Author Topic: Space exploration thread - Unexpected Rapid Disassembly in the launch area.  (Read 309454 times)

Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #80 on: August 3, 2012, 06:06:12 am »
Odyssey (Mars orbiter), which I think still holds the record for the longest serving Mars orbiter.

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Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #81 on: August 3, 2012, 06:08:57 am »
MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter), which will snap pictures from the landing. If you look closely at the reflection in the left solar array, you may see my reflection ;)

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #82 on: August 3, 2012, 10:40:28 am »
Yeah, I'm still involved... Unfortunately... I'm a Failure Analyst and my job is to put myself out of a job, but... Murphy is looking after me, I suppose.

Spud's a good lad.  :P

Glad Disappointed Glad you're still involved, must be a great feeling getting up for work this week. I can't wait and it's got feck all to do with me.

Just found out that the cable being used on the sky crane is similar to a nylon washing line! I know the budgets tight, but Christ... That's a $2 billion dollar machine you're dropping there!!

Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #83 on: August 3, 2012, 04:02:42 pm »
Spud's a good lad.  :P

Glad Disappointed Glad you're still involved, must be a great feeling getting up for work this week. I can't wait and it's got feck all to do with me.

Just found out that the cable being used on the sky crane is similar to a nylon washing line! I know the budgets tight, but Christ... That's a $2 billion dollar machine you're dropping there!!
You can feel the spring in people's steps at work, really. I've been here for 11 years, and haven't seen that excitement even for the previous rovers.

But I think that NASA is playing a dangerous game... They have all the news trucks in, they are publicizing a lot, and there is even a rumor flying that they will do something life in London during the Olympic events... In the past, we've always tried to under promise and overachieve, What would happen now if we make a crater on the surface? Like the (Lockheed Martin) Mars Polar Lander, they cut off the engines 60 miles up... It's all a finding fight, but it can go horribly wrong...

Rumor has it, if we land successfully, we'd have another big project. Otherwise, this may be the end of JPL association with NASA as we know it. We may start working with Space-X or the miliraty, neither one of which looks good to me.
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Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #84 on: August 3, 2012, 06:32:23 pm »
In case anyone is interested, some public buzz links From a recent email (not sure if they work outside NASA, but they seem open to the public):

From the Office of Communications & Education:
 
If you have an iPad or an iPhone with a camera, here's a chance to create personalized photos with a high-resolution 3D model of the Curiosity rover.
 
1.                Download Spacecraft 3D from the Apple Apps Store. It's free! (Android version: to be out in a few weeks).
2.                Print a couple of copies of the paper "Targets" before landing night.
3.                Place the Target where you want the rover to appear.
4.                Compose the desired photo, then tap the "Gear" icon and press the Photo button to take snapshots of the rovers with old and new friends on landing night.
5.                Send your pictures to:  jplpublic@jpl.nasa.gov
 
We'll put together a collection of photos after the landing.
 
 
Other free Curiosity software to play with:
 
Xbox - Mars Rover Landing
Try your own skills on landing Curiosity through this Xbox game
Downloadable through the Xbox menu system or at: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Mars-Rover-Landing/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258480836
 
Eyes on the Solar System: Curiosity Edition
Experience Curiosity as it lands at Gale Crater
http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov (viewable in any web browser)
 
Be A Martian Mobile Phone Apps – Mars on the go!
Participate as a Citizen Scientist on the Mars Science Lab mission
iPhone: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mobile/beam/iphone/
Android:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mobile/beam/android/
Windows: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mobile/beam/windowsphone/
 
Explore Mars on the Web!
This 3D interactive experience lets you explore Mars with Curiosity
Curiosity’s Journey: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/curiosity
Free Drive: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/freedrive/
Gale Crater: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/galecrater/
Learn the Rover: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/learnaboutrover/
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Offline Zeb

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #85 on: August 4, 2012, 08:36:55 am »
Cheers mate. Was watching the Horizon documentary with gf last night. Good luck to those who've put a lot of time into this.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #86 on: August 4, 2012, 10:18:25 am »
Interesting to see how the mars landing goes on Monday.


