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Space Science

NASA's Mars Odyssey Enters Orbit 129

Posted by Hemos from the get-it-where-it-needed-to-go dept.
maddmike writes "Nasa's Mars explorer Odyssey is scheduled to brake and orbit about Mars today at 7:30PDT. Among the mission's objectives are to understand Mars' climate and geological history and to search for signs of life sustaining environments including water. Main web site is at the JPL website." Update: 10/24 13:12 GMT by T : The BrownFury writes cites a Space.com summary which says "The Mars Odyssey spacecraft appears to have succeeded Tuesday night in one of the most tricky and critical parts of its missions by slipping into orbit around the Red Planet."
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NASA's Mars Odyssey Enters Orbit More

NASA's Mars Odyssey Enters Orbit

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  • Cool! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bob McCown ( 8411 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2001 @09:27AM (#2471729)
    That means our cloaking technology was successful against those pesky aliens that have blasted last few probes.

    Onward to planetary colonization!

    • They just weren't expecting an orbital trajectory that didn't include the planetary core . . .


      hawk

    • No joke (Score:3, Interesting)

      by s20451 ( 410424 )
      The NASA people talk about the "great galactic ghoul" which lurks somewhere between Earth and Mars, which eats Mars-bound spaceprobes. It's their tongue-in-cheek attempt to explain why roughly half of all Mars probes fail -- some for apparently no reason.

    • Re:Cool! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Saeger ( 456549 )
      Onward to planetary colonization!

      You would trade one gravity well for another?

      Mars is interesting, but space habitats are the future my man. :)

    • I would joke that it was running Windows NT, and NO ALIEN would want to touch that POS OS for fear of assimiliation.

      It may be nice to know for brag rights that the spacecraft is using a radiation-hardened version of the POWER chip, of which the PowerPC chip family is included. No Pentiums there, unless they want to start global warning by landing the thing.

      /././.
  • This is EXACTLY the kind of good press Nasa needs right now - Hopefully, if we can avoid further mishaps, we can get the kind of funding we need to put people on Mars in my lifetime. If we can find water on the planet, think of the possibilities.
  • understand Mars' climate and geological history and to search for signs of life sustaining environments including water.
    let's hope they don't mix up degrees Celcius and Fahrenheit and Liter and gallon..... else these "colonists" are in for a BIG surprise ;-)

  • Wow (Score:2, Funny)

    by the_other_one ( 178565 )

    In the picture on the main web site the spacecraft looks very much like the main part of it is a Furby. Now that's a hack!

  • It's about time :-) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anton Anatopopov ( 529711 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2001 @09:33AM (#2471758)
    I guess by the law of averages at least one NASA mars probe would eventually get through :-)

    Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.

    I can't help thinking that we are not spending enough money on cool space research like this. Why does congress always seem to resent paying for NASA ?

    NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets. After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.

    • This begs the question why are we sending one expensive probe at a time, when we could be sending many, many less expensive probes. Even with the law of averages, we should have enough successes to do just as well and find out just as much.
    • After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.

      Why does everyone feel the need to falsely attribute various inventions as space program spinoffs?

      Teflon was invented in 1938 [dupont.com], well before anything that could even remotely be considered modern space research.

      Don't get me wrong, space research is good, and it produces a valuable product: knowledge.

      False attributions to the space program don't help with their budget problems, though. I'm not blaming you, however, NASA themselves is quite guilty of exaggeration.

    • Seriously though, this is good news, the more data we have on Mars, the easier it will be when we attempt to colonize it.

      Sending unmanned probes: of course
      Sending a manned mission: why not?

      But to colonise it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task.

      Of course, we should explore space, not only because of spin-offs or "Americas ingenuity and power", but because of the everpresent human curiosity, which is the force behind most of the fundamental research.

      But colonisation is something completely different. And BTW, what do you mean by colonisation? Sending a couple of scientists for a year or something, like to an orbital space station? Or maybe terraforming of Mars? In this case let us maybe start with terraforming Sahara.

      Rav

      • Re:It's about time :-) (Score:2, Interesting)

        by MrDolby ( 303452 )
        "But to colonize it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task. "

        It's simple, the human race will have a much better chance of survival if we start spreading out. Also, colonization does not require us to change or terraform all of mars. With the right equipment it should be theoretically possible to sustain a small population of humans indefinitely. This is one of the main reasons behind these probes, to determine what kind of raw materials there are available to work with that could sustain human life on mars for a long term/permanent stay.
      • "But to colonise it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task."

