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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

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Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#91

Post by haalcion3 »

tangue wrote: post #62

In Rob Manning's book [0] : He explained how hard it is to land on Mars. It's nicely sum up in those two sentences : “There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.” [1] The recent success of Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity must…

To give it some context, here are the Mars failures:

Soviet Union/Russia: 1M No.1, 1M No.2, 2MV-4 No.1, 2MV-3 No.1, 2M No.521, 2M No.522, Kosmos 419 (3MS No.170), Mars 96 (M1 No.520), Mars 1 (2MV-4 No.2), Zond 2 (3MV-4A No.2), Mars 2 lander (SA 4M No.171), Prop-M Rover rover (SA 4M No.172), Mars 4 (3MS No.52S), Mars 5 (3MS No.53S), Mars 6 (3MP No.50P), Mars 7 (3MP No.51P), Fobos 1 (1F No.101), Fobos-Grunt

US: Mariner 3, Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 2

China: Yinghuo-1

UK/Europe: Beagle 2, Schiaparelli EDM lander

Japan: Nozomi (PLANET-B)

Also: Soviet Mars 3 lander (SA 4M No.172) landed, so counted as partial success, but contact lost 14.5 seconds later. And Soviet Fobos 2 (1F No.102) orbited successfully then lost communications during landing, so a partial success.

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

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#92

Post by dr_zoidberg »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #77
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're years away from landing anything that could dig a hole deeper than Schiaparelli's crater. Depending on how hard it cratered, and how soon Opportunity could get there, it could be the most important thing for Opportunity to do.

Not necessarily. Schiaparelli used hydrazine for fuel, and if it smashed into the surface it seems to me that it's a reasonable assumption that the whole crash site is contaminated with it. Is that something we want to get all over the rover?

Both are good answers... let's see what scientists decide. In te meantime, MRO should give some interesting hi-res pictures.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#93

Post by dr_zoidberg »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #70
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".

We're years away from landing anything that could dig a hole deeper than Schiaparelli's crater. Depending on how hard it cratered, and how soon Opportunity could get there, it could be the most important thing for Opportunity to do.

> ...how soon Opportunity could get there...

Months, to say the least -- the rover moves very slowly. Ever since it got to Mars, it's moved at about ~3,5 km/year (just shy over 2 miles/year). I think a more realistic estimate could be "longer than it has been there".

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#94

Post by ramgorur »

Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs?

Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#95

Post by Hondor »

mrkbxt wrote: post #67
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read in some of the reports (can't remember if official ESA, news, or twitter) that they were turned on for just 3 seconds (instead of the inteded ~50), plus the parachute was cut off earlier too. So, as this report from ESA says, it fell from at least a 1000 times higher than intended (the cut off altitude was 2m or so).

a 1000 times... that sounds rather metric.

It's an order of magnitude. 1e3, not 1.000e3 which would indeed be suspicious.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#96

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

ramgorur wrote: post #94

Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs? Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?

Rockets blew up all the time back in the 60s.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#97

Post by elkos »

Symbiote wrote: post #86
maxander wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed, the entire ESA budget for this year is €5.2 billion, of which a third is Earth observation satellites. http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/01/ESA_budget_2...

And as a Greek I see that day by day we are taking advantage more and more the data available from EO satellites. You need lots of data to restart the economy.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#98

Post by Sanddancer »

ramgorur wrote: post #94

Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs? Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?

The landing techniques that are being used are bringing much larger payloads to the Martian surface than were brought in previous landings. Curiosity, for example, is about twice the weight of the Viking landers. In general, we're much more successful at landing and receiving data from mars-bound craft than we were back there; the soviets sent several probes to mars and got minimal data back from them before they failed.

Fast/accurate computing is needed for surface work on Mars because it means that the devices don't have to wait around for commands all the time. Giving more processor power and ability means that more flexible programs can be written to sift through the data and just send back the most interesting parts. Fast and accurate are very much needed for the kinds of lab experiments we're doing on mars.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

shuntress wrote: post #64
raverbashing wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it seems they made quite a dent on Mars I'm not so sure that this should be interpreted as "thrusters turning off prematurely" rather, it getting to the point of shut-off sooner (and faster) OR it stopped because they hit the ground

That is when it switched from thrusters to lithobraking.

A proven method of matching planetary velocity.

Re: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

#100

Post by mastazi »

mturmon wrote: post #56
beamatronic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty much what we have done: http://imgur.com/3Hg9O (Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity). Mars2020 isn't designed yet, but it will be based on Curiosity.

Thank you, that is actually a great picture!

Most pictures of the rovers fail to depict the difference in size between Sojourner (the Pathfinder rover), Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity which is the largest to date.

Besides rovers, on the surface there are also several landers, sent by USA, USSR, UK and ESA.

A complete list of human made objects landed on extra terrestrial bodies is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterre...

I suspect the above link just made someone's week end ;-)

UPDATE On a separate note, it would be very interesting if future (manned or unmanned) missions could visit artifacts sent by previous missions and assess their state / decay over time. The only example that I know of is Surveyor 3 (moon unmanned lander) which was visited by the Apollo 12 mission a couple of years later.

For some reason, my dream is one day to be able to travel to Mars and visit Spirit in its final resting place at Troy[1].

[1] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA12205

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