Seem to be so many things that could go wrong.


The robot or the size of a small car.... The capsule will enter the atmosphere then jettison its heat shield.

After that rocket motors will slow its speed to 1 m/s before lowering the lander by cords to the ground...  The cords will cut away and the robot will drive off....

Seems a touch complex to me...
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #87 on: August 4, 2012, 03:25:40 pm »
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19112800

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/62013000/jpg/_62013789_1793170-low_res-mission-to-mars-a-horizon-special.jpg

John Grotzinger is the project scientist on Nasa's latest multi-billion-dollar mission to Mars.

He's going to become a familiar face in the coming months as he explains to TV audiences the importance of the discoveries that are made by the most sophisticated spacecraft ever sent to touch the surface of another world.

The Curiosity Rover - also called the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) - is set to land on Monday (GMT) for a minimum two-year exploration of a deep hole on Mars' equator known as Gale Crater.

The depression was punched out by an asteroid or comet billions of years ago.

The lure for Grotzinger and his fellow scientists is the huge mound of rock rising 5km from the crater floor.

Mount Sharp, as they refer to it, looks from satellite pictures to be constructed from ancient sediments - some deposited when Mars still had abundant water at its surface.


From orbit, Mount Sharp looks like Australia. Gale is named after an Australian astronomer.
That makes it an exciting place to consider the possibility that those distant times may also once have supported microbial life.

And Curiosity, with its suite of 10 instruments, will test this habitability hypothesis.

Grotzinger is a geologist affiliated to the California Institute of Technology and he recently took the BBC Horizon programme to the mountains of the nearby Mojave Desert to illustrate the work the rover will be doing on Mars.

He climbed to a level and then pointed to the rock sediments on the far side of the valley.

"What you see here is a stack of layers that tell us about the early environmental history of Earth, representing hundreds of millions of years," he told Horizon.

"They read like a book of Earth history and they tell us about different chapters in the evolution of early environments, and life.

"And the cool thing about going to Mount Sharp and Gale Crater is that there we'll have a different book about the early environmental history of Mars.

"It will tell us something equally interesting, and we just don't know what it is yet," he said.


Curiosity dwarfs all previous landing missions undertaken by the Americans.

At 900kg, it's a behemoth. It's nearly a hundred times more massive than the first robot rover Nasa sent to Mars in 1997.

Curiosity will trundle around the foothills of Mount Sharp much like a human field geologist might walk through Mojave's valleys. Except the rover has more than a hammer in its rucksack.

It has hi-res cameras to look for features of interest. If a particular boulder catches the eye, Curiosity can zap it with an infrared laser and examine the resulting surface spark to query the rock's elemental composition.

If that signature intrigues, the rover will use its long arm to swing over a microscope and an X-ray spectrometer to take a closer look.


Still interested? Curiosity can drill into the boulder and deliver a powdered sample to two high-spec analytical boxes inside the rover belly.

These will lay bare the rock's precise make-up, and the conditions under which it formed.

"We're not just scratching and sniffing and taking pictures - we're boring into rock, getting that powder and analysing it in these laboratories," deputy project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada, told the BBC.

"These are really university laboratories that would normally fill up a room but which have been shrunk down - miniaturised - and made safe for the space environment, and then flown on this rover to Mars."

The intention on Monday is to put MSL-Curiosity down on the flat plain of the crater bottom.

The vehicle will then drive up to the base of Mount Sharp.

In front of it, the rover should find clay minerals (phyllosilicates) that will give a fresh insight into the wet, early era of the Red Planet known as the Noachian. Clays only form when rock spends a lot of time in contact with water.

Above the clays, a little further up the mountain, the rover should find sulphate salts, which relate to the Hesperian Era - a time when Mars was still wet but beginning to dry out.

"Going to Gale will give us the opportunity to study a key transition in the climate of Mars - from the Noachian to the Hesperian," said Sanjeev Gupta, an Imperial College London scientist on the mission.

