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Mars Soil Frustrates Phoenix Again
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jul 27, 2008 08:11 PM
from the pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept.
from the pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept.
Tablizer writes "The Phoenix Mars lander has been frustrated yet again by Mars's odd soil. The wet nature of the soil they are targeting appears to have made it get stuck in the scoop rather than drop into the oven. Past problems with similarly clumpy soil may have damaged the lander because the vibrator had to be used longer than it was designed for, resulting in a short circuit."
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Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Could be worse - it might have been Uranus, after all.
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum."
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:4, Funny)
I will!
wget http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=627539&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=24362939 [slashdot.org] | grep -i vibrator > vibrator
touch ./vibrator
Parent
Re:Neato (Score:5, Funny)
No manual entry for vibrator
Parent
PLEASE TAG VIBRATOR (Score:5, Informative)
This would make my day. I'm a girl btw :)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
MOD PARENT INTERESTING (Score:5, Funny)
Since I'm a guy and all :)
Parent
Re:MOD PARENT INTERESTING (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You'd think NASA scientists knew more about the reliability of vibrating devices...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides the fact that your post was mostly rant there were a few good comments.
All of the problems so far could have been fixed by a guy with a hand trowel. He could dig, sieve and work the vibrator.
I think its time for a more general purpose robot to go.
Also this really should have been more thoroughly tested. I mean one of those things that help you get icecream off the scoop would have been useful now. Guess next time they will think "what if the soil is clumpy" before blowing a cool 1/2 billion. I'd rat
Fess up.... (Score:4, Funny)
Vibrator had to be used for longer than designed.. (Score:3, Funny)
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere.... Wet nature... Drop into the oven... Got to think... Lemme get another beer.
Re:Vibrator had to be used for longer than designe (Score:5, Funny)
Why stop there? Anything can be a euphemism.
Frustrates phoenix...Wet nature...drop into the oven...get stuck in the scoop...damaged the lander...and of course, the universal problem everyone faces: ...the vibrator had to be used longer than designed, resulting in a short circuit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Vibrator had to be used for longer than designe (Score:5, Funny)
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere....
Mars hasn't had contact with any life forms in hundreds of millions of years, at least. Of course it needed an unusually long time with the vibrator.
Parent
Definition of 'wet'? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Definition of 'wet'? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Definition of 'wet'? (Score:4, Informative)
Ahh but the triple point of water is pretty close to zero C, so you have to check the phase diagram to see whether it melts or sublimes at mars surface temp.
Parent
A phoenix using an oven! (Score:5, Funny)
A Phoenix putting something into an oven... there go our tax dollars! Any competent phoenix would wait until its body burst into flame, then use the spare heat to analyze the sample.
I don't know about you, but I intend to write to my Congressperson.
---
Thousands are enslaved every day: http://www.riverofinnocents.com/ [riverofinnocents.com]
Preparation Oversight (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the next mission includes an icecream scoop.
Unmanned missions (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are relatively cheap you can screw up plenty and still do the work for less cost than a manned mission.
Parent
Re:Unmanned missions (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet all it would take is for a human to crumble the soil in his hand.
Parent
Except.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Except.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Unmanned missions (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, they aren't relatively cheap. You pay a fraction of the cost, and you get less than a fraction of the science.
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Re:Unmanned missions (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, humans are far more adaptable and can modify plans and experiments in a way no robot yet built could. Sometimes, you have to take the risks. If you want to consider costs, then let's say a robust manned mission costs fifty times as much as a robot mission. If you consider the missions that produced uncertain results (Viking landers and early probe photographs), minimal results (Phoenix) or no results at all (everything that has crashed), you are beginning to approach the cost of a manned mission, where a manned mission could have produced ALL of the useful data so far collected AND much of the data that has been lost due to unexpected conditions and unforeseen circumstances.
Yes, manned missions are extremely risky, and that means a danger of bereavement, but it is better to die with your boots on, making the discoveries of a lifetime, than to live in fear at the back of a cave. Indeed, if we look at places that are most risk-averse, we see that unexpected risks (when they arise) are actually the more dangerous for it. Risk aversity is no healthier than plunging straight into danger without care. Indeed, in a way, it is the same thing, except being risk-averse means you are always plunging into unknown dangers, never known ones. The correct solution is always to be risk-aware, to anticipate and minimize, but never to eliminate, danger. Eliminating danger is probably the most dangerous thing you can ever do.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I strongly agree. One of my life mottos is:
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain
Re:Unmanned missions (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two very large problems with a manned Mars mission.
