Schiaparelli Mars Probe's Parachute 'Jettisoned Too Early', Whereabouts Still Unknown (bbc.com) 185
An anonymous reader writes: Europe's Schiaparelli lander did not behave as expected as it headed down to the surface of Mars on Wednesday. Telemetry data recovered from the probe during its descent indicates that its parachute was jettisoned too early. The rockets it was supposed to use to bring itself to a standstill just above the ground also appeared to fire for too short a time. The European Space Agency (Esa) has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive. Experts will continue to analyse the data and they may also try to call out to Schiaparelli in the blind hope that it is actually sitting on the Red Planet intact. In addition, the Americans will use one of their satellites at Mars to image the targeted landing zone to see if they can detect any hardware. Although, the chances are slim because the probe is small. For the moment, all Esa has to work with is the relatively large volume of engineering data Schiaparelli managed to transmit back to the "mothership" that dropped it off at Mars - the Trace Gas Orbiter.
So it appears . . . (Score:5, Informative)
. . .there were two failures: the parachute release and the burn length. But both were likely set in the software on the lander, so I suspect parameters got borked somehow.
Additionally, if the burn was shorter than planned, that would put significantly more fuel on board when the catastropic 'landing' occured. Which, depending on the propellant, could have caused an explosion at the crash site. That would likely scatter the remains, but should leave a notable mark on the soil. . .
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at JPL's Mars parachute test in 2014 that ripped the parachute https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com].
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That wouldn't explain why the parachutes were jetisoned. They shouldn't have jetisoned at that point in time.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if the burn was shorter than planned because the ground came up and interrupted it... a likely possibility if the parachute released too early and snapped off. I've seen this happen before... in KSP.
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So it wasn't properly grounded.
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There were 12 seconds of signal after the engines shut off. Looks more as if the lander was in free fall and then impacted after these 12 seconds.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
That last sentence, if you assume loss of signal corresponds to impact with the ground, suggests de-orbit velocity relative to the ground was much higher than expected. The early parachute release may have been the culprit. Or the probe entered the atmosphere at too steep an angle (which could also explain the early parachute release - the probe would've entered higher density atmosphere more quickly thus increasing aerodynamic load on the chute to the point at which it failed). The burn probably began at a higher velocity than it was designed for.
If we're speculating, my guess would be the higher velocity when the retro-rockets were fired caused greater instability - aerodynamic forces caused the probe to rock more than expected. The parachute's purpose isn't just to slow the craft down; it also keeps the craft's orientation stable during this period of higher aerodynamic forces. Without it, drag on tiny asymmetries on the front of the craft can result in large turning moments. With a parachute attached, these moments are countered by the righting moment the parachute imparts on the rear of the craft every time it deviates from the proper orientation. Without the parachute, the craft can experience large oscillations or even flip due to these drag-induced turning moments. The large amplitude and higher frequency of the resulting oscillations could've exceeded what the rocket control software was designed to handle, and it shut off prematurely when it exceeded some threshold programmed into the software.
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there were two failures: the parachute release and the burn length. But both were likely set in the software on the lander, so I suspect parameters got borked somehow.
As in hardcoded on a timer? Unlikely. This is quite far into the descent and the parachute was probably supposed to jettison when a certain altitude/velocity was reached. That both the parachute and thusters was off suggests to me a sensor failure led the probe to think it was going much slower or flying much lower than reality. It would be odd for both systems to fail and at the same time be in good enough condition to send radio signals.
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Additionally, if the burn was shorter than planned, that would put significantly more fuel on board when the catastropic 'landing' occured. Which, depending on the propellant, could have caused an explosion at the crash site. That would likely scatter the remains, but should leave a notable mark on the soil. . .
Maybe America could send its rover around to take a look - a nice explosion on the surface might uncover evidence of water. Or it could just clean up the debris.
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Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Come on guys, was this not checked, double-checked, and tested?
The simulations all ran successfully on "Lunar Lander".
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C'mon, ESA, at least upgrade to Kerbal.
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Exactly. That's the sound it makes when it does that.