"The rocks we believe preserve that with real fidelity, and the volume of data we get from Curiosity will be just extraordinary."

A roving laboratory for Mars


General equipment: MSL equipped with tools to remove dust from rock surfaces, drill into rocks, and to scoop up, sort and sieve samples
Mast Camera: will image rover's surroundings in hi-res stereo and colour; wide angle and telephoto; can make hi-def video movies
ChemCam: pulses infrared laser at rocks up to 7m away; carries a spectrometer to identify types of atoms excited in laser beam
Sample Analysis at Mars: inside body; will analyse rock, soil and atmospheric samples; would make all-important organics identification
Chemistry and Mineralogy: another interior instrument. Analyses powdered samples to quantify minerals present in rocks and soils
Mars Hand Lens Imager: mounted on arm toolkit; will take extreme close-ups of rocks, soil and any ice; details smaller than hair's width
Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer: Canadian arm contribution; will determine relative abundances of different elements in samples
Radiation Assessment Detector: will characterize radiation environment at surface; key information for future human exploration
Mars Descent Imager: operates during landing sequence; hi-def movie will tell controllers exactly where rover touched down
Rover Environmental Monitoring Station: Spanish weather station; measures pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, and UV levels
Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons: looks for sub-surface hydrogen; could indicate water buried in form of ice or bound in minerals
The rover is not a life-detection mission; it does not possess the capability to identify any bugs in the soil or huddled under rocks (not that anyone really expects to find microbes in the cold, dry, and irradiated conditions that persist at the surface of Mars today).

But what Curiosity can do is characterise any organic (carbon-rich) chemistry that may be present.

All life as we know it on Earth trades off a source of complex carbon molecules, such as amino acids - just as it needs water and energy.

Previous missions, notably the Viking landers in the 1970s, have hinted at the presence of organics on Mars. But if Curiosity could make the definitive identification of organics in Gale Crater, it would be a eureka moment and go a long way towards demonstrating that the Red Planet did indeed have habitable environments in its ancient past.

It's a big ask, though. Even in Earth rocks where we know sediments have been laid down in proximity to biology, we still frequently find no organic traces. The evidence doesn't preserve well.

And, of course, there are plenty of non-biological processes that will produce organics, so it wouldn't be an "A equals B" situation even if Curiosity were to make the identification.

Nonetheless, some members of the science team still dream of finding tantalising chemical markers in Gale's rocks.

Dawn Sumner, from the University of California at Davis, is one of them.

"Under very specific circumstances - if life made a lot of organic molecules and they are preserved and they haven't reacted with the rocks in Gale Crater, we may be able to tell that they were created by life. It's a remote possibility, but it's something I at least hope we can find," she said.

"I am confident we will learn amazing new things. Some of them will be answers to questions we already have, but most of what we learn will be surprises to us.

"We've only been on the ground on Mars in six places, and it's a huge planet.

"Gale Crater and Mount Sharp are unlike anything we've been to before. That guarantees we will learn exciting new things from Curiosity."

Horizon: Mission to Mars was broadcast on BBC Two Monday 30 July. Watch online via iPlayer (UK only) or browse more Horizon clips at the above link.

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Offline Danny Boys Dad

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #88 on: August 4, 2012, 06:36:41 pm »
Will there be live coverage of the landing on Monday morning?
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Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #89 on: August 5, 2012, 04:55:41 am »
What John Grotzinger didn't say is that all this science, driving the rover, and communication is done with a power source that boggles the mind - 110W only! No, it's not a mistake, the power source for the entire rover, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, can power one light bulb...

The best science from the rover would be from drilling rocks and analyzing what's in them, especially in terms of organics. I've been working on several issues regarding that robotic arm, the most hair-rising of which was the drill health. The hammer drill flew somewhat damaged. But as of yesterday, we are confident that we can get one mission life out of it, while an extended mission is very questionable. We do hope we can go and drill anything we see, but we may have to avoid drilling the hardest rocks in the beginning of the mission.