        Because one good-sized rock could hit the Earth, and that's it for humanity.

        A self-sustaining settlement on another planet (or in space, though that's MUCH harder) gives the species the best chance to survive such an impact. Otherwise, it's up to mutant octopi to figure out how to get off the planet within 65 million years.

        Then you figure out how to re-settle one planet from the other in the event of an impact. After that, you have a nice long 5-billion year stretch to figure out how to colonize another star system.

        Terraforming the Sahara might be good practice, though.
      • But to colonise it? Give me just one reason to justify such an incredibly expensive task.

        Because the Bill Gates "I want to be a young computer geek forever" biological research program doesn't seem to be making enough progress. And even if it did, in his arrogance, he didn't anticipate the antitrust thing going as far as it has. Finally, a big rock from space could land on the Microsoft campus. By colonizing Mars, it gives Microsoft a chance to survive such a catastrophic event.

    • Re:It's about time :-) (Score:3, Insightful)

      by anzha ( 138288 )

      Why does Congress resent paying for NASA? Pretty good question. Think about it though.

      The short answer is that NASA happens to be demonstrating that it's rather incompetant. Flamebait? Karma killer? Perhaps, but think about it.

      Shuttle? Years delayed and expensive as h*ll to operate. Space station? Ditto.

      X Vehicles? Let's take a look there!

      X-33 was cancelled for starting to run down that same route, and they picked the winning Lockmart proposal because it was full of nifty tech, not based on the stated goals of the X program (much cheaper access to orbit using SSTO technologies).

      X-34 was killed because MSFC wanted to incorporate THEIR engine instead of the original one (*GASP* it was delayed and overbudget...)

      X-30? The National Aerospace Plane fell the way of the X-33, but back in the early 90's.

      Manned spacflight at NASA has been an embarassment for some time for its screwups.

      On the bright side, look at the unmanned probes recently. Sehr gut! Pathfinder, Global Surveyor, DS-1, Lunar Prospector, etc, etc...

      BUT...when NASA f*cks up like say with the Mars 98 missions: English to metric unit conversion problems crash one probe into Mars. WTF!?! These are supposed to be the best and brightest and make THAT stupid a mistake! The royal screwups in the lander mission are ...ummm...amazing.

      Good and bad, Goldin did get one thing right in that he said that for NASA to be trusted any time soon with the budget to go to Mars manned style they'd have to fix - budgetwise - the ISS program. It didn't happen.

      On sci.space.policy, Gary Hudson, of Rotary Rocket and more fame, made the following remark [google.com] when someone suggested that he be nominated to take over NASA. . .and politically, that's about as likely as slashdot deciding that they're going to run IIS.

      In short, NASA is a wreck.

      Now. Why do you think Congress resents spending money on NASA? Money isn't the main problem here...

      • >> The short answer is that NASA happens to be demonstrating that it's rather incompetant.

        Does anyone know how NASA salaries compare to those for similar jobs in private industry?
        • I work at NASA Ames (but not FOR NASA; I'm a contractor). I have a Master's degree from Stanford, and during the dot-com days (and perhaps even now), I could have left for a LOT more money. Many of my colleages did (the more competent ones). The pay is just NOT competative for the people with great talents; but I like my work, and now that many people have been layed off, I'm still working, and doing long term development projects (that's a benefit for me).

          That said, I make a decent wage, and am not complaining. But we always have a hard time recruiting good programmers, engineers, etc. because the pay is generally less these days.
          • Oh, one more thing. We still do some NEAT things here, and we need good people to help turn them into to commercial technology (or at least releasable technology for others to benefit from). We also do lots of safety related work that is non-proprietary, for example. So, if you are looking for a good job these days, definitely look into NASA. We are in need of good people!

            • >> But we always have a hard time recruiting good programmers, engineers, etc. because the pay is generally less these days.

              I agree wholeheartedly about pay not being the most important part of a job. I also traded salary for an increase in job satisfaction and a lifestyle upgrade.