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Well, with that approach, you should expect only the lowest quality software engineers, as anyone worth a shit will do something else where they won't get prosecuted.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
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Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
Write a divide by zero error and have your ass cheeks divided in federal prison.
Infinite Loop errors requires infinite butt pounding.
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Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
Write a divide by zero error and have your ass cheeks divided in federal prison.
Infinite Loop errors requires infinite butt pounding.
This is Europe. EU prisons are not at all like US federal prison.
Then again, wasn't it Italy that in 2009 tried and convicted some Earthquake scientists on manslaughter charges (although their conviction was ultimately overturned, they did spend time in jail) for downplaying the chance of an earthquake. All of this was after a *different* scientist was accused with being an alarmist for predicting the same earthquake a month earlier by analyzing radon gas emissions. If you are a scientists in Europe, dam
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
Really. Criminal conviction, huh? Programmer in prison? Are you even listening to yourself?
Would it be the Programmer? Or the Tester? Or the Project Manager that signed off on it? Or should it be the entire team?
Hillary Clinton. Trump says we should blame her for everything that has gone wrong - ever. :-)
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Wrong!
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And here I was thinking this thread was nonsense and no one should go to jail. But I'm strangely okay with this, especially if it means we can press the reset switch on the election.
Wow. It's a strange world we live in where we end up with an election as farcical as we have, and I get modded down for wishing we could start it over with new candidates.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite possibly none of the above; from the description, I think that it's more likely some sort of sensor issue. It used a doppler radar altimeter/velocimeter to estimate its position, with 1 antenna is dedicated to range (points straight down, direct measurement) and 3 to X/Y/Z velocity (angled outward, used to estimate how the landscape is moving with respect to the craft). There's also accelerometers onboard. I'm not sure what sort of priority is given to what data.
A program is only as good as the inputs it receives. It seems to me that it thought it was going "low and slow". I mean, technically it could be a software issue, there could be some sort of "unit conversion" bug or some sort of mistaken sequence specifications or the like. But if I had to guess, I'd go with a sensor data problem rather than software.
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Maybe if the industry valued real issues over eye-candy and buzzwords.
Real engineering is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Real engineers go to jail when they fuck up.
People who pretend to be engineers go to jail. Did you actually read your link? It's nothing but people with forged documents and other fraudulent acts. Nothing about sending people to jail for honest errors where nobody died.
Maybe a little accountability for you "coding is an art" folks would be a good thing?
If someone is willing to pay for the proper quality control structures then fine. Most software engineering quality control is severely budget limited. There are folks out there who know how to write incredibly robust software but doing that isn't cheap and it isn't merely a matter of throwing money at the problem either. It's not a secret how to do it but it isn't cheap and it isn't easy. If you want people to do a better job then you need to give them the resources and organizational structure necessary to make it happen.
Answer this. Would you do a job where you could go to jail for making a error in a calculation? Especially if no one was injured?
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OK, but you won't like it. That will mean the software doesn't release until the lead programmer says so. No ifs ands or buts. If management presses too hard on that issue, THEY go to jail. Expect prices to get a lot higher and development time to multiply. Provide a high quality hardware platform or no go. No substituting hardware later or you invalidate the sign-off. Expect to have a computer dedicated to that application and that application only. Be sure to get any thing added to the LAN approved...
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OK, but you won't like it. That will mean the software doesn't release until the lead programmer says so. No ifs ands or buts. If management presses too hard on that issue, THEY go to jail. Expect prices to get a lot higher and development time to multiply.
Sadly, we live in the opposite world. Products ship when marketing says so, or asses get beaten. Bugs? We'll get to those in the next release.
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That could be fixed by putting the teeth back into consumer laws.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Because of the highly successful Mars Rover missions, many people have forgotten (or don't know) that about 60% of all missions to Mars have failed [universetoday.com].
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Because of the highly successful Mars Rover missions, many people have forgotten (or don't know) that about 60% of all missions to Mars have failed [universetoday.com].
Not only that, but this specific probe's landing was an experiment in preparation for a future mission in 2020. The main thrust (no pun intended) of the mission was to position the mothership which will be gathering most of the data. It's disappointing the probe failed, but the information gathered and the root cause analysis of the experiment should provide good data for the next mission.
