma that this story was submitted multiple times by multiple people, and the editor chooses which one to run. I think they chose poorly this time:)
They often carry the same stories, but usually one of them will have the scoop. There are more sites, but these ones are definately worthy of a daily visit, and some have plenty links to other interesting sites. Have fun:D
1) The outcrop in the crater shows deeper layerings and thus were more interesting than the few patches of outcrop on the plain. They did peek over the rim rather early, remember the parachute pics?
2) They have tested working on "mars time" before the landing. The longer working "day" was needed because planning each sol was pretty difficult in the earliest sols. Now, with over 90 days of experience running the machines they can do more in less time, hence the switch back to normal time.
3) It was time to get more work done on the next mission. It makes sense to take experienced people from projects where their involvement is no longer absolutely needed. If they don't a lot of people will be ready to complain (and rightly so)about human resource management when the next lander fails because everything had to be learned from scratch by the people on the team. IIRC this was determined to be one of the factors in the failure of the Mars Polar Lander mission. The project manager did a great job with the MER's, left it in capable, experienced hands, and moved on to make sure the next project would be just as successful.
4) Agreed. I'd like to see things like maps with each days planning and progress, and maybe some more daily notes from the scientists. I can understand about the daily briefings getting fewer tho. The room where they were held was emptier each day, and I'm sure it was a burden for the scientists and techs to prepare and conduct a briefing each day, or every other day. Personally a weekly briefing is fine with me, just wish they'd do them an hour or two later:)
While increasing the robotic exploration to possibly habitable planets/moons. But you are right in that other missions are in danger. I want my Pluto probe!
There's more he got wrong. Plagued? One filesystem bug on Spirit and one broken heater on Opportunity (it can't be turned off), and one or two communication issues. Pretty impressive too me, on such complex systems.
The flight software update is not done yet, it will take 4 days to upload. Spirit should reboot and run the new software monday or tuesday, Opportunity shortly after that. I'd expect them to wait with the Opportunity reboot until they've seen it succeed on Spirit.
Some good news finally? What about Stardust? A huge success. Cassini/Huygens? Going great. Spitzer Space Telescope doing just fine, MESSENGER about to be launched to Mercury. Let's stop confusing the troubled manned space program with the hugely successful robotic exploration.
I'm happy to see space exploration articles on Slashdot, I just wish the editors would pick a more informed submission to run than this one, with better sources than cnn, yahoo or reuters who are almost always days behind the space related websites..
This argument always annoys me. You risk your life every day when you step into your car (or, if you're not old enough to drive, a car or a bicycle). Judging from your nick you're from Holland, there were some quite deadly accidents in the news even today. Why do you take that risk? Because the benefits of your trip outweigh the risk, at least in your judgement.
There are enough posts in this story that mention some of the benefits of human spaceflight. Factor in the as of yet unknown benefits that will probably also result, and you will find people to whom those benefits outweigh the risk they take.
Not doing anything considered risky by anyone would stop our advancement. It would make life incredibly dull. Personally, I think human spaceflight is absolutely necessary, and so is robotic exploration. They can go side by side, and complement each other. Wether this is achievable by NASA is a political question, not a technical or financial, IMHO.
Not really ahead of the times.. NASA knew that there was gray Hematite in Meridiani Planum (as your link shows), it was one of the most important reasons for choosing to land Opportunity there. The interesting thing is that we now know what on the surface is the hematite, and that the hematite was formed in abundant liquid water and not by other processes. Just fyi:)
BBC is kinda late with this story, this picture was shown during the NASA Marsrover briefing of thursday last week, and the article says nothing more than was already said at that briefing. You can watch reruns of the briefings here and here. Real format only:-/
But but but.. i like the pager:) It's so much smaller than a phone. Carry the pager on belt or pocket, keep phone stashed far far away in coat. I rarely use it anyway.
About the voicebox: the client speaks to a computer. Not a computer from the phone company, but a computer in our datacenter. I guess the software on that could be changed so it could send an SMS message instead of a pager call, but for now it only supports pagers.
The threshold would be lower for people to call me on the cell. The voicebox computer (I'm speaking of a separate computer, connected to the company telephone system, not the voicebox you get with the cell) is only for customers who have an immediate problem that stops their business, emergency situations. Calls get recorded, and logged. The few times that my cell was on, and customers were aware of that fact, they started calling there for much more trivial things.
For us this setup separates the on-call workers from the whims of the client, and it works well for us. Ofcourse you could set this up many other ways, and your suggestion might well work in some of those. It depends on what you're trying to achieve, and if the other systems already in place can do what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
90% of all computer users as soon as it is a default format in Windows Media Player (not saying that that is a likely thing to happen). Windows XP phoning home hasn't stopped it from being widely accepted, now has it?
Who cares? I want my flying car!
Well, according to the latest statistics, at least a thousand times less people have died on Venus than on Mars!
No, it's about uploading the correct set of data to the rocket, so it uses the right flight profile when launching. Thus not a problem with the satellite. Source: SpaceFlight Now.
Viking lander 2: success
Pathfinder: success
Polar Lander: fail
Spirit: success
Opportunity: success
What am I missing here?
They did. And discovered that every possible option of keeping the solar panels clean was too expensive either money-wise or mass-wise for the mission requirements. It is rocket science, not slashdot science.