              That being said, pay counts *a lot* for many people. The easiest way to fix America's broken educational system would be to double teacher pay. The same strategy would undoubtedly rejuvinate the workforce at NASA.

      • Re:It's about time :-) (Score:3, Insightful)

        by s20451 ( 410424 )

        In short, NASA is a wreck.

        NASA is no different from any other sci/tech organization. However, they have the combined disadvantages of very high risk projects and intense public scrutiny.

        Example:

        NASA engineer writes a bug in code: $300 million spacecraft pancakes into the Martian plains; elected officials demand answers; public wonders why NASA is full of buffoons who can't do something as "simple" as launching a spacecraft into orbit around another heavenly body on a shoestring budget.

        Microsoft engineer writes a bug in code: Another MS engineer is assigned to write a Service Release; yet another engineer is assigned to correct the bugs in the Service Release. Resulting security holes lead to viruses costing billions in lost productivity, according to some estimates. Elected officials defend free enterprise; public doesn't care.

        Linuk kernel hacker writes a bug: Another hacker finds and corrects the bug; elected officials and public don't give a rat's ass.

    • NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets. After all, space research has lots of practical spin-offs, like teflon for example.

      The only problem is that NASA is also a clear example of managerial incompetence at work. Brilliant engineers (I am currently in school working on an Aerospace Engineering degree) that have managers that can't balance a checkbook.
    • NASA is a clear demonstration to the world of Americas ingenuity and power. I think at times like these we should be looking to provide them with more funding rather than cutting their budgets.



      Now I won't name any names, but a lot of countries out there have no idea about the things we do. Even if the ruling parties are aware of our accomplishments, the children of said countries are not taught about the ingenuity or power of our country. Their schools are often little more than conformity factories where the minds of the youth are shaped to fit the political goals of the rulers. Thus, the population is ignorant of our history, to the point that all they know is we are the enemy who would suppress them or kill them as quickly and painfully as possible. This is the environment in which terrorists grow.



      In other words, if we put a human on Mars, terrorists around the world won't stop to marvel at the beauty of mankind's success. We might just need those extra billions of dollars when the you-know-what hits the fan. And I don't mean sh!t.

  • What's Next.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cybrpnk ( 94636 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2001 @09:36AM (#2471769)
    There are three instruments on Odyssey. One is a gamma spectrometer that will be able to map the presence of permafrost and subsurface ice - obviously important. A second is an infrared spectrometer - not only will it be able to make a geological survey map of the minerals on the surface, it will be able to locate "hot spots" on the surface where there might still be liquid water and perhaps even life. The third instrument is a radiation monitor that was supposed to measure the dose an astronaut would receiv on a Mars mission. It appears to be broken, one hopes not from excesive radiation exposure.....
  • Can anyone tell me why we just can't send a KH11 sattellite to Mars? It would give us all the imagery we would ever want and answer the questions we keep asking.
    • The kh-11 is designed to send real-time imagery from an orbital height of approx 200 miles (it often orbits lower) to TDRS type satellites in synchronous orbits at approx 25.000 miles. Mars is a bit further away than that. Now a landsat 7-band thematic mapping satellite with a stronger transmitter would be useful.

    • Re:Why can't we just sned a KH11? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2001 @10:25AM (#2471963)
      Because a KH-11 is heavy.

      http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/xk h- 12.htm

      14 tons for a KH-11, 18 tons for the Improved Crystal.

      Niether the Americas, ESA or Proton have rockets with the throw-weight to chuck 18 tons of KH-11 to Mars.

      http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atlsiiib.htm
      The Atlas III can launch 4,500 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer trajectory

      http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm
      The Delta IV Large can launch 10,843 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer

      http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ariane5.htm
      The Ariane 5 can launch 6,800 kg. to a Geosynchronous transfer

      Shuttle might do it - 24,000 kgs to LEO, but you'd have to have a big boster. Perhaps if Saturn hadn't been killed, or Energia. But right now no one has the rocket to send something like that to Mars.
      • Of course, you can still do it, despite those limitations. You can take the satellite up, and start boosting at the right time and slingshotting it around until you have enough energy to get to Mars, virtually for free... except for time. This would take years.

        Money, money, money. It's all about money. (Same reason you can't do what a sibling of this message proposes, which is assemble it in pieces. Of course there's no technical reason that's impossible, just monetary. We have other things to do with launches then to send up a shuttle multiple times for one Mars probe.)