1) It cost a shit ton of money. Don't give me "but it just costs X days of Iraq war!!!" crap. That might be true, but Americans will open up their pocket books for "making the world a safer place". They lynch presidents that spend a few trillion on science experiments. Sure, we did it with Apollo, but that fell into the "making the world a safer place... by kick the ass of the communist in a metaphorical sense". If it Apollo had been pure science, it would have never of flown. Because Apollo was about one upping the commies, we were okay with it.
2) It is a suicide mission. Sure, there are plenty of people that would sign up for a suicide mission if it meant they got to stick their boot print on Mars first. That doesn't change the fact that it would never fly. Americans, and even more extreme, Europeans, are extraordinarily risk adverse to the point of absurdity. Pools kill thousands of kids and no one really cars. Unhealthy food kills an absurd number of Americans (millions) and we just shrug it off. Toss an airplane into a building and kill a couple thousand and all of a sudden it is OMG OMG LETS CHANGE SOCIETY AND TOSS OUT CIVIL LIBERTIES TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS MINOR AMOUNT OF DEATH NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!!!11!!! KILL ALL THE ARABS!!!! NEVER AGAIN!!!1!!!! Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at. NASA blows up a shuttle filled with adrenaline junkies every quarter of a century, and now we can't fly the foolish things if a bird happens to fly by and drop a shit on one before it takes off.
Our (western) priorities are so far out of whack and screwed up that this will never happen. The monetary argument is at least logical and something I can get behind. The utter terror at letting someone willingly sacrifice themselves doing something they want to do is a sign that our lives are way the hell too comfy.
Space exploration is dead to humans until someone finds a cheap way for individuals to get into space, governments to damned. The second you can head west, hit the California coast, and go up a few thousand miles, you will have the US population drop by 10% as the crazy pioneer genes that are still floating around from the crazy immigrants that pushed into the US over the past few hundred years reassert themselves and people throw themselves into space.
Until that day, the pragmatic and rational folks are going to tell you to fuck off once they see the price tag, and the people begging for a nanny state will break down into tears cry about the inhumanity of it all to let a person willing sacrifice themselves.
Parent
Re:Preparation Oversight (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the soil is the consistency of clay. Trying to get clay out of a scoop takes water and a lot of patience.
Parent
Bad vibrator (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad vibrator (Score:4, Funny)
That's how it goes when they send a vibrator to do a mans job. Anyway, are the exploring that hole they found a while back?
Oh come on!
You can send 1000 vibrators for the price of one man.
Vibrators always do what they are told.
Vibrators never get tired...
Parent
All that money.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not wet (Score:5, Informative)
Yo mama (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry (Score:3, Funny)
Phoenix Mars Mission Logo (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see the fleet street headlines (Score:5, Funny)
Re:YHBT (Score:5, Funny)
Considering that this is from the "pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept." I think the editor was all too happy to play along.
Timothy may also be getting an email shortly from Taco.
Parent
Actually, (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
After the loss of the first vehicle, they did extensive testing. The whole Phoenix story is truly rising from the ashes, and very interesting. I think it was on the Discovery channel.
My first thought was gravity as well, though I'd think we have enough physics simulations that we could at least do simulated testing under low grav. Looking at the homepage for Phoenix, it looks like they are looking into heat caused by the rasping might be contributing to the problem. Digging holes on Mars just isn't the
Re:One sad conclusion (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
One Big Mega-Probe, or Incremental? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your joke raises an interesting question: is it cheaper to send up a single big swiss-army probe that has everything, or simpler probes that use lessons borrowed from the last probe? Phoenix is relatively cheap, probe-wise, such that its not like we put all our eggs in one basket on this one. A later probe can now be more focused to the task based on known soil characteristics.
It is hard to calculate a clean answer to such questions without having some experience with different designs. Mars is still a new world. Our experience with biology experiments with Viking suggests that the incremental approach may be better. We've learned how Mars may "trick" such experiments and how sneaky life can be based on Earth samples. We can now design experiments that rule out the traps that Viking discovered. Sure, we'll probably find new traps along the way, but nobody says exploration must be easy.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps, just perhaps.... (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, if NASA is SOOO incompetent, why do they have a much better record at delivering vehicles to other planets than ANY other group? Me, I have my issues with them, but I have worked on a small part of MGS and know that there is a lot involved. These folks are doing good work.
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Re:One sad conclusion (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Lotta problems on Mars (Score:5, Funny)
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