Re:So it appears . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Not only that, but this specific probe's landing was an experiment in preparation for a future mission in 2020. The main thrust (no pun intended) of the mission was to position the mothership which will be gathering most of the data.
It's disappointing the probe failed, but the information gathered and the root cause analysis of the experiment should provide good data for the next mission.
That's what she said.
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This is yet another reason why I think Elon Musk's plans for Mars are on the optimistic side. I think we'll be doing great if a human lands in Mars before 2040, and a small permanent station is running by 2080.
An actual colony, with Martians? not before 2200. Think about it, we reached the South Pole over 100 years ago and even so we still don't have Antarctians permanently living there.
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Re:So it appears . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Well, unlike Mars, there is no reason to set up a permanent colony in Antarctica.
Oh, wait... maybe a permanent settlement on Mars is pointless as well? :) Apart from the whole "backup location for humanity, in case Earth gets creamed by an asteroid no one saw coming" thing. That has some far-fetched merit of sorts. However, due to the extremely hostile environment there, chances are that a Martian colony has a much higher probability of failing than civilisation on Earth in the first place, at least for centuries to come. So even in the most optimistic scenarios, it will be the thought that counts w/r to Martian settlement.
FWIW, Early European settlements in North America not only had a high probability of failure, they did fail, prolifically.
Here are a few well known examples...
1526 San Miguel de Gualdape (Georgia) - failed due to food shortages, disease, native attacks
1527 Jungle Prada (Florida) - abandoned after native attacks
1541 Cap-Rouge (Quebec City) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy, native attacks
1562 Charlesfort (South Carolina) - abandoned due to fire destroyed supplies
1565 St Augustine (Florida) - survived!
1566 Fort San Juan (North Carolina) - failed, burned by natives
1570 Ajacan Jesuit Mission (Virginia) - all killed by native attack
1585 Roanoke (Virginia) - abandoned for some unknown reason ("lost colony of Roanoke")
1599 Tadoussac (Quebec) - failed due to harsh winter, scurvy
1607 Popham (Maine) - failed due to harsh winter, fire destroyed supplies
1607 Jamestown (Virginia) - survived!
I expect a few spectacular failures in the early attempts to colonize Mars. In a way, these new-world colonies were about as isolated as Mars (difficulties in financing voyages meant that colonies could be unsupplied and on their own for 2-3 years at a time). Although there won't be any natives attacking on Mars (or *are* there natives?), the things that undermined many colonies were disease, fires, and the environment which will be all real problems in any Martian colony.
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(difficulties in financing voyages meant that colonies could be unsupplied and on their own for 2-3 years at a time).
And yet they had air, water, wood and agricultural land.
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Unless the Earth crashes into Mars, the impact isn't going to melt the planet's crust. You can do an underground backup of humanity much more cheaply on Earth than on Mars.
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Think about it, we reached the South Pole over 100 years ago and even so we still don't have Antarctians permanently living there.
Because there is no point in permanently living there. 3 months total night, 2 x 3 months twilight, 3 months total day time. How would you build something self sustaining there? And: why?
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You can ask the exact same questions about living in Mars.
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No. On mars you can live easier than in the (Ant-) Arctics.
The only "drawback" is the distance.
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In Antarctica, you can do something you can't do on Mars: breathe! You've got the standard Earth radiation protection package (an optional extra on Mars), and the gravity is guaranteed to be strong enough for human health. (I don't know about Mars gravity: we know that 1G is enough, and 0G is way too little. Anybody know of research on this?) It's possible to get there with an ordinary aircraft or ship in a relatively short time, with gravity, air, and radiation shielding provided.
I think the bigg
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On Mars you can breath perfectly well inside of your suit or in a shelter. :)
In Antarctica you can breath outside of the shelter until you are frozen to death.
I don't see a big difference
The radiation issue is overrated any way. Where do you think the magnetospere of earth is directing the 'radiation' to? Hm .... ? Can't be so hard to figure :)
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Cold-weather clothing doesn't require advanced technology, and can be improvised if necessary. If there's a failure in the Antarctic base, there's time to repair it. Pressure suits and airtight shelters do require advance technology, are hard to improvise, and the results of any problem can be deadly very quickly.
