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Mars Space Science

Mars Orbiter Launch Delayed 98

Posted by Zonk from the waiting-for-major-tom dept.
Mictian writes "NASA's newest Mars probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), was originally scheduled to be launched from Kennedy Space Center Wednesday morning atop an Atlas 5 rocket. However a potential problem with the Atlas' Redundant Rate Gyro Units (RRGUs), that are part of the vehicle's flight control system, detected at Lockheed Martin's factory has caused the engineers to make sure that the two RRGUs in MRO's rocket are working, thus delaying the launch at least until Thursday morning. There is a 1.5 hour launch window daily until the end of the month."
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Mars Orbiter Launch Delayed More

Mars Orbiter Launch Delayed

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  • Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:24AM (#13286877)
    Today elation swept across our fair world when it was revealed by the Council that the invaders from the evil blue planet have been stymied in their latest efforts to despoil our perfect planet.

    K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, was on hand to address the jubilant masses:
    "Gentle Citizens, today I stand before you with my gelsacs swollen with pride. Today I reveal to you that our wise and powerful Council, not being content to merely defend our world against the constant antagonism by the filthy inhabitants of the evil blue planet, have struck a blow agains the aggressors on their own horrid soil! Utilizing our superior technology, we have caused irreperable damage to one of their loathsome machines while it still squatted on the noisome loam of the evil blue planet! All glory to the Council!"

    During the question-and-answer session that followed, when asked by a citizen whether rumours were true that the device damaged was only a minor inconvinence to the sickening inhabitants of the evil blue planet, and that in all probability the craft would be launched within a day, K'Breel ordered the citizen's summary execution. The remainder of the question-and-answer session passed in a remarkably subdued manner.
  • Mission Controller 1: What about the R.R.G.O.U.S.'s?
    Mission Controller 2: Redundant Rate Gyros Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
    R.R.G.O.U.S: GRAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHH!
    • Fixed

      Mission Controller 1: What about the R.R.G.O.U.S.'s?
      Mission Controller 2: Redundant Rate Gyros Of Unusual Size? I've never heard of them.
      R.R.G.O.U.S: GRAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHH!

  • Its just a minor delay (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Saggi ( 462624 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:32AM (#13286931) Homepage
    They expect to launch Thursday morning.

    But its better to wait one dya, than loosing a big rocket, just to stay on shedule. Better be safe, than sorry.
  • Imagine if it's only a Rate Gyro Unit. They could have launched and their rate gyro might have been off.

    Thank god to that engineer who figured out "let's have a Redundant Rate Gyro Unit".

    The thing I don't understand is as long as it gets to outer space on the right course isn't that good enough? They arn't recovering the shuttle as this is going off into the far ether (well Mars far)

    • Re:And to think they might of not noticed. (Score:5, Informative)

      by timster ( 32400 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:52AM (#13287074)
      Yeah, and if it DOESN'T get to outer space on the right course, then your pretty little orbiter is nothing more than a multimillion-dollar piece of useless space junk.

      So it's important that your rocket goes in the right direction. This is actually very hard to do. A rocket is inherently unstable, as the thrust isn't ever perfectly aligned with the center of mass, and any errors in position tend to magnify themselves.

      Ever blown up a balloon and released it? Notice how it flew every which way like crazy? Mostly NOT toward Mars?
      • Ever blown up a balloon and released it? Notice how it flew every which way like crazy? Mostly NOT toward Mars?

        Dude, I am SO inventing and patenting balloon gyros! Oho, Timmy will bear that smug birthdayboy smirk no longer when all balloons are gyro-guided directly at his face!

      • Well, it isn't as if such things have not happened before, particularly with Lockheed-Martin as NASA's contractor. I seem to recall that a previous $250 Million USD Mars orbital probe was turned into Mars "deep geological probe" when the units of measurement (Imperial & metric, or SI & metric?) were mixed between the flight and orbital software routines. Different software functions built by different sub-projects without adequate overall engineering management was apparently to blame. NASA's man
    • What the heck are you trying to say? That a redundant gyro is foolish and profligate waste of taxpayers money?

            The gyro is what makes it go where it is supposed to go. Primary gyro failure, and no redundant unit = big splash in the Atlantic and/or range safety destruct. So you save $250,000 on a second gyro, and risk a $400 million+ dollar program.

              Brett

  • Hopefully Thursday (Score:5, Informative)

    by Guysmiley777 ( 880063 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:34AM (#13286947)
    They are planning on testing the gyro unit today so they can get the launch off Thursday morning.

    Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.

    • Re:Hopefully Thursday (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:59AM (#13287144) Homepage Journal
      Oddly enough, the Atlas V acually uses Russian engines in the 1st stage. Ironic for a rocket that was originally an ICBM.

      One thing I've always wanted to seen done. Take all the US and Russian engineers, put them together, give them a blank check and the goal of colonizing space along with permission to use any and all knowlege (including classified) that they posses. And just wait to see how long it is until I'm living in orbit.

      • Re:Hopefully Thursday (Score:2, Insightful)

        by frgough ( 890240 )
        You'd wind up with the R101 Airhsip, version 2. It would be over deadline, overbudget and crash on liftoff.

        The best way to get a horrible result is to remove all restrictions.

      • One thing I've always wanted to seen done. Take all the US and Russian engineers, put them together, give them a blank check and the goal of colonizing space along with permission to use any and all knowlege (including classified) that they posses. And just wait to see how long it is until I'm living in orbit.

        With all of the ships adrift in the solar system from broken russian equipment and american software failure, you'd basically have the setting of Space Hulk... minus the space marine power armor...

      • I'd like a pony.
      • A NASA guy on Science Friday was needled by a caller into talking about an Air Force contingency plan where they maintained a manned spaceflight capability throughout most of the life of the shuttle, because they don't trust the security around the shuttle.

        So, there's a parallel manned spaceflight program going on in the US under wraps. That's a resource that your plan could leverage if it were politically feasible.
    • AFAIK, the Atlas V has little in common with the original Atlas ICBMs, aside from the name.

    • Re:Hopefully Thursday (Score:3, Interesting)

      by boarder ( 41071 )
      The Atlas V wasn't originally an ICBM. The Atlas was originally, but the Atlas II, IIAS, IIIA and IIIB were just normal launch vehicles. I work and did work on the latest four of these (I'm too young to have worked on the original Atlas and Atlas II) and can tell you that each is VERY different from the next iteration.

      It would be like saying your current Pentium IV PC is anything like the Pentium you had 10 years ago. ISA bus is gone, RAM is different, video cards are AGP instead of ISA or PCI, floppy dr
  • I know that a launch window is a period of time that you can launch in, but is this an environmentally created window (ex: the atmosphere being ideal at a specific time), or is this some sort of legal clearance granted by the FAA/NASA, etc?

    • Wikipedia to the rescue (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:45AM (#13287014)

      It takes almost 5 seconds searching the term in the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

      Launch window is a term used in aerospace to describe a time period in which a particular rocket must be launched. For trips into Earth orbit almost any time will do, but if the spacecraft intends to rendezvous with another (or a planet, or other point in space) the launch must be carefully timed so that the orbits overlap at some point in the future. If the rocket does not launch in the "window", it has to wait for the next one before it can be launched.

    • Its a period of time when the Earth is pointed the correct way to align the crafts trajectory where you are wanting to end up (since the launch pad isn't very mobile).

      In this case its Mars. In the Shuttle's case it was to be able to meet the ISS in its orbit, AND be daylight during the launch.
    • They're a matter of when the planets are close together so that you can conveniently lob a piece of hardware from one to another, and when the Earth has rotated to point in the right direction. Closeness of Earth and Mars happens every so often as they mutually orbit the sun at different speeds, and pointing in the right direction happens once a day.

      • Re:Launch windows (Score:3, Interesting)

        by p3d0 ( 42270 )
        Nope, that's not it. How close two planets are doesn't matter. What matters is that the trajectory you plan to use must intersect the planet you're trying to reach.

        However, even that is not pertinent here. When launching a spacecraft, it is beneficial always to launch eastward, because then you get an extra 400m/s boost due to the Earth's rotation, which can save a considerable amount of rocket fuel. (Fuel is exponential in the speed boost you need.) The 1.5 hour-per-day launch window represents the

    • Everybody above basically has it right (i.e., Earth-Mars trajectories and planetary rotation), but the launch windows have also been shifted slightly to allow telemetry to come down near the upper stage separation. And most of the windows are actually 2 hours long, except on 8/11 and 8/18 (90 minutes).

