Mars Helicopter Spots Wreckage From Perseverance Landing (theverge.com) 50
New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. The Verge reports: Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard -- an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn't. Perseverance went through a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror to descend onto the Martian surface. As it entered the atmosphere, a heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and slowed it down dramatically. After that, the massive parachute deployed out of the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), slowing it down even more. At that point, the backshell and parachute separated from Perseverance and let the descent stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a "sky crane" to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing.
On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.
On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.
Go Humans (Score:3, Funny)
Not enough to pollute only planet earth..
Lets pollute other planets...
Re:Go Humans (Score:5, Funny)
It's horrific! The zodiac is altered significantly.
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It's all part of the plan... adding mass to Mars is necessary for successfully terraforming that world.
We're building up that planet's mass - one piece of garbage at a time.
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Would Mercury provide enough mass? Several times Luna, so it's starting to get into useful territory. And I'd love to see the "safety case" (technical term) for how they're going to get Mercury from where it is today to intersect w
Re:Go Humans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Go Humans (Score:1)
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Re:Go Humans (Score:4, Insightful)
We're not only polluting other planets, we're changing the gravity of both Earth and Mars, by taking away mass from Earth and adding mass to Mars.
It's estimated that 3 tons of interplanetary dust estimated to fall daily [science.org] on Mars.
You'd need a pretty steady stream of landers to have as much impact as that.
It's horrific! The zodiac is altered significantly.
The doctor delivering you probably has a greater gravitational impact on you than Mars.
Re: Go Humans (Score:3)
He was being sarcastic about the parent's post. I guess the joke was up there on mars, while your head was down here on earth... wooosh!
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We call it "seeding".
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Not quite: in this case, the leftover junk was unavoidable if the mission was to happen at all. I don't think a single gram of the stuff we left on Mars so far was unnecessary. - simply because each gram we lift up there costs a pretty penny.
It's not like filling landfills with plastic shopping bags, disposable e-cigarettes, slightly out-of-date but working cellphones or unserviceable Apple Airpods here on Earth.
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I wish the human race would stop dumping on itself. Seriously, we've become a pessimistic and depressing lot.
Me too, but we keep electing people who dump on us.
We've been a depressing lot ever since the industrial revolution. Before then there was hope.
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Maybe you could summarize. On the other hand, I couldn't trust your characterization, since you're an AC.
If you know what CRT is then you know it's essentially promotion of history and sociology lessons, so the fact you are bringing it up in this context is a bit worrisome.
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There's no wreckage of a helicopter on Mars. That's a picture of the backshell and parachute, taken from a helicopter.
Perhaps the Martians will think it is a failed entry from a "safely drop an egg" science challenge.
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in other news, the Martian Council has fined NASA $400 for littering.
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EARTH FIRST!
We'll mine the other planets later.
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Want to help poor people? Bring stability, education, jobs. Guess what, we're already doing that or trying to. Those space billions are not going to make much of a difference.
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What we're spending on space exploration would feed those millions only for a little while. Then what? And we'd be adding to the poor, since all those people working on the space programs would be out of a job too. Want to help poor people? Bring stability, education, jobs. Guess what, we're already doing that or trying to. Those space billions are not going to make much of a difference.
Then what? WTF are you thinking? As if lifting the lower class out of poverty wouldn't result in much better results here on earth where it counts. Don't think for a second we couldn't be doing more with that money even in space. Furthermore, if those NASA people are so intellegent and productive, they should have no problem find work or creating it, should they? Especially considering how affluent and well connected they are.
I disagree with your assesment, sure NASA does a lot of good, but there's a lot of
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If you want to fix poverty that way you should look at the military, not NASA.
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Billions of people are poor and or starving and rich kids are playing with expensive remoe control toys :(
So what's Musk plan to counter this?
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Soylent Musk - a blend of soya, lentils and a certain commercially sensitive protein-rich "something special".
bonkers (Score:3)
It's still kind of bonkers that a rocket propelled sky crane is the best method we have for landing payloads of that size on Mars. It sounds completely outlandish, but then again I suppose it is in a very literal way.
Still though I don't see the current methods scaling for much larger payloads. I wonder what's next. Going to be fun to see.
Re:bonkers (Score:5, Informative)
It's still kind of bonkers that a rocket propelled sky crane is the best method we have for landing payloads of that size on Mars. It sounds completely outlandish, but then again I suppose it is in a very literal way.
The reason for the sky crane was to not blow away the planet surface where the rover touched town.
A sky crane keeps the rockets away from the ground.
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Just a thought :
Maybe they should also consider landing with some sort of cold booster just before touch down (high pressure N2 or some other inert gases which are "safe" for this purpose?), so that it blows off the top layer for viewing / experimentation by whatever is being landed.
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Would that be heavier? It seems like rocket fuel would produce more thrust per gram than pressurized gas. Reducing weight is a top priority on these missions.
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It’s actually more that the skycrane is actually the lighter/simpler way of doing it, assuming you do not want to carry around the unused propellant and rocket engines around for the rest of the mission. If it was a sled that you’d landed, you’d need a lot more structure and mass to support the rover on the way down. It’s cheaper, and simpler, to lower the thing down on cables, and then chop the cables once the rover touches down. You then also get to use the suspension on the rover
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It’s actually more that the skycrane is actually the lighter/simpler way of doing it, assuming you do not want to carry around the unused propellant and rocket engines around for the rest of the mission.
Lucky for us it managed to cut all the cables properly and didn't have to drag the crane around.
PS: If it can cut cables, it can dump rocket engines.
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Something like a giant paraglider unfolding, possibly. Because parachutes aren't terribly useful to actually bring things all the way to the surface.
The atmospheric density is just far too low, even if the gravity is also lower.
reentry - entry (Score:3)
The summary uses the word "reentry" (as in "blistering heat of reentry") to describe the vehicle's passage through Mars' atmosphere. This is incorrect, since the landing was the first time the vehicle encountered Mars: the word should be "entry".
The misuse of "reentry" is based on history--the first vehicles to move from space to ground had been launched from that same ground, so they were, in fact, re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Not so with Mars landers, at least not yet.
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Technically it left atmosphere and re-entered atmosphere, just not on the same planet :)
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Technically it left atmosphere and re-entered atmosphere, just not on the same planet :)
And more technically there isn't a cutoff for atmosphere, it just gets thinner and thinner. So it's the same atmosphere and it never even left.
NYT link and amazing eclipse (Score:3)
NYT has a great article on this as well, but they have an even cooler movie in the article, of Phobos passing in front of the sun on April 2. Not a full eclipse because Phobos occupies a smaller solid angle than the sun as viewed from the Martian surface, but it's an awesome movie.
NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com]
Eclipse movie if NYT paywalled:
https://youtu.be/aKK7vS2CHC8 [youtu.be]
Never (Score:2)
....been so proud to see litter in my whole life.
Hope (Score:2)
Roswell alien spacecraft landing place. (Score:2)