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Landing a manned ship on Mars is actually theoretically more reliable, because it's too massive for anything except rockets to be considered. That makes it insanely expensive, but more reliable than parachutes and skycranes and bouncing landers and so forth.
Grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
Billions of dollars spent on hardware, and some fuckup software dude sends the whole thing crashing to the ground
The proximal cause of failure is unknown at this time. There are people smarter and harder working than you working on it.
This pisses me off.
Oh well then I'm sure they'll care more now that you are "pissed off".
Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
Ok asshole... For what crime exactly? What law was broken that justifies jail time? How about you tell that to them in person Mr. Anonymous Coward. Actually never mind since you aren't brave enough to put your name to your idiotic rant. Grow up you pathetic twit.
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Ok asshole... For what crime exactly?
The crime of pissing him off, obviously.
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Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
Yeah, whoever signed off on it. Who's head of the ESA these days? Maybe 'jail for a very long time' is a bit harsh though. Do you realise much of a waste of public money that world be? So, harsh and ironic.
Are you trying to kill the space program? (Score:2)
Yeah, whoever signed off on it. Who's head of the ESA these days? Maybe 'jail for a very long time' is a bit harsh though.
Anyone who seriously believes that sending people in the space program to jail for a failed mission is a good idea is an idiot. If you want to kill a space program that would absolutely be the fastest way to make it happen short of completely defunding one. What engineer or program manager is going to risk going to jail for making an innocent error in a calculation?
Some missions are going to fail. Get over it. It's the cost of doing business if you want to go into space. Only a complete imbecile would
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Fix the problem not the blame (Score:3)
OP seemed to be implying find what the specific error was, find who made it and punish them harshly, I was just pointing out it doesn't really matter who made the actual error, who ever approved it is ultimately at fault.
Incorrect. The fault lies in the system that permitted the error to occur. It's (probably) not the fault of a person but of the structure in which that person works. Assigning fault to an individual is generally a waste of time and usually counter-productive. To use a crude example it's like shooting your dog because it peed on the rug. It technically solves the problem in a sense (the dog won't do it again) but it won't result in the outcome that is truly desired.
My day job is to to run a manufacturi
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Billions of dollars spent on hardware
The hardware is not the expensive part. Getting the hardware to Mars in one piece - THAT is the expensive part.
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Billions of dollars spent on hardware, and some fuckup software dude sends the whole thing crashing to the ground. Come on guys, was this not checked, double-checked, and tested? This pisses me off. This is not a CTRL-ALT-DELETE 'oh shit'. This is enormous sums of money and peoples careers. Someone should go to jail for a very long time as soon as we figure out exactly what was screwed up.
I suggest ten years for writing that low wattage post. It's humane, but still sends a message that we won't put up with those idiots who second guess tough engineering problems without bothering to think.
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It's not just how hard you check, but how incisively. It's easy to satisfy yourself that software's anticipated failure modes won't happen. What's tough is discovering ways of screwing up that have never happened before.
That's why there's no substitute for experience. This gets back to the very roots of rocket science: the path to success passes through many, many failures.
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It's not just how hard you check, but how incisively.
Like my old boss used to say, "Check incisiver not harder."
We had him locked up.
Re: So it appears . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Gee, you'd think some engineer mght have thought about there being no oxygen on Mars before sending rocket thrusters there that burn. They should come up with a two part propellant that provides its own oxidizer. And make it so it ignites automatically when the two parts mix - no flame required. And they should call it hydrazine.
Your license to comment is hereby revoked.
Damn metric time conversion. (Score:2)
/s
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To recycle the old joke, "There are two kinds of countries: the kind that use the metric system, and the kind with successful Mars rovers."
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No successful Mars Climate Orbiter [wikipedia.org] though
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I came here to facetiously post this as well.
"And the one time we used metric and imperial units? Massive failure.
It's that damn metric system, I tell ya! It makes people think that math is easy!"