  • 40 bits a second! (Score:2, Informative)

    by netman133 ( 98237 )
    From Space.com [space.com]

    11:01 Odyssey turns on its telemetry and begins transmitting data at 40 bits per second. The Deep Space Network will take several minutes to synchronize their equipment with the pattern in the telemetry because of the slow rate at which the data is being received.

    • For such a new satelite, why such a slow rate of transmission?
      • Reliable transmission rates depend on lots of things: available transmitter power, distance to Earth, receive antenna gain and sensitivity, etc etc etc. I guess 40 bps is the result of this kind of tradeoff, and probably represents the best they can do for now. Not knowing much (anything?) about the spacecraft design, I don't know whether 40 bps is the best it can do, or just the best it's set for right now.

        • 40 bps is pretty good. I've worked with 9.9 bps before on spacecraft operations. It could take an hour before we get the first transfer frame shipped to us from DSN.

          It's painful, but if you design it right, you get all of the info you need to make decisions in a just a few dozen bits.

      • Mars probably isn't that close to a central office.

      • Distance, reliability (Score:3, Informative)

        by s20451 ( 410424 )
        1. When the spacecraft first goes into orbit, you want a reliable, simple telemetry signal to indicate the basics of what is happening with the spacecraft. This means a low-gain, wide-beam transmitting antenna. The high-gain antenna will provide higher rates, but must be aimed much more carefully; such a system would not be robust if something went slightly wrong during orbit insertion.
        2. From the Where is Mars Odyssey Right Now? [nasa.gov] page, the spacecraft is currently 1.53e+11 meters from Earth. Even with a directional antenna, signal power drops with distance squared, so the path loss is on the order of 200 dB. That is, if the transmitter power is (say) 50 watts/m^2 at 1 meter away from the spacecraft, as measured from Earth it would be something like 10^-20 watts/m^2, not counting antenna gains. At those powers you'd be lucky to get 40 bits/s, simply by running into Shannon's limit. (Somebody check my math, I haven't had coffee this morning.) Imagine the communications challenge for Voyager 2, which is now heading out of the solar system at a range of billions of kilometers; or Galileo, which lost its high-gain antenna at Jupiter ...

      • Re:40 bits a second! (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's why I'm canceling my subscription to the Deep Space Network - the 16 minute ping times & resultant lag makes plying Quake3 with the Aliens impossible.
    • 1 megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes... which = 8,388,608 bits... divided by 40 is 209,715.2 seconds. divided by 60 seconds = 3,495.25 minutes. divided by 60 minutes = 58.25 hours... So it would take 2 days 10 hours and 15 minutes to send 1 megabyte of data.

      Does that sound right?

    • Re:40 bits a second! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Longbow ( 28366 )
      Actually the 40 bps is just the carrier signal that they use to keep a lock on the spacecraft.

      The 40bps comes through the low gain omnidirectional antenna. Once they are back on the high gain antenna, the signal rate goes back
      up. After the spacecraft is out of danger and back into normal operations the rate is switched back to something like 28,800 bps. Pretty good rate for communicating across 100 million miles.
      • the rate is switched back to something like 28,800 bps. Pretty good rate for communicating across 100 million miles.

        Ya, I once download a Red Hat CD over my modem. I hope NASA's using wget -c because I sure found it useful for that.
      • After the spacecraft is out of danger and back into normal operations the rate is switched back to something like 28,800 bps.

        You think they could have sprung for one of those 56K modems. Sheesh, talk about penny-pinching...
  • Okay folks, keep in mind we are celebrating the arrival in orbit of basically a relay transmitter. Putting up inteinfrastructure is nice (and yes, I know there are a few instruments on it) but this is mostly just for future probes, so they can have very low power transmitters and still get thru.
    • Yes, but we have to start somewhere. It's still a success. And let's face it, this is very refreshing news, considering all the gloom and doom we've been force-fed for the last 6 weeks.

      Exploring Mars [exploringmars.com] has more info on Mars missions, past and present.
    • A relay for future landers...

      ... and an experiment to learn about the radiation that future human Mars explorers will encounter (and possibly a buried Shadow vessel, too?)

