Comments on: Landing on Mars: seven minutes of TERROR!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:29:00 +0000

Then Angela Merkel will tell Greece that they can’t receive a bail-out unless they reduce their meters to 94 centimeters.

By: Daniel Friesen

Daniel Friesen — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Undoubtedly the l33t speek and bragging was put in by some PR bozo with no real connection to the engineering team.

By: TR

TR — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:30:00 +0000

Two things strike me:
1) This landing involves so many physical configuration changes that have to go *just right*. The System Engineer in me is kinda appalled that they’re taking on the risk. Granted, everything always has to go just right when you’re landing on a planet, but I’ve never seen so many Big Things Popping Off And New Things Deploying in my life. Methinks these folks watched too many Transformers movies. Take the last Tricky Maneuver, for example – having the rocket thingie hover overhead as the rover itself is extended down to the ground. They’re doing this because they don’t want to kick up dust that’ll coat the instruments. OK fine, but this is Mars, and Mars has nasty weather– won’t there be a dust storm in the next two weeks anyway? And don’t the instruments have
retractable covers?

2) One wonders if anybody there noticed the irony of bragging about “500,000 L1nes of Cod3… zero margin of error”

By: pishabh

pishabh — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:27:00 +0000

Anyone else need to change their underwear after watching this?

By: Davy Jones

Davy Jones — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:50:00 +0000

And not forgetting that having a nuclear reactor bouncing on the ground is not going to be something that they would like to test back here on earth..

By: ImmutableMichael

ImmutableMichael — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:26:00 +0000

Be careful. Europe will have a run on the metre and there’ll be a metric crisis, you mark my words.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:57:00 +0000

I believe it does broadcast simple messages during the aerobraking and landing phase so that if it goes badly, the investigation has a head start. But the transmission will of course be unreliable when there is a lot of plasma around the aeroshell.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:12:00 +0000

The full link previously cited is full of awesomeness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:11:00 +0000

Sky crane: DONT CRY BABY. KNEW THIS WAS ONE WAY TICKET BUT YOU KNOW I HAD TO COME.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 09:04:00 +0000

Awesome video. We could have easily sent one of these for every space shuttle launch that went up (they each cost $0.5B). But unmanned isn’t teh sexy.

By: SpaceBeers

SpaceBeers — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:51:00 +0000

God I really hope this works.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:46:00 +0000

Also, which is more boss? SkyCrane™ or beachball?

By: Sanjaya Kumar

Sanjaya Kumar — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:11:00 +0000

I believe the actual calculations are all done in metric. But then they have to resort to “Imperial” to explain it to the taxpayers.

By: timquinn

timquinn — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:04:00 +0000

When would you need to know how many cups in a gallon? Never. If you use a system it is easy, if you don’t use it it may not be.

Gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups

By: franko

franko — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:32:00 +0000

i really feel they over-sell this. it’s awesome all on its own — it doesn’t need the bruckheimer treatment.

By: franko

franko — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:32:00 +0000

“human-crude”, maybe?

By: Anne Noise

Anne Noise — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:19:00 +0000

And for years our children’s children spoke of the Great Martian Fart.

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:35:00 +0000

Rube Goldberg Meets The Martians, again. Given the constraints, it’s a brilliant solution, but…

An essay-in-song on the 1997 misison profile can be found at http://www.oocities.org/area51/vault/8789/bounce.htm (I couldn’t find a current copy, alas; one author’s website is outdated and the other’s has gone AWOL.)

By: Culturedropout

Culturedropout — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:08:00 +0000

Personally, I kind of feel bad for the sky crane. All that way to get to Mars, only to face plant at high velocity, and that’s only if it does its job perfectly. Sort of reminds me of some of my previous jobs, come to think of it. :-(

By: omems

omems — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:05:00 +0000

That’s an excellently-made video. But I wonder, shouldn’t they have let Dr. McKay engineer it, not Dr. Beckett?

By: sean

sean — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:41:00 +0000

If Mars is like a million and one miles away, they should just put in enough fuel to go a million and NINE TENTHS of a mile. Then it would run out of gas and sputter to a stop and they could swing down on ropes.
Don’t thank me, I saw that in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

By: sean

sean — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:36:00 +0000

Why don’t they just wrap the thing in bubble-wrap, if they’re worried about busting it?

By: sean

sean — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 02:35:00 +0000

Ah, you’re just jealous because our mile is longer than your kilometer and our gallon is bigger than your liter.

By: fight4paece

fight4paece — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 01:15:00 +0000

Schrodinger’s Mars Rover for 7 minutes. This is gonna be interesting.

By: CognitiveDissident

CognitiveDissident — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:41:00 +0000

It depends on which neighbourhood of the planet that you live in.
I was all for metric in America, then some moron started to make it confusing with conversion factors, etc, then they dropped the metric, so now gasoline is STILL “metered” out in gallons.
They should have put plastic representations of a liter and a gallon on top of the pumps, instead of “scaring” people with math!
Sorry for the rant, but I can’t believe the USA has not fully adopted metric system by now!
How the heck am I supposed to know how many cups are in a gallon?! But I know that there are 1000 milliliters in a liter EASY!
How many feet in a mile, five thousand two hundred and who gives a F vs. 1000 meters in a kilometer.
(But what do I know, I drive on the Parkway and park in the Driveway, and I have Impending-Dark-Ages issues…)

By: CognitiveDissident

CognitiveDissident — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:26:00 +0000

Although the the bouncy-ball technique may not be sufficient, I believe that the whoopee-cushion technology shows great promise and may propel space exploration to new lows. New lows = successful landings!
(Just drop it first, and land on it! No uncomfortable bouncing, the kinetic energy is converted into sound!)

By: airshowfan

airshowfan — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:24:00 +0000

I think the skycrane comes to a hover at 20m/66ft off the ground. Then it extends the cables lowering the rover by 6m/20ft. Then the skycrane descends 14m/46ft until the rover settles down onto its wheels (at which point the skycrane is 6m/20ft off the ground). Then separation.

I wonder whether they’ll attempt to land the skycrane or just let it crash once it gets far enough away. Minimizing the impact velocity woul be more expensive (requiring more fuel, more computing resources, maybe an extra sensor or two, etc) but it might be safer for the rover (since there won’t be pieces of skycrane flying everywhere) if they auto-land the skycrane instead of letting it fall and slam into the ground.

By: steve

steve — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:14:00 +0000

JPL engineer, “hey did you read Guy’s comment on BB?
Other JPL engineer, ” shit, stop the countdown”

By: timquinn

timquinn — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:12:00 +0000

Yeah, I guess that whole “metric” thing was sort of a bust, eh?

By: p96

p96 — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:09:00 +0000

Stupid fake shaky-cam – it hides any visual indication of how much they expect the craft to pitch, or not pitch, as the rockets are doing the atmospheric correction.

If there were humans aboard, they could get out the $500k space-feather duster and clean off any instruments / solar panels – no need for a sky-crane.