"Splat" of Schiaparelli Mars Lander Likely Found (spaceflightnow.com) 106
Long-time Slashdot reader Tablizer quotes Space Flight Now:
Views from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released Friday show the crash site where Europe's experimental Schiaparelli lander fell to the red planet's surface from a height of several miles, leaving a distinct dark patch on the Martian landscape...The image from MRO's context camera shows two new features attributed to the Schiaparelli spacecraft, including a large dark scar spanning an estimated 50 feet (15 meters) by 130 feet (40 meters). Schiaparelli's ground team believes it is from the high-speed impact of the lander's main body... A little more than a half-mile (1 kilometer) to the south, a bright spot appears in the image, likely the 39-foot-diameter (12-meter) supersonic parachute and part of Schiaparelli's heat shield, which released from the lander just before ESA lost contact."
There's a little black splat (Score:5, Funny)
on Mars today
Re:There's a little black splat (Score:5, Funny)
It's the same black splat
I saw yesterday...
Re:There's a little black splat (Score:5, Funny)
Someone needs to police this thread...
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How much did all of this mission cost? Does anyone realize how much food that money could have provided to those in need ON THIS PLANET?! We have no business looking off-planet until we learn to live in harmony with THIS planet.. and with each other.
Cleanup and harmony on this planet is furthered by our activity in space. It greatly furthered the development of solar power generation, it provides a lot of data regarding climate change, it provides some of the greatest examples of international cooperation. Space exploration has paid back its costs many times over, creating the economic activity that helps pay for so many earthbound efforts.
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There used to be some guys who didn't care about a space program. They just wanted to chase chicks and eat. Then one day, a rock came out of the sky and obliterated them and everybody related to them. That was 65 million years ago.
City killer every 10K years (Score:2)
There used to be some guys who didn't care about a space program. They just wanted to chase chicks and eat. Then one day, a rock came out of the sky and obliterated them and everybody related to them. That was 65 million years ago.
About 50 thousand years ago a rock fell from the sky in Arizona and immediately killed everything for a radius of 20km. Beyond that there were massive fires that caused further death.
The current estimate is that a city killer falls from the sky about every ten thousand years.
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Sounds like maybe perhaps their estimating is off.
City killers are smaller than the Arizona meteor.
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It doesn't even need to _hit_ to cause massive damage.
There's quite a bit of evidence that the Younger Dryas period and the sudden extinction of north american megafauna were both caused by a string of large bolides from a broken-up comet passing over the continent and impacting the northern icefields. The hot downdraft theory is supported by what happened at Tunguska.
It's a bit controversial at the moment, but so were Chicxulub and continental drift until quite recently (and the jury is still out on whethe
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Except that argument is such a bad one. The space program is not the best way to preserve the human race. Repeat, if you are worried about preserving the human race, space is not the way to do it.
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Except that argument is such a bad one. The space program is not the best way to preserve the human race. Repeat, if you are worried about preserving the human race, space is not the way to do it.
How would you deflect an errant asteroid without a space program?
What's your solution? (Score:2)
The space program is not the best way to preserve the human race. Repeat, if you are worried about preserving the human race, space is not the way to do it.
Hah! Ok Mr. Smart Guy. Enlighten us with your inspiring message of what you think is the best way to preserve the human race. Bear in mind that your solution has to include a solution for large rocks falling on Earth from space as well as all other threats to the Earth's ecosystem which keep it compatible with human life.
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Oh OK, it's your childish faith, complete with misanthropy and doomsday scenario. I wonder what you think a camera on wheels can do against your feared Death Asteroid?
In fifty years we went from flying airplanes that were little more than kites with engines attached to landing on the moon and returning safely. You don't think in one or two centuries we could have an effective detection and remediation program? Hint: The math is already worked out. Given sufficient warning (recall the detection capability from a sentence ago) we can place a mass behind the asteroid to slow it down through gravitational attraction (again, detection yielding time to deal with it) and turn
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Space based manufacturing (Score:2)
Want to get rid of industrial pollution? Without returning to the 13th century? Then help move them to lunar orbit, were it can't hurt anything else.
