When I was in Washington a couple of weeks ago for ICCC6,
I took the family to the National Air and Space Museum on the mall. While everyone was gazing at rockets and other bus-sized hardware of glory days past, off in the corner I noticed this, roped off, without a placard even:
What was it? A full sized mockup of the new Mars Science Lab explorer known as Curiosity. Apparently, it would serve as a backdrop to this announcement I found out later.
About the size of a Jeep, it looked ready to rumble on the red planet. I figured they would use the air bag bouncy deployment system that worked so well for Spirit and Opportunity, just super-sized.
But after learning a bit more about how Curiosity will be landed, and watching a video from NASA JPL on the mission sequencing, I was surprised to learn they weren’t using that method, but rather a series of mechanical, dangling drops by wire, and rocket maneuvers, that look more than a bit worrying due to the complex synchronization that must occur. Watch this video:
This artist’s concept animation depicts key events of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, which will launch in late 2011 and land a rover, Curiosity, on Mars in August 2012.
My view: there’s a lot more that can go wrong. One thruster rocket failure, or a tangled drop wire, is all it would take to doom the mission. Mars is known for eating missions, with an over 50% failure rate, so adding to the complexity during landing, especially that dangling rover under a hovering rocket, looks mighty failure-prone.
More on the mission here at NASA JPL.
@sman67 says:
Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain that! What I didn’t say in my original comment was that I find this mission very exciting, and upon seeing the video a few weeks ago I emailed it to both of my brothers.
JPL has done some of the greatest robotic exploration ever, and if the rest of NASA (I’m looking at YOU MSFC) was on par with the folks who work at JPL, we’d have a moon colony by now.
NoAstronomer says:
July 25, 2011 at 9:22 am
Wrote
As an aside one thing that sometimes annoys me about some of the comments on WUWT is those people who seem to be unable to resist an attempt to make some kind of political point about everything :
“Seems like a long way to fly for muslim outreach.”
What does this article have to do with muslims? I assume this is supposed to be a jab at Obama …
I read Michael D Smith’s comment. I did not see reproach to any particular president.
I just the reproach of the stupid directive that director Charles Bolden said he was given
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/07/white-house-nasa-defend-comments-about-nasa-outreach-to-muslim-world-criticized-by-conservatives.html
So, lot of us (like me, who grew up falling in love with astronomy. that is what led me to take engineering as my major. i wanted to come up with a better fuel !! ), are at this point very saddened by the decision to put “muslim outreach” as an important goal, instead of making the science as the single most important goal; or “inspiring future generations into science, space and technology” as important goal.
It is a shame when politcal hacks like you write all this “I assume” garbage. I don’t know where you get off “assume”ing what the other guy is “implying/thinking”?
@Alexander Feht
“So? It’s July.”
Oh, I see… record breaking heat is because it’s summer, record breaking cold is because AGW is a lie, and thousands of scientists are participating in the greatest scientific fraud, ever.
“On average, global temperatures are down.”
Are they?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-temperature/
I notice the 1998 warming is labelled “El Nino Warming” but the 2007 “cooling” is NOT labelled “La Nina Cooling”. I also notice that the second half of the graph is mostly above the average and the first half below the average.
Now how can you say that temperatures are down when 1983 was colder than 1993 and they were both colder than 2003 or now.
Either you simply can not understand what is being discussed, or you are intentionally ignoring the facts in favour of a political belief.
“The science is settled: CO2 increase doesn’t result in temperature increase, it’s the other way around. ”
Whatever. It’s the sun, cosmic rays, a fraud, an error… anything but AGW… right? The only thing that is settled is your mind. Nothing will ever change it, because you refuse to accept any conclusion that contradicts your own.
“Why don’t we hear from you about record harvests, record fish and lobster catches, the greening of Sahara, and other positive effects of CO2 increase?”
Why don’t hear from you about the empircally PROVEN “greenhouse” effect of CO2 that is REQUIRED by physics? We are not talking about people looking at the sky and saying “CO2 did it” we are talking about lab experiments determining the warming effect of various gas concentrations in the atmosphere. CO2 (and other GHGs) MUST warm the atmosphere. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t exist.
So can you explain to me how CO2 can cause warming in lab experiments, but not in the real world? Try it. It will be amusing to see.
“Screw the headlines.”
Yeah, screw em! Who needs reality when we have a global conspiracy of evil scientists to fight!
@Ric Werme
“Funny how you’re interested in TX/OK/NM weather (and WA/OR/MT I trust) here when it’s well covered”
That article is about a drought, not about a heat wave. But fair enough. Buried in the middle of the article is a small mention of the heat wave affecting the entire US, while he discusses where the drought is centered.
So the words “heat wave” are used exactly ONCE in that article:
“Though the heat wave has spread into the wet areas further north this week creating a literal sauna, the rains and cooling will return there n the next 8 days but the drought will persist in parts of the southern plains.”