  • Spheroid Earth and Launch Windows (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:42AM (#13286997)
    The 1.5 hours is because of the optimum time for launching to Mars due to the earth's rotation right? Darn scientists! If they'd stuck to the flat earth model we'd not have to worry about all this launch window mumbo-jumbo.
    • Actually launch window in this case (better explained in a post above) has to do with Earth's rotation, Earth's orbit around the sun, and Mars' orbit around the sun, among other celestial gravitational pulls and such. Basically since we don't have uber-powerful engines (or enough fuel to keep them going for long periods of time) and rely mostly on drifting in orbits to reach interplanetary targets, there's only a certain time frame that you can launch in and still be able to reach the orbit of the object y

  • Rumor has it... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @11:50AM (#13287062) Homepage Journal
    However a potential problem with the Atlas' Redundant Rate Gyro Units (RRGUs)...has caused the engineers to make sure that the two RRGUs in MRO's rocket are working

    ...that they just want to make sure that the RRGUs were installed the right side up [newscientist.com].

  • "Dammit, I knew we should've loaded it with falafel instead."

  • Mod Gyroscopes... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kjones692 ( 805101 ) <the.cyborganizer@NOsPAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @12:12PM (#13287248)
    -1, Redundant.
  • Isn't one of the major goals of this orbiter to look for signs of water, and didn't the British orbiter recently find a "pool" of frozen water in a crater? It'll be interesting to see this orbiter's observations of the pool, especially at the resolution the size of a dinner table (compared with previous orbiters' resolution the size of a bus). Martian animal fossils, anyone?

  • HiRise camera (Score:5, Informative)

    by slashd'oh ( 234025 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @01:06PM (#13287721) Homepage

    This mission will carry the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise), which is "the largest camera ever sent out of Earth's orbit and will deliver the highest resolution images of Mars yet" according to an article [digitalcamerainfo.com] that adds "The camera utilizes a series of mirrors and lenses that project the image onto a cluster of CCDs rendering images with a resolution up to 20,000 pixels by 40,000 lines, an image so large that it would take 1,200 typical computer screens to fully display. The camera's high resolution will enable the identification of objects as small as a coffee table while the camera orbits 300 kilometers above the planet's surface."

    Back in January 2004, there was an interesting article [space.com] at Space.com about the high quality of the 1-megapixel camera used by the Spirit rover; I assume this is manufactured to similar quality control standards (although by a different team), but the article doesn't specify and the cameras are not manufactured by the same groups. The Spirit PANCAM has two CCDs whereas this has at least 14 (28?).

    • "The camera's high resolution will enable the identification of objects as small as a coffee table while the camera orbits 300 kilometers above the planet's surface." If this camera can resolve a coffee table-sized object as it orbits from that height, just think of the wonderful pictures we'll get as the whole probe goes off course and plunges into the Martian atmosphere and buries itself hundreds of feet into the red soil. "Did you get a look at that rock just before we crashed into it and vaporized it"
    • Now that seems like a lot of data. Let's see, I read somewhere it's going to image 1% of the surface of Mars. Mars has a surface area of [Googles radius, punches calculator] 1.4e+14 m^2, so 1% of that is 1.4e+12 m^2. If the smallest thing you can resolve is a coffee table, and that's about 1 m^2, then that suggests each pixel is 1 m^2, so we have 1.4e+12 pixels coming back. Full color, natch, so no less than 32 bpp, totaling 5.8 terabytes.

      That's a lot of data. If it has to get back here in a year or so
      • From the press kit [nasa.gov]:

        Resolution at 300km altitude is 30 cm per pixel for targeted observations (one of 3 modes). I beleve the 1% number is for targeted imaging only.

        For the high gain, the pipe to Earth is up to 3.5 Mbit/sec (receiving at a 70m antenna) and about 2.4 Mbit/sec for a 34m antenna.

        Expected total data volume for the prime mission only, (through 2010) is 34 terabtes!

      • Or, and I'm just guessing here, they're going to compress (!) the data before sending it back to Earth.

        Ok, I'm being a smart ass. But, come on, we have great compression technologies, why wouldn't we use them?

        • skeptical (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Quadraginta ( 902985 )
          Just taking a guess here, but I'd say they'll only consider lossless compression schemes (no point in throwing away data it took $400 million to collect), and that photos of Mars are not boring enough (e.g. with vast seas of one-color pixels) to be very compressable via lossless algorithms.
    • Perhaps we'll find K'Breel's Council Chamber at last...

      SB

  • you have to be kidding me? (Score:3, Funny)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2005 @02:09PM (#13288261) Homepage
    "All glory to the Council!"

    They got the iraqi information minister?

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