That is not likely to be a realistic solution to industrial pollution. You are going to generate VAST amounts of pollution and extra cost just getting to/from orbit with products even if you had a space elevator. With chemical rockets it's just not even worth considering. Even if it were technically feasible withing a reasonable time frame (it isn't) it makes no sense economically. That's not to say a space program couldn't help us hugely with the problem. It just won't come from that vector. Building
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Oh go blow it out your ass.
Re:Cost of loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much did all of this mission cost? Does anyone realize how much food that money could have provided to those in need ON THIS PLANET?! We have no business looking off-planet until we learn to live in harmony with THIS planet.. and with each other.
If you take the budget of ESA and divide that number by the GDP of the EU (a slightly misleading calculation, but not grossly so) you find that the EU spends less than 0.04% of its GDP on space.
You also have to keep in mine that the European economy has a tremendous amount of over-capacity in terms of unemployed people and under-utilised infrastructure and machinery. Europe would not be able to increase its production of food and other goods by anywhere near 0.004% if we stopped spending money on space. We'd just have more unemployed scientists, engineers and factory workers.
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Sorry, that should read "Europe would not be able to increase its production of food and other goods by anywhere near 0.04% if we stopped spending money on space."
My typo where I wrote 0.004% might also be true, but that's hard to say.
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Production of food is not the problem. The problem is getting it to where it's needed. Often the worst famines have nothing to do with not enough but with inadequate distribution, often due to war. Many times food that is delivered by charities is taken over by warlords who then profit on it.
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Production of food is not the problem. The problem is getting it to where it's needed. Often the worst famines have nothing to do with not enough but with inadequate distribution, often due to war. Many times food that is delivered by charities is taken over by warlords who then profit on it.
Yeah, but there is something to be said for sending food when there is a drought or some other disaster that has caused an actual shortage of food.
Some of the food that we send will end up in the hands of the people after the government officials have stolen their share of the food and the local warlord has taken his toll and what not.
Never going to happen but easy fix for that (Score:3)
You add a group of " independent contractors" to the convoy with instructions stating "You film drop off of X tons of supplies to %location" by %date% you get %payment% if the shipment is complete. If you have to defend the convoy you get %bounty% per head (with %bonus% if its a known warlord)."
then the shipments will arrive intact and early
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What seems to work best is paying the warlords cash to deliver the food. It's a crazy world.
Re:Cost of loss? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the neighborhood of $1.3 billion.
$1.3B would buy in the timezone of 300 million big macs. Which would be enough for every poor FAMILY in the world to get a Big Mac. Hardly a significant impact on world hunger.
Note that if ALL the money ever spent on space were spent on food instead, we'd be worse off. The weather satellites alone paid for the entire world's space exploration budgets in better harvests as a result of better weather prediction....
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Money? I've got a 100-euro note here which says this fine genius posted the above from his smartphone.
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How about you spend all of your own money first on food for those in need on this planet.
If you don't even care to feed the homeless, why should the rest of us?
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How much did all of this mission cost? Does anyone realize how much food that money could have provided to those in need ON THIS PLANET?! We have no business looking off-planet until we learn to live in harmony with THIS planet.. and with each other.
Why are you posting on the internet when you could be using your resources to help those in need on this planet.
Wait, i just realized that you never said what planet you were posting from? Are you on Mars?!?!
More Like "Crunch" (Score:2)
Splat is reserved for the sound of meatbags smearing across the surface.
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In order to show up in the images, the pattern probably resembles that of the crash-landed Genesis probe. [spaceflightnow.com] (Earth desert)
It's also possible its landing fuel, which appeared to be under-utilized based on telemetry, sprayed about upon impact.
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Splat is reserved for the sound of meatbags smearing across the surface.
Correct. It's an onomatopoeia. This is just a wreck.
Bulls-eye! (Score:2)
They got within 5 miles of the intended target. From here to mars that is a bulls eye. They should get points for that.
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Its only the last half inch that hurts.
Kaboom and anti-science prats (Score:3, Insightful)
Kaboom. There's always a Kaboom.
On a more serious note, what's with all the anti-science prats showing up on Slashdot recently ?
At one time, the community here used to be the one championing new experiments as a positive learning curve even if the immediate experiment ended in failure.
Seems like there's a bunch of prats around here who don't realise that all the things they take for granted these days came about as the result of many experiments, including the failed experiments.
