will the jeep be able to leave the crater?
Nuclear Mars tank thrusts hard into perfect position
Unlike the broken-down Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, the NASA Mars Science Laboratory is on track for touching down on the Red Planet after smoothly pulling off some well-choreographed thrusts. In its biggest manoeuvre yet, the floating nuclear science tank - which is carrying shiny new rover Curiosity - fired up to eight …
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Thursday 12th January 2012 15:12 GMT Gary F
Don't worry, the NASA boffins have programmed a handbrake parking manoeuvre macro to a hotkey - F12 I think. Press... skid, spin round, swish neatly into the atmosphere. Then it's Ctrl+E to release its cargo. Hopefully someone remembered to print out a keyboard overlay just in case. I wonder if the Russians realise it's Ctrl+R to restart? ;-)
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Thursday 12th January 2012 16:51 GMT AdamT
Indeed it will be tragic if it fails and I really, really hope it doesn't. But it sure is awful complicated! There's a heat shield to use and jetison, parchutes to use and jetison, hovering with jets to a very specific altitude, cables to be unwound and gentle landings to be done...
Oh, and then cables to be disconnected, hovering things to be flown away and crashed somewhere else. And then the tank, which is no simple beast itself, has to wake itself up and start it's trundle 'n' zap routine ...
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Thursday 12th January 2012 18:56 GMT Mike Flugennock
complex for sure, but...
"...There's a heat shield to use and jetison, parchutes to use and jetison, hovering with jets to a very specific altitude, cables to be unwound and gentle landings to be done..."
Yeah, it's complicated as hell, for sure, but is it really that much more complex than the entry/landing systems used by Viking, Pathfinder, or MER?
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Thursday 12th January 2012 19:04 GMT TimeMaster T
Other than the "Sky Crane" they have already done everything you mention before, On Earth, Venus, Mars, Titan and Jupiter.
As to the crane, its really just an extension of the Viking landers and the moon landers, only with newer tech. Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity being excellent examples of new tech (air bags) being used for the first time.
I've worked with the people at JPL. It isn't just a job for them, its their Bliss (read Joseph Campbell if you don't get it).
I have faith in their abilities to pull this off.
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Friday 13th January 2012 03:34 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Could not find anything under "Faith". Did you mean "Fail"?
You just need to have about 2 years of engineering on your résumé to learn that designing and building an artifact doing stuff in the real world is fraught with risk because nature WILL confront you with configuration spaces larger than you imagined and exhibit the FRANKLY DISTURBING tendency to change the state of your artifact from a controlled region to one of the VASTLY LARGER regions next to it, with those regions labelled "here be failure", "don't go here" and "your wife just left you", and this RANDOMLY and EXPONENTIALLY MORE FREQUENTLY the more complex your artifact is.
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Friday 13th January 2012 14:14 GMT Figgus
"There's a heat shield to use and jetison, parchutes to use and jetison, hovering with jets to a very specific altitude, cables to be unwound and gentle landings to be done...
Oh, and then cables to be disconnected, hovering things to be flown away and crashed somewhere else."
I wonder how the little green men will like us littering up their planet?
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Thursday 12th January 2012 19:56 GMT Camilla Smythe
What's the exchange rate?
Fine
1) Reckless Flying.
2) Fly Tipping.
3) Shit Parking.
4) Driving the wrong way around a one way crater.
5) Inappropriate use of full beam laser disturbing oncoming traffic.
6) ETC
"The chances of anything coming from Earth are a Million to One They Said. The Chances Of Anything Coming From Earth Are A Million To One but......"
'Oh Do Shut The Fuck Up. Are we going to Ticket it when it gets here?'
'Sir! Yes! Sir!'
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Friday 13th January 2012 01:28 GMT Steven Roper
Velocity change of 12 mph
in which direction? Velocity is a vector quantity consisting of speed and direction. So, did the craft speed up by 12mph (delta-v of 12 mph at 0, 0 degrees [relative to the initial direction of travel and the plane of the ecliptic]), slow down by 12 mph (delta-v of 12 mph at 180, 0 degrees), or actually change course (delta-v of 12 mph at e.g. 90, 0 degrees)?
Or did the craft merely change *speed* by 12 mph?
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Friday 13th January 2012 11:16 GMT mhenriday
Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude ?
«NASA shows Russians how Phobos-Grunt should have worked.» I get the impression that Ms Leach is far happier at the Russian failure than at the US success. So much for H sapiens sapiens being engaged in a common effort to overcome the limitations that the Earth's gravity well, solar radiation, etc, etc, impose upon us !...
Henri
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Saturday 14th January 2012 15:47 GMT Mike Flugennock
Dull? Sez YOU.
"I look forward to lots of driving round in a dull lifeless landscape but in higher resolution."
Lifeless, for sure, but dull? Hardly. I've found the landscapes of Mars to be beautiful and compelling in progressively greater degrees as the image quality increased, ever since the first images came back from Viking 35 years ago.
I'm still hoping I'm alive -- and still coherent -- when the first rover is landed on Mars which is capable of recording and transmitting back full-motion video, so we can see things like the sampling arms and drills at work, views from the rover while traveling, and dust devils sweeping across the plains. I still remember the 16mm motion picture footage shot from the Apollo LRVs while "on the road" between traverse points (they couldn't transmit live video while traveling) -- man, that was amazing stuff.
I don't recall if the sky crane has its own imaging systems or not -- I'll have to hit the MSL site -- but some shots of the rover being lowered to the surface and a view of the landing site as the crane ascends and flies off would be really fascinating... like the views from the Apollo LM lifting off from the Moon, shot by the 16mm window-mounted, ground-facing movie cameras.
Also, I don't know how far off the sky crane will fly before it kamizes in, but I'd also be really interested in some views of its crash site if the rover's able to swing by there. I was fascinated with the MER rovers' close-up shots of the crashed aeroshells and heatshields that they transmitted back for the engineers.
I, for one, can't wait to see the fotos that the MSL sends back; if the MRO shots of the site are any indication, we're in for some pretty spectacular views -- "magnificent desolation", as Buzz Aldrin once said.
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