Kerbal Space Program (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I do this all the time in Kerbal Space Program. From my experience, they just need to make sure the parachute icons aren't red or yellow when they deploy them. It always sucks to go through a whole mission only to mess up your landing and waste everything. I suggest they revert to launch and try again.
Repeating itself (Score:4, Insightful)
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The name confused the math team; they accidentally used polar coordinates.
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No, you're thinking about one of the Die Hard movies.
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Young lads in Martian Air Defence (Score:3)
Disappointed with the Press Conference (Score:5, Interesting)
At the Press Conference they emphasised the success of the orbiter and mentioned NOTHING at all about data from the lander. They left that all to questions from the Press. Basically all questions from the Press were about the lander and the data (and they were good questions - no stupid questions came), and they drip fed a piece of info at a time to the journalists.
I believe the suits at ESA were in damage control because they are scared about losing funding for the 2020 lander so they mentioned NOTHING about the crashed lander, so that when politicians check on the press releases/conferences in months to come there is NO info on the crash, but in a few days the world will know anyway, especially if NASA gets a photo of the impact and debris.
They did not make any statements at all (e.g. yes we got data from the Lander, the rockets fired for only 3-4 seconds, something went wrong with the parachute and we suspect a very hard landing) in a controlled and orderly way, they forced the journalists to extract it from them relunctantly.
I was super disappointed about scientists playing politics and covering up what they obviously knew the audience wanted to know. It was sickening.
And, yes, I live in Europe and yes, I want my tax Euros to fund the 2020 Lander, but I'm angry at scientists playing politics and ignoring the audience who wanted to know what happened last night and they deliberately said nothing.
Re:Disappointed with the Press Conference (Score:4)
It is possible that they wanted to have completed some kind of analysis to determine exactly what happened before they started talking about it.
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This is Murica, we guess quickly, and talk out of our ass.
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I've only been part of 30 or so aircraft mishap investigations, but I'm sure that in the space world, where you only have telemetry, none of that confusing physical evidence, that you can perform an accurate mishap analysis in 45 minutes. Seriously, all the rest of that time is just bullshit to cover people's asses, right? I mean, we already know all of the possible failure modes, and deliberately didn't design around them, so it's just a matter of pasting a few hundred megabytes of data still getting trans
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I was super disappointed about scientists playing politics and covering up what they obviously knew the audience wanted to know.
Working in a U.S. National Lab, I can say with some likelihood of correctness that any scientists speaking in front of cameras were almost certainly having their strings pulled by the hidden suits in Management, a separate division. So while it might have seemed like scientists were covering their tracks, they almost certainly would have lost their jobs if they'd been open, honest, and forthright without Management's vertiginous spin.
(And, any scientists that should lose their jobs over confusing seconds wi
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I believe the suits at ESA were in damage control because they are scared about losing funding for the 2020 lander so they mentioned NOTHING about the crashed lander, so that when politicians check on the press releases/conferences in months to come there is NO info on the crash, but in a few days the world will know anyway, especially if NASA gets a photo of the impact and debris.
The ESA in general seems to hold their cards a lot closer than NASA. I suppose there are cultural or political reasons like you suggest, but it's annoying if you're used to the flood of information NASA releases.
Re:Disappointed with the Press Conference (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. I live in Europe, but I find little that's admirable about ESA in comparison to NASA. They're not nearly as open with the public, nor nearly as successful. NASA has its faults, but I'd take a European version of NASA over the ESA any day.
The openness issues don't just stem to press conferences. They also embargo mission data a lot more and have more strict licenses on reuse of ESA products. It's.... let's just say "unfortunate". And it needs to change.
Worst DMCA abuse? Nah. (Score:2)
A dash cam would have really helped (Score:2)
Premature ejettonisation (Score:2)
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Re:Crazy "Curiosity" Landing worked.. Schiaparelli (Score:4, Insightful)
Only thing crazier, would be to put balloons around a lander and let it bounce to a landing. Could you even imaging such a thing?
Ahh yes, Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity :-)
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Viking 1 in 1976 landed exactly like Schiaparelli and it worked fine, at the first try. Heat shield, parachutes, landing rockets, touchdown. Worked for years, too.
Mars is hard, but it seems to be harder for some than for others.