There are no "shills" on slashdot (Score:3)
I think we have a couple of ULA shills posting frequently here. The ULA (Lockheed and Boeing) are cutting jobs, since their comfy monopoly on space launches involving minimal R&D costs has been broken up by SpaceX.
Sigh... It's a long time tradition here on slashdot to call anyone with a different opinion a "shill". As if paid representatives of those companies have the time to give a shit about a minor technical discussion forum like slashdot. It's an idiotic argument because what is really happening is one of two things. A) someone has a genuine difference of opinion or B) they are a troll and you shouldn't feed the trolls. The folks at ULA could not possibly care less about the opinions of some random poster h
Don't feed the trolls (Score:2)
On a more serious note, what's with all the anti-science prats showing up on Slashdot recently ?
Just trolls mostly. Nothing new and they've always been here. We only notice them because the traffic on Slashdot isn't what it used to be.
War Crimes! (Score:5, Funny)
Stop the orbital bombardment of Mars! White cis-gendered males are attempting to continue their colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples! They're trying to buy Olympus Mons for a handful of beads! #martianlivesmatter
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Why does the ESA have a worse record of landing? (Score:3)
First of all, I don't see much mention that they still have a new satellite in orbit around Mars so the mission is at least partly successful.
But with a string of failures to land on Mars from the ESA, and a string of successes from NASA you have to start to wonder - what is it that is lacking in the ESA program that is not able to get landings right? Is it just different approaches to the problems of landing that are not panning out over a few attempts? Is it some kind of engineering process failure that they just are not accounting for some possibilities? I was wondering if anyone had any insight.
I wish the ESA the best of luck and really want to se them succeed, as the more craft studying mars the better (though they are all a handful of beans in comparison to the first human to land and study there).
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It's probably, because ESA uses the metric system.
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In this situation they were originally going to use NASA's landing system, and worked with NASA for a few years on it, but then had to develop their own from scratch after a diplomatic pissing contest led to NASA's support being withdrawn. Even worse they couldn't use any good ideas they had picked up from NASA for I.P. reasons.
Their new system didn't work first time. It's not a matter of fucking up on attempt three after
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I appreciate the explanation, but isn't it more that the new system was added in rush (to replace the old ones) as opposed to it being the first time used? It seems like the NASA successes were first time uses of those landing systems also, from what I remember.
Also, I really don't understand how IP applies since these are not products for commercial sale nor used for commercial purposes. I don't see where NASA could even bring a suit.
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Even if only NASA buys a specific component from Boeing (for example) it's still a commercial product. While NASA has I.P. sharing arrangements with it's suppliers the diplomatic pissing contest excluded the ESA from that.
The ESA did it quickly, got Russian help and thought it would work but it was still the first of it's kind. NASA was building on stuff going way back to Viking
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That's nonsense. There's no "I.P." in the sense that you refer to. Anyone can read about what Vikings did and do the same thing. There's no patent or any other protection afforded to that system - it'd be long expired, and the only thing a copyright would protect is copying of nonessential aspects of the design.
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It's not software.
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Viking came after apollo, and most likely learned a lot from the automatic powered descent of the LM. Europe doesn't have the same background in aerospace.
Re: Why does the ESA have a worse record of landin (Score:2)
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... what is it that is lacking in the ESA program that is not able to get landings right?
One of the contributing factors is probably that there is less redundancy; I think ESA are trying to pack as much science as possible into a limited budget. I think also, the lander part of the program wasn't necessarily the main ambition, although it would have been very, very nice to our own vehicle down there. I think everybody agrees that space missions are unsustainably expensive, so we really do need to find (safe) ways to reduce the costs a lot; this is no doubt another important part of ESA's space
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NASA has has 6 failures on mars missions.
The ESA has had 1.5. The most recent of which was not one. Remember what this mission was called? "ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)" and the "Schiaparelli EDM lander"
The key word there being Orbiter. The orbiter is working just fine. The other key part is in the acronym EDM "Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module" The key word there is being Demonstrator. Schiaparelli wasn't on any major science mission.
The only purpose of the lander was to test and provide
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We don't really know that. It may have had a semi-hard landing that gave it partial damage.
Re: Why does the ESA have a worse record of landin (Score:2)
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AFAIK the lander is Russian built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(Schiaparelli being the test/demonstrator version)