Just after looking at those animation videos people commented on the complexity of the design and what can go wrong. But how much had gone wrong before, few have a clue... Two years ago we had to postpone the mission with four major problems, each of which was big enough on its own to pull the plug. But we worked through the problems and we are now almost there... We just need everything to go as planned and have a successful landing, only then we can start seeing the capability of the rover. As they joke around here, JPL stands for Just Plain Lucky; maybe we need that bit of luck now...

One more day...
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #90 on: August 5, 2012, 08:24:43 am »
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19132121

Nasa's Curiosity rover edges closer to Mars




The Curiosity rover remains perfectly on course to make its Monday (GMT) landing on the Red Planet.

The Nasa robot's flight trajectory is so good engineers cancelled the latest course correction they had planned.

To be sure of touching down in the right place on the surface, the vehicle must hit a box at the top of the atmosphere that is just 3km by 12km.

"Our inbound trajectory is right down the pipe," said Arthur Amador, Curiosity's mission manager.

"The team is confident and thrilled to finally be arriving at Mars, and we're reminding ourselves to breathe every so often. We're ready to go."

The rover's power and communications systems are in excellent shape.

The one major task left for the mission team is to prime the back-up computer that will take command if the main unit fails during the entry, descent and landing (EDL) manoeuvres.

Continue reading the main story
Curiosity - Mars Science Laboratory


Mission goal is to determine whether Mars has ever had the conditions to support life
Project costed at $2.5bn; will see initial surface operations lasting two Earth years
Onboard plutonium generators will deliver heat and electricity for at least 14 years
75kg science payload more than 10 times as massive as those of earlier US Mars rovers
Equipped with tools to brush and drill into rocks, to scoop up, sort and sieve samples
Variety of analytical techniques to discern chemistry in rocks, soil and atmosphere
Will try to make first definitive identification of organic (carbon-rich) compounds
Even carries a laser to zap rocks; beam will identify atomic elements in rocks
Gale Crater: Geological 'sweet shop'
Discover more about the planets
Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science Laboratory - has spent the past eight months travelling from Earth to Mars, covering more than 560 million km.

The robot was approaching Mars at about 13,000km/h on Saturday. By the time the spacecraft hits the top of Mars' atmosphere, about seven minutes before touch-down, gravity will have accelerated it to about 21,000km/h.

The vehicle is being aimed at Gale Crater, a deep depression just south of the planet's equator.

It is equipped with the most sophisticated science payload ever sent to another world.

Its mission, when it gets on the ground, is to characterise the geology in Gale and examine its rocks for signs that ancient environments on Mars could have supported microbial life.

Touch-down is expected at 05:31 GMT (06:31 BST) Monday 6 August; 22:31 PDT, Sunday 5 August.

It is a fully automated procedure. Nasa will be following the descent here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The rover will broadcast X-band and UHF signals on its way down to the surface.

These will be picked up by a mix of satellites at Mars and radio antennas on Earth.

The key communication route will be through the Odyssey orbiter. It alone will see the rover all the way to the ground and have the ability to relay UHF telemetry straight to Earth.

And mission team members remain hopeful that this data will also include some images that Curiosity plans to take of itself just minutes after touching the ground.


These would be low-resolution, wide-angle, black and white images of the rear wheels.

They may not be great to look at, but the pictures will give engineers important information about the exact nature of the terrain under the rover.

A lot has been made of the difficulty of getting to Mars, and historically there have been far more failures than successes (24 versus 15), but the Americans' recent record at the Red Planet is actually very good - six successful landings versus two failures.

Even so, Nasa continues to downplay expectations.

"If we're not successful, we're going to learn," said Doug McCuistion, the head of the US space agency's Mars programme.

"We've learned in the past, we've recovered from it. We'll pick ourselves up, we'll dust ourselves off, we'll do something again; this will not be the end.

"The human spirit gets driven by these kinds of challenges, and these are challenges that drive us to explore our surroundings and understand what's out there."


