81–90 of 116 posts
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Yeah! When has exploring ever benefited anyone! No more exploration! The mission cost the citizens of Europe and Russia a bit over 1 Euro per person.
And how much return did the citizens of Europe and Russia get for this investment?
The answer is nothing, because he rejected Columbus's request to fund his fleet.
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Yeah! When has exploring ever benefited anyone! No more exploration! The mission cost the citizens of Europe and Russia a bit over 1 Euro per person.
And how much return did the citizens of Europe and Russia get for this investment?
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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
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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.
This experience both in term of facilities and human resources will allow us to better compete in the market of space application and other high-tech fields, which is exactly what our country needs.
High visibility European space missions seem to have catastrophic failures a lot
Unfortunately, in both cases people end up thinking that the whole mission has failed when actually just a small part of it did :(
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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-deb…
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/01/ESA_budget_2...
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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.
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Considering that both rovers were planned to last for 90 days each both of them outlasted their mission like a boss you can't say any of them failed, yes Spirit has failed but after 2269 days in operation. Opportunity by this time must be fueled by some dark magic since the darn thing out lasted it's planned mission by freaking 12 years.
https://xkcd.com/1504/
Trial run? Sounds like the spin machine at work to me. I wonder what a trial run to Mars costs these days.
> Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h. Ouch. It will be interesting to read the results of the investigation as to why the landing thrusters turned off prematurely.
According to the landing sequence... http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a23475/beagle-2-schiap... ...the lander was supposed to detach from the aeroshell at about 1km up. So if it fell from 2 to 4km up, that implies that it detached too early. This article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/10/20/last-data-from-schiapa... ...says that the telemetry shows that the engines did fire, for at least a few seconds. My unin…
It depends on many factors, but as an order of magnitude terminal velocity on Mars is about 1000 km/h (speed of sound on Earth at sea level).
https://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/ter...