Since MEX does not need to service Beagle II communication requirements, have there been talks with ESA about getting MEX to help getting MER data to Earth? It has already been shown that it can be done, why don't we hear more about MEX being used?
Are you kidding?
My take on that would be that unmanned missions are great to chart the new territory, to indicate which parts of Mars are most interesting to visit by much more flexible human explorers. Thus making sure that the high cost of a manned mission is not wasted by landing in the (scientifically) wrong spot..
No water on Mars? What rock have you been living under the last couple of years? No offense, but that remark just seemed off whack considering the recent discoveries.
No. According to recent briefings it is much more likely that other parts will fail before the solar panels become useless.
Opportunity already drove 100 meters in one day. Ofcourse the terrain on Meridiani is completely different compared to Gusev.
You are pretty naive if you think that's the only science goal for such a space mission.
Secondly, it's not so much estimated lifetime, but designed lifetime. Designed to last at least 90 days. Designed lifetime is a design parameter that has a big impact on cost of the project, designing for longer lifetimes automatically means more extensive (thus expensive) testing, more engineering difficulties within the same weight constraints, and possibly less room/weight available for science instruments (ie: one more battery installed: bye bye Mossbauer spectrometer. Bigger solar panels: strike PanCam).
Better sources for space related stuff:
spaceref.com
space.com
spaceflightnow.com
spacedaily.com
the rovers' homepage
and just for fascinating pics and educative descriptions: Astronomy Picture of the Day
They often carry the same stories, but usually one of them will have the scoop. There are more sites, but these ones are definately worthy of a daily visit, and some have plenty links to other interesting sites. Have fun :D
2) They have tested working on "mars time" before the landing. The longer working "day" was needed because planning each sol was pretty difficult in the earliest sols. Now, with over 90 days of experience running the machines they can do more in less time, hence the switch back to normal time.
3) It was time to get more work done on the next mission. It makes sense to take experienced people from projects where their involvement is no longer absolutely needed. If they don't a lot of people will be ready to complain (and rightly so)about human resource management when the next lander fails because everything had to be learned from scratch by the people on the team. IIRC this was determined to be one of the factors in the failure of the Mars Polar Lander mission. The project manager did a great job with the MER's, left it in capable, experienced hands, and moved on to make sure the next project would be just as successful.
4) Agreed. I'd like to see things like maps with each days planning and progress, and maybe some more daily notes from the scientists. I can understand about the daily briefings getting fewer tho. The room where they were held was emptier each day, and I'm sure it was a burden for the scientists and techs to prepare and conduct a briefing each day, or every other day. Personally a weekly briefing is fine with me, just wish they'd do them an hour or two later :)
While increasing the robotic exploration to possibly habitable planets/moons. But you are right in that other missions are in danger. I want my Pluto probe!
The flight software update is not done yet, it will take 4 days to upload. Spirit should reboot and run the new software monday or tuesday, Opportunity shortly after that. I'd expect them to wait with the Opportunity reboot until they've seen it succeed on Spirit.
Some good news finally? What about Stardust? A huge success. Cassini/Huygens? Going great. Spitzer Space Telescope doing just fine, MESSENGER about to be launched to Mercury. Let's stop confusing the troubled manned space program with the hugely successful robotic exploration.
I'm happy to see space exploration articles on Slashdot, I just wish the editors would pick a more informed submission to run than this one, with better sources than cnn, yahoo or reuters who are almost always days behind the space related websites..
FYI: NASA's Polar Lander. It crashed. And much like the Beagle 2, there was a months and months during search for it, and AFAIK it was never found.
This argument always annoys me. You risk your life every day when you step into your car (or, if you're not old enough to drive, a car or a bicycle). Judging from your nick you're from Holland, there were some quite deadly accidents in the news even today. Why do you take that risk? Because the benefits of your trip outweigh the risk, at least in your judgement.
There are enough posts in this story that mention some of the benefits of human spaceflight. Factor in the as of yet unknown benefits that will probably also result, and you will find people to whom those benefits outweigh the risk they take.
Not doing anything considered risky by anyone would stop our advancement. It would make life incredibly dull. Personally, I think human spaceflight is absolutely necessary, and so is robotic exploration. They can go side by side, and complement each other. Wether this is achievable by NASA is a political question, not a technical or financial, IMHO.
Part 3
Not really ahead of the times.. NASA knew that there was gray Hematite in Meridiani Planum (as your link shows), it was one of the most important reasons for choosing to land Opportunity there. The interesting thing is that we now know what on the surface is the hematite, and that the hematite was formed in abundant liquid water and not by other processes. Just fyi :)
BBC is kinda late with this story, this picture was shown during the NASA Marsrover briefing of thursday last week, and the article says nothing more than was already said at that briefing. You can watch reruns of the briefings here and here. Real format only :-/
About the voicebox: the client speaks to a computer. Not a computer from the phone company, but a computer in our datacenter. I guess the software on that could be changed so it could send an SMS message instead of a pager call, but for now it only supports pagers.
For us this setup separates the on-call workers from the whims of the client, and it works well for us. Ofcourse you could set this up many other ways, and your suggestion might well work in some of those. It depends on what you're trying to achieve, and if the other systems already in place can do what you want.