Curiosity is heading for Gale Crater
The mission team warned reporters on Saturday not to jump to conclusions if there was no immediate confirmation of landing through Odyssey.

There were "credible reasons", engineers said, why the UHF signal to Odyssey could be lost during the descent, such as a failure on the satellite or a failure of the transmitter on the rover.

Continued efforts would be made to contact Curiosity in subsequent hours as satellites passed overhead and when Gale Crater came into view of radio antennas on Earth.

"There are situations that might come up where we will not get communications all the way through [to the surface], and it doesn't necessarily mean that something bad has happened; it just means we'll have to wait and hear from the vehicle later," explained Richard Cook, the deputy project manager.

This was emphasised by Allen Chen, the EDL operations lead. His is the voice from mission control that will be broadcast to the world during the descent. He will call out specific milestones on the way down. He told BBC News there would be no rush to judgement if the Odyssey link was interrupted or contained information that was "off nominal".

"I think we proceed under any situation as though the spacecraft is there, and there for us to recover - to find out what happened," he said.

"That's the most sensible thing to do. There are only a few instances I think where you could know pretty quickly that we'd be in trouble."

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #91 on: August 5, 2012, 08:30:38 am »
An ex-collegue of mine has just taken a job with Virgin Gallactic and will be one of first commercial Space Pilots, what are RAWK's thoughts on this venture or should that be adventure?  Will it lead to the want to go further into our known universe or just a jolly for the rich and famous?

EDIT - Here is a local news story about Keith.

http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/16673827/oro-valley-man-will-pilot-virgin-galactics-first-space-flight

A jolly for the rich and publicity for Richard Branson.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #92 on: August 5, 2012, 09:28:27 am »
I'm made up. I've finally seen this sentence in the news " lasting two Earth years"


The only way they can top that is to have a sentence of "Two of your Earth years"
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Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #93 on: August 5, 2012, 04:11:50 pm »
I'm made up. I've finally seen this sentence in the news " lasting two Earth years"


The only way they can top that is to have a sentence of "Two of your Earth years"
;D  That's cool

It's really strange how they define mission duration. For the older two rovers it was 90 sols (1sol=25h, so 3 months). They lasted more than 7 years. It all depends on how many experiments each instrument has to conduct to get minimum science return, but everyone is hoping for an extended mission. If it lands well...
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #94 on: August 5, 2012, 06:00:23 pm »
I guess a day as we define it is very arbitrary in the grand scheme of things and doesn't make a lot of sense.

Hopefully, they'll introduce stardates soon.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #95 on: August 5, 2012, 06:01:29 pm »
Can I ask how you know the drill is broken but operating?

What kind of feedback tells you guys that?
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Offline farawayred

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #96 on: August 5, 2012, 06:54:53 pm »
Can I ask how you know the drill is broken but operating?

What kind of feedback tells you guys that?
The drill is not really broken yet, but its lifetime is limited well below the design parameters. There is a bushing that has been attached with the wrong epoxy that cracks at low temperature and loses strength. We know that the flight drill epoxy is cracked. We've done 8 months of testing on many replicas, and they survive for a good while. If that bushing falls off, the drill starts rattling and develops an electrical short, and they won't power it because that will risk other apparatus. To save some life on the bushing, the percussion mechanism may not be used at all or used at lower power (we have 6 levels and we only tested the worst), but the drill bit wears out faster... Murphy doesn't sleep... But we should be OK. The initial scare was that we had a failure of a replica at a very short time, but I found that someone stuck a razor blade in the bushing when cleaning the excess epoxy and precipitated the failure. It was hard work to convince the project in discounting that failure, but the evidence was overwhelming. Without that, more than 15 replicas worked fine for over 1 life at worst conditions.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #97 on: August 5, 2012, 07:10:17 pm »
Opportunity and Spirit really have spoiled us in terms of Mars.  I doubt anybody envisioned, ten years ago, that constantly changing vistas of Mars' surface would become such an everyday occurrence.  I am so excited for MSL, even though I'm also very nervous.  I've played back the preview on the "Eyes on the Solar System" website so many times and I'm desperate for this mission to succeed.  I'll be watching carefully at 6am!
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #98 on: August 5, 2012, 07:33:02 pm »
Just watched the Horizon special on Curiosity. I find it incredible just how innovative the landing process is. Truly inspiring, and hope it lands successfully.