Yes, the “heat wave” has been adequately covered on this site, according to it’s authors and fans. Not a mention of the deaths. Just a quick note to say “ah, but it will be gone soon”.
Pfft. Try again.
@Karmakaze
Are you daft? Where were you last winter? Global temperature anomoly last month was around 0.2ºC last month.
Bennet Wrote: JPL has done some of the greatest robotic exploration ever, and if the rest of NASA (I’m looking at YOU MSFC) was on par with the folks who work at JPL, we’d have a moon colony by now.
Thank you Bennet. One of the reasons that JPL tends to have a better track record than other NASA centers is that nobody here is a civil servant. We are all employees of Caltech. If the budget is tight or we are no longer useful, we get laid off and more useful people get hired instead of us. That does two things: first, we tend to be leaner and younger here at JPL. Second, we tend to be more technically oriented. At other centers where the civil servants form a large portion of the workforce, they tend to manage the contracts while the for-profit contractors do all the technical work. That way, if a project ends or gets cancelled, the contracting people are let go but not the civil servants since it would be very difficult to let them go. Sean O’Keefe, the only non-Engineer administrator that I have worked for was the only guy to realize this and had a proposal to make all NASA centers work like JPL and have universities take over the workforce but that did not happen. If it had, NASA, IMO, would have been a much better organization. Not that JPL is perfect since we still tend to gold-plate our stuff but we have a lot of technically savvy people around. Of course I shouldn’t generalize as all the people that I have come across at JSC have impressed me as very good managers.
During the past year we have laid off about 300 people at JPL. With no big projects in the works and NASA budget being what it is, we may have to let go of some more people next Fiscal Year.
Again these are all my opinions and do not reflect JPL or NASA policy.
karmakaze says:
“Why don’t hear from you about the empircally PROVEN “greenhouse” effect of CO2…”
There is no ’empirically proven’ greenhouse effect, as R.W. Wood showed by experiment. A greenhouse effect may exist, but there is no testable, empirical evidence of a greenhouse effect, per the scientific method. It is a model-based conjecture which could be true, but your understanding of ’empirically’ is wrong, and in this context so is your misuse of ‘proven.’ If it were proven, there would be no debate over the climate sensitivity number.
This is the internet’s “Best Science” site. It isn’t realclimate or climate progress. Words have specific meanings, and you are misusing “empirically proven”. You probably just don’t understand what the words mean, that’s all. Climate alarmists are no different than Humpty Dumpty: they believe that words mean whatever they want them to mean. That’s why alarmists always get the science wrong.
Actually that is quite an elegant and simple system. Lowering the rover by cable significantly lowers the centre of gravity on the landing system which would be an enormous help with stability, and counteracting any unexpected wind gusts, and also keep the thrusters sufficiently high enough above the surface to avoid issues with dust. I should imagine there is considerable degree of elasticity built into those cables to further help with shock absorption. The quick release system on toutch down means that the landing module doesn’t have to exactly counteract the weight of the rover just slow it down enough to place it on the surface without damage. Basically aim for the sweet spot, but the combination of elasticity in the cable, and instant release on touchdown gives you quite a wide window to fit through.
metryq says (July 25, 2011 at 5:52 am): “Because 2001: A Space Odyssey was so technically accurate?”
While that film predictably traded off accuracy for entertainment, it did show how to keep a silent space sequence interesting: add music. In the first part of the MSL video, I can imagine a little “traveling music” punctuated by musical effects (drum, cymbals, etc) for events such as stage separation. Once in the Martian atmosphere, sound effects are appropriate, but more music wouldn’t hurt.
Presumably it was faster and cheaper to stick with sound effects only. 🙁
As the proverbial rocket scientist (engineer): Spirit and Opportunity were washing machine sized. This is a Jeep. Bouncing bags would pop with this much mass. That’s been seen in testing as reported on Nova, I believe. Parachutes (all the way to the ground) tend to drift into hazards, foul the vehicle, or fail to separate at all. All are likely failures with loss of mission as a result. Rockets are a solution given the mass and conditions. The cable drop is a solution to when to turn off the rockets and how not to be dragging the rockets and tanks around for the rest of the mission. This is complex, but it’s of the complexity needed to safely land a large, mobile probe on Mars.
“In space, no one can hear you ‘whoosh'”
Re Karmakaze on July 25, 2011 at 2:33 pm:
Heh, silly little warmist troll wants to hijack a space exploration thread to spew his assertions and accusations. By the sheer quantity he must really enjoy that tingle he gets when ranting.
Space exploration was led by those who were critical of what was accepted. By boldly challenging the existing “settled science” humanity made it off this planet. By questioning the unquestionable, someday we shall make it to other stars.
And this little troll wishes to tell us this science was long proven, there is nothing new to be learned, none of it will ever be disproven, can’t be disproven, so we should all just shut up, stop being critical, stop questioning, and just accept what the self-certified Climate Experts™ tell us is the Absolute Unalterable Truth.