      ... and a camera with far-greater resolution than the one on mars Global Surveyor (maybe it can hunt for the lost Polar Lander?)

      ... and a gamma-ray specrtrometer.
    • And did they change the default passwords?

      Gotta watch out for those Martian script-kiddies!
  • here's a cool link [nasa.gov] about the steps they take to get into orbit. my favorite part is that the first step involves 'turning off the fault protection software'. its not as bad as you think, though my immediate reaction was to imagine mission control saying "Well, we're only 100 kilometers away, we should be safe so let's just turn that fault protection stuff off. Or was it 100 miles?"
    • This was done in order to prevent small errors that won't affect the spacecraft from shutting it down at a bad time. Fault control software on late-model NASA craft causes them to enter into a "safe mode" that shuts down nonessential functions and causes the craft to wait for instructions from Earth.

      If this were to happen during the engine firing -- causing the probe to stop everything and just wait -- it'd sail right on past Mars, a fate which befell some of the earlier lunar probes.

      If this were to happen, Mars Odyssey would be useless anyway... so better to risk the small problems rather than have them come back to bite you in a big way.
  • search for signs of life sustaining environments including water...
    Didn't Nasa find water on Mars several times already? How will this mission tell us anything new?
    • NASA never found water. NASA has gobs of images of the Martian surface which /suggest/ water. Channels on the surface, etc., which look an awful lot like running water made them. There are even some features that hint at ancient oceans.

      However, at the moment, these images are equivalent to ink blots. Yeah, maybe they look like something - but maybe you're just reading into them.

      Odyessey seems like it's going to go a bit beyond that and actually do some surveying of the surface and subsurface for signs of actual water, as opposed to just saying, "Hey, that looks like it might've been made by water a million years ago!"

  • Touching scene in mission control (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2001 @11:25AM (#2472290) Homepage

    I was watching the mission control footage, when the satellite came out of Mars' shadow, two mission control geeks went to high five each other, and missed. That's NASA for you: nerding it old school. ;-)

  • ...I didn't hear anything about it. ;)



    Even though there's more important things going on in the world right now, nothing disappears into the news black hole faster than a successful space mission. A failed mission, on the other hand...

  • Funny, wasn't that a story about someone who got lost for 20 years? Remind me again why someone thought that was a good mission name....
  • Hrm. Go here [space.com] for updates..

    "Breaking News Updates
    Wednesday, Oct. 24

    11:32 a.m. ET: Hours after Mars Odyssey entered orbit, concerns were raised about the spacecraft smacking into Phobos -- one of two natural moons circling Mars. More data was needed to plot Odyssey's exact orbit. "

    That would really suck... get all that way, have a great burn and WHAP.

    Damn pesky moons...
  • Amazing what NASA can do when they don't use the English system of measurement!
  • The near-disaster Galileo Jupiter probe has been operating satisfactorily for six years at a 10 bps transmission rate. About once a month it makes a close moon flyby, snaps a few dozen pictures and records them on tape. Then during the empty parts of its orbit it tranmits the pictures back to earth at about two per day.

    The main Galileo antenna which was over a thousand times faster failed to open- a near embarassment to NASA. The mission was re-programmed enroute to use the slow antenna, and achieve 70% of the original objectives.
    • Interestingly enough, the antenna used on Galileo was the same or similar as that used in Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). Those satellites have never had any trouble with antenna deployment. The one fitted to Galileo failed because it was not lubricated at all over the years the probe sat in storage after Challenger exploded -- Galileo was designed to be launched by the Space Shuttle.

      Interestingly enough, the main antenna for a Voyager probe fits perfectly within the Shuttle's payload bay, which may or may not be a coincidence. Remember that the Shuttle was designed in part to specs supplied by the Department of Defense, and chances are the specs were those of a KH-series spysat. Now consider that the KH satellites are launched by Titan IV rockets -- the same vehicle that launched Voyager 1 and 2.
      ... Magellan, also launched by the Shuttle/Inertial Upper Stage, used a spare Voyager antenna and performed flawlessly during its mission to map Venus.
  • Apparently they have learned to calculate with SI units this time... :)
  • The APOD [nasa.gov] (Astronomy Picture of the Day), has a picture of what this MIGHT have looked like... in natural and false-colouring... and as always, tons of informational links.

    M@

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