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When I saw the video of the "7 minutes of Terror" and the crazy landing system for Curiosity, I thought, "Seriously, all of these mechanisms are required?".
Then I saw the Schiaparelli, landing, and I thought, "can the do this successfully in what appeared to be a more 'straight-forward' approach?"
We now, it appears, know why Curiosity had the landing system designed the way they did. Only thing crazier, would be to put balloons around a lander and let it bounce to a landing. Could you even imaging such a thing?
Yes, that's the trouble with the Martian atmosphere, enough to make landing by rockets problematic but not enough to slow things down. I remember reading an article where a guy that works specifically on parachutes for re-entry vehicles said that a parachute only landing on Mars was not possible. Keep making the parachute bigger and you end up with deminishing returns for weight and other reasons before it will slow things down enough. Likewise, supersonic entry into an atmosphere with rocket tech at the ti
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When dealing with a human landing on Mars and you are talking something like 40 tons
This obesity thing is really getting out of hand.
Too Bad the US Pulled Out (Score:2)
It's too bad budget cuts in the US forced JPL to back out of the program. While the US has several spectacular failures, they also have even more successes. The fact that they got the Rube Goldberg landing device for the Curiosity lander to work is an engineering wonder in itself. Hopefully Europe has the same tolerances for learning from mistakes as the US.
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It's too bad budget cuts in the US forced JPL to back out of the program. While the US has several spectacular failures, they also have even more successes. The fact that they got the Rube Goldberg landing device for the Curiosity lander to work is an engineering wonder in itself. Hopefully Europe has the same tolerances for learning from mistakes as the US.
[badjokeeel] It sounds to me like JPL pulled out just in time.[/badjokeeel]
Beagle 2 (Score:2)
Maybe start with the Beagle 2, maybe they are cozying up together? ;)
Manned mission (Score:2)
Don't worry. They won't feel a thing during the landing.
The Matrix's fault, Mars slipped (Score:1)
It may be a problem with the Matrix [theonion.com]
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TFA has a graphic showing landing locations for the various probes. From an analysis of the pixels, it appears that Opportunity and Schiaparelli landed in the same location. Of course, by now Opportunity is halfway up Olympus Mons, but maybe it could look behind itself and find the hydrazine cloud.
Optimist (Score:2)
So what if the parachutes deployed too early? So long as they deployed, one would assume they they would do their job regardless (eventually). Unless of course there were also parameters to detach and eject the parachutes just prior to landing or rocket burn. Perhaps having the Parachutes deploy so early slowed the craft so much that only a very short burn was even required to land safely.
The optimist in me likes to think that in doing so, about the only thing that might be causing the "delay" is that I bel
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Wait... are you saying that the parachutes actually needed to be attached to the lander? Why doesn't anyone tell us these things?!
(Oh, and it's "too early", not "to early")
Lithobraking (Score:4, Funny)
So the emergency lithobraking maneuver didn't do the trick then. This sucks. Really.
Last throughts of Schiaparelli (Score:2)
"Whatâ(TM)s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ⦠ow ⦠ound ⦠round ⦠ground! Thatâ(TM)s it! Thatâ(TM)s a good name â" ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
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I was thinking that it was, like, 17 seconds of "Wheeeeeeeee!" followed by two seconds of "OH SHIT!"
Mark Watney could have landed it... (Score:2)
Re:I hate it when that happens. (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, everyone "jettisons too early" once in a while.
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for some the rocket can't lift off
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An Italian probe named after Schiaparelli... Maybe the probe's visual system got confused because it thought it had identified canals on the surface.
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If MRO sees it, it should be a smouldering wreck, the kind you'd expect from mostly full hydrazine tanks slamming into a surface at high speeds
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Beagle 2 didn't involve, as mentioned, " a smouldering wreck, the kind you'd expect from mostly full hydrazine tanks slamming into a surface at high speeds"
Shiaparelli ditched its parachutes and stopped thrusting while moving at high speeds at high altitude. There's a lot we don't know, but among the things we do, is that it's not just standing there in the sky, Wile E. Coyote style, waiting for someone to point out to it that it should be falling.