Heh. You keep dreaming that’ll happen, little troll. We’ll stay skeptical and keep dreaming of how to reach for the stars. 😉
weasel53 says:
July 25, 2011 at 11:37 am
> I’ll bet it works. If they can soft land a probe on Saturn’s Titan they can surely do this.
There’s a decent atmosphere on Titan (60% greater than Earth!) – parachutes work.
Hmm, Mars’ atmospheric pressure is some 99.3% less than Earth’s.
Okay, so Mars eats ships. So what? Exploration eats ships, it always has. Look around the coastlines of any continent for proof.
If the engineers at JPL think this is the way to do it, then I’m willing to believe they know what they are doing. But win, lose or draw it’s worth the effort.
People like those at JPL are keeping alive the tradition that gave us names like Cook, Da Gama, Drake and Columbus. A tradition that dates back to the first caveman that wondered what was on the other side of the next hill. The curiousity, the desire to “go and see”. Whether by probe or rover or by boots on the ground, it’s the same desire and to lose that is to lose a part of our humanity.
I say “Good luck Curiousity and JPL, and Gods speed”.
@Karmakaze says:
July 25, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Re: all that stuff you wrote (and wrote, and wrote)… so tell me again how all that relates to getting a “Jeep” on Mars? I couldn’t make heads nor tails of your opinion of the topic at hand.
On topic: The lunar landing module worked out OK. I think they have a good shot with this.
All that aside, we are very late putting a base on the moon.
sman67 says:
July 25, 2011 at 6:12 am
Thanks for the information. One thing about the crane approach interests me after reading your comment on the power used in relation to the crane approach. I am assuming that the rover has solar panels to recharge the unit. Is there not a problem with the dust raised by the thrusters then coating the panels?
By the way, watching the vid on my laptop at night with the lights out was fun! Quite scary when the bits pop off! Reminded me of the old TV advert in the U.K. with the by line “Take your littler home”!
Hope the thing works well even though I side with Anthony on the “If it can go wrong…it will”!
The Soviets got Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2 to land successfully on the Moon. In 1970 and 1973 respectively.
Without any dangly wires.
Binny says:
July 25, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Actually that is quite an elegant and simple system. Lowering the rover by cable significantly lowers the centre of gravity on the landing system which would be an enormous help with stability…
Actually, quite the opposite. It becomes a growing pendulum. These are tricky to control, particularly by humans, as anyone who has flown loads under a helicopter will be able to tell you.
Remember in the old days when spaceships were named by MEN and WOMEN with guts? Like Apollo, and Viking? Is it just me or is ‘curiosity’ the gheyest name ever for a spacecraft/rover? Who names these things? Why don’t we name it Hope and Flowers?
And another thing – Where does Curiosity fit in with NASA’s new Muslim Outreach Program.
Nah mate, she’ll be right. It’ll all work on th’ day. 😉
@ur momisugly Bernd Felsche
Easy. The moon has no atmosphere and a lot less gravity.
If you’ll take another look: There are actually three cables tethering the lander/rover to its thruster during the final descent phase. This “triangulation” will allow for some counteraction to the pendulum effect, keeping oscillations damped within limits. This sort of triangular damping is not generally available when helicopter-lifting, as that is generally done with single cable or sometimes two-point lifting.
If the whole setup gets to that point – and assuming that the thrusters don’t falter and that the release mechanisms work o.k. – that final phase seems likely to work quite well.
What gets me is what incredible optical AI has got to be in place for that thing to locate and place the rover on suitable ground. The programming must be intense.
Easy. The moon has no atmosphere and a lot less gravity.
Not necessarily. The lack of atmosphere makes a lunar descent and landing more difficult than on a planet with an atmosphere. There is no atmosphere for aerobraking with heat shields and parachutes. There are ways to adjust an orbit to use gravity for some deceleration, but most braking is by pure rocket muscle power. So you have to bring more fuel along.
“Thanks for the information. One thing about the crane approach interests me after reading your comment on the power used in relation to the crane approach. I am assuming that the rover has solar panels to recharge the unit. Is there not a problem with the dust raised by the thrusters then coating the panels? ”
That’s one reason to suspend the payload far beneath the thrusters. Also, keep in mind that there are windstorms on Mars. At one point either spirit or opportunity were about to croak due to dust on the panels, but a windstorm came along and cleaned the panels, reviving the little booger.
Those rover missions lasted far longer than their design spec. They were also designed and operated by JPL. Real Engineers dealing with real missions. I hope they design us a moon base soon, because a manned mars mission is extremely impractical. A moon base is a practical goal with many tangible benefits to be had. If this nation needs anything, it’s a positive goal to replace this seemingly endless crisis mentality and defensive posture.
Hopefully those bright minds at JPL will be there when we decide to do it. My guess is that in a couple of years, they’ll be hiring again at JPL, and that will be a good day indeed.