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #99 on: August 5, 2012, 07:39:25 pm »
It's hard to believe Mars only gets about 40% of the Sunlight energy Earth does.  I don't normally think of the greater distance in those terms.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #100 on: August 5, 2012, 10:22:39 pm »
It's hard to believe Mars only gets about 40% of the Sunlight energy Earth does.  I don't normally think of the greater distance in those terms.
Yep. And solar cells at Jupiter have ~1% of the efficiency here on earth... Makes you wonder why we flew JUNO on solar cells. Although the solution was dictated by the fact that we have little material left to make RTGs; just enough for one more mission, probably the Europa one.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #101 on: August 5, 2012, 10:24:16 pm »
RTGs?
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #102 on: August 6, 2012, 12:11:24 am »
RTGs?
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Baically, a radioactive material creates heat, which thermocouples convert to electricity. All ~100W of it... They were used on all deep space missions, but now there is a shortage of materials and because of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties we can't make more. So the last mission to Jupiter (JUNO) was sent with huge ineffective solar arrays.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #103 on: August 6, 2012, 12:31:27 am »
Gonna go to bed nervous as hell hoping to wake up to good news. Hope the landing all goes well.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #104 on: August 6, 2012, 12:51:21 am »
Probably can be found in one of the links posted but what is the main area of discovery that is being hoped for by JPL/NASA?
Whether Mars was once conducive to life. All we know now is that there was liquid water many eons ago, and we always associate life with water. The jackpot would be finding complex organic materials in rocks. And that was a tough one to measure, because the contamination level requirements were something we've never done on another mission - 1 part per billion DNA or aminoacids, for example. That cleanliness compares only to clean rooms in electronic chip manufacturers. But we don't want to detect a trace of common cold virus or something... Although there is a bit of a leap between finding organics and linking them to life, because they don't translate one to one.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #105 on: August 6, 2012, 04:15:37 am »
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #106 on: August 6, 2012, 04:51:23 am »
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

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When are we expecting it to touchdown?
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #107 on: August 6, 2012, 05:18:16 am »
When are we expecting it to touchdown?

I was about to ask that myself, i've been watching it a while but no info in that regard up to this point
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #108 on: August 6, 2012, 05:30:54 am »
When are we expecting it to touchdown?
It's at 10:31pm PST, give or take a minute depending on when the shoot opens. The earliest confirmation of a successful landing could come at 10:40pm, but it's more likely to be at 10:45pm.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #109 on: August 6, 2012, 05:51:58 am »
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

For all the US-based guys and gals, and the insomniacs.

here's another link, news report style. think I like yours better though.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/mars/curiosity_news3.html

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #110 on: August 6, 2012, 06:06:47 am »
what's with the peanuts?

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #111 on: August 6, 2012, 06:11:19 am »
tradition from the 60s.

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #112 on: August 6, 2012, 06:16:12 am »
Curiosity Rover ‏@MarsCuriosity

Cruise stage separation complete. So long & thanks for all the navigation. 17 minutes to Mars! #MSL
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #113 on: August 6, 2012, 06:22:48 am »
Good Luck Curiosity!
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #114 on: August 6, 2012, 06:25:40 am »
Here we go.

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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #115 on: August 6, 2012, 06:29:42 am »
Shoot opened
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #116 on: August 6, 2012, 06:30:55 am »
Down to 90 meters a second.
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #117 on: August 6, 2012, 06:31:23 am »
Power flight
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #118 on: August 6, 2012, 06:32:05 am »
Sky crane ready and started
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Re: Space exploration thread
« Reply #119 on: August 6, 2012, 06:32:24 am »
nearly there.
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