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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

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Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#41

Post by maxander »

LunaSea wrote: post #35
pavlov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has a population of over 500 million. For a program like this (assuming it's all from public funds), each citizen paid on average less than a cup of coffee costs at Starbucks. It's real money, but what pressing pan-European problem could you really solve with such a tiny budget?

Look at the economical situation of countries like Greece and Spain. That would be one starting point.

According to the easily-found stats on Wikipedia [1,2], the MRO cost $720 million, whereas the Greek bailout given in 2010 (alone) was €110 ($119) billion. Notice the "m" in the first and the "b" in the second- your "starting point" is orders of magnitude beyond the resources we're talking about here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#2...

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#42

Post by pmoriarty »

Ma8ee wrote: post #21
nicholasjon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds of the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video that NASA put out ahead of the Curiosity landing explaining how they intended to make it safely to the surface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s (Note: I get goosebumps every time I watch this, absolutely amazing problem solving.)

I'm still amazed that it succeeded. I was prepared to bet quite a bit of money that at least one of the many quite complicated stages of the landing would fail. I'm happy I was wrong.

To me, the air bags[1] used to land the Spirit and Opportunity rovers seemed like a saner way to go than trying to deposit them gently directly on to the surface using a sky crane. The reported reason the sky crane was used for Curiosity is that it was too heavy for the air bag approach.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRCIzZHpFtY

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#43

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nixos wrote: post #33
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if it lands they can say "see? we learned to land with the crashed Schiaparelli, so it was good sending it in the first place". But a succesful landing would've been better, now they may face a few objections arising from the failure.

>Or if it lands they can say "see? we learned to land with the crashed Schiaparelli, so it was good sending it in the first place" Failures may not be bad, but they're still failures. Apollo 1 was a failure. Sure, it helped NASA make future spaceflight safe, and may have saved more lives in the long run (Apollo 13 makes it even) , but it didn't accomplish its goal. Especially that a successful lander is a reality che…

> Especially that a successful lander is a reality check. We did it once and we can do it again.

Not necessarily. A successful landing may be "we got really lucky". You may not succeed a second time, even with the exact same hardware and technique.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#44

Post by analogmemory »

LunaSea wrote: post #27

Once again, billions of euros are put into use for what is essentially scientific curiosity instead of trying to solve the very real problems Europe is facing. I love astronomy and space exploration but the amounts of money wasted into it rather than other problems with a high priority is staggering.

The amount of money we waste on military expenditures is staggering compared to the amount we spend on scientific exploration.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#45

Post by trose »

beamatronic wrote: post #40
protomyth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for the day where someone can tell their rover to drive / fly over and find out what the heck happened.

We have proven designs for Mars rovers, and a proven delivery system. The R&D has been done, the infrastructure is in place - why don't we send some more? We should be able to make incremental updates and constantly improve the rovers capabilities.

The rovers we sent cost us about $400 million each. And one failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#46

Post by wott »

beamatronic wrote: post #40
protomyth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for the day where someone can tell their rover to drive / fly over and find out what the heck happened.

We have proven designs for Mars rovers, and a proven delivery system. The R&D has been done, the infrastructure is in place - why don't we send some more? We should be able to make incremental updates and constantly improve the rovers capabilities.

It's like software. Once you finally manage to get something kinda reliably working, you ditch it and start a new one.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#47

Post by posterboy »

LunaSea wrote: post #27

Once again, billions of euros are put into use for what is essentially scientific curiosity instead of trying to solve the very real problems Europe is facing. I love astronomy and space exploration but the amounts of money wasted into it rather than other problems with a high priority is staggering.

Given your name, this opinion seems quite surprising.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#48

Post by mynameisvlad »

trothamel wrote: post #38
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmmm... not so sure, the Huygens probe was a high visibility ESA mission[0] and worked fine. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)

Well, except for one of the two data channels being lost, and a design that had a major flaw that was overcome only with heroic engineering effort (and a major mission redesign). Both of these are discussed in the wikipedia page.

Sure, but I wouldn't consider any of those "catastrophic failures".

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#49

Post by smpetrey »

mturmon wrote: post #34
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity is not so far (it's actually inside a crater nearby I think), but it'd take months to get to place, and there may not be enough scientific value in doing so just to see the charred remains of Schiaparelli. But who knows, it's so over it's expected mission life that maybe someone goes "f * it, let's go take a look".

Opportunity tried to see the descent, but it did not work: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/1019152...

Damn. So cosmic rays are pretty intense huh?

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#50

Post by erjjones »

skrap wrote: post #8
yummybear wrote: post #2

What a shame. The only consolation, if any, is that they are not the first ones to crash on Mars. If I remember correctly the historic chances of landing successfully on Mars is about 50/50.

Just about! For lots of fun info, check out the interplanetary Expensive Hardware Lob League: https://www.strudel.org.uk/lob/

This deserves its own thread entirely! Awesome.
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