UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA JPL! First image received. See below.
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I thought I”d take a minute to advise you that some real science and engineering that will be see from NASA tonight rather than the politically motivated science from scientist turned arrested activist Dr. James Hansen in the latest NASA GISS claim distributed via AP’s compliant repeater, Seth Borenstein. On the plus side, Seth at least gave a voice to the other side.
Readers may recall I photographed and wrote about the Curiosity exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum last year:
Experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) share the challenges of Curiosity’s rover final 7 minutes to landing on the surface of Mars on the 5th of August,2012 ( 10:31 US Pacific time) . Watch the video below, well worth your time.
Curiosity is a Mars rover launched by NASA on November 26, 2011. Currently en route to the planet, it is scheduled to land in Gale Crater on August 5, 2012 ( US Pacific time) . The rover’s objectives include searching for past or present life, studying the Martian climate, studying Martian geology, and collecting data for a future manned mission to Mars. It will explore Mars for 2 years.
Curiosity’s landing Times in regarding time travel zones:
Aug 5, 2012 10:31 p.m. US Pacific
Aug 6, 2012 1:31 a.m. US Eastern
Aug 6, 2012 3:31 p.m. Hobart – Australia
Aug 6, 2012 5:31 a.m Universal (UTC)
Curiosity cost: A cool US$2.5 billion
Cool stuff Bonus (Mars Science Laboratory) such as interactive experiences can be found in:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/
NASA official site:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
NASA-TV coverage starts two hours before landing. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html (h/t to Ric Werme)
UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA! First image received. Will post as soon as I have something to show you.
UPDATE2 self explanatory
Willis Eschenbach says:
August 5, 2012 at 10:30 pm
If I ran the zoo and I were trying out this plan, I’d start out by…
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The testing techniques you propose are path to failure. Scale models never work the same as full size because weight of an object increases with third order of its size – 1/10 scale model is not 10 but 1000 times lighter, for example (that’s also the main reason why airbags could not be used for Curiosity, by the way – it’s simply too heavy for them). And Earth atmosphere has vastly different properties than Mars atmosphere, most of aviatics tests done in Earth atmosphere are completely useless for Mars.
People from NASA know what they can expect. Yes, a lot of testing was done using computer simulations. Very sophisticated simulations, which give the tested equipment the same inputs as if it was really landing on Mars. These simulations are only possible because they already know Mars very well thanks to previous successful missions and thanks to many physical simulations such as tests in wind tunnels using simulated martian atmosphere. And that is also the best they can do if it’s not possible to do these experiments directly on Mars.
Of course if the mission was a failure you can always say they didn’t test it enough. There are always more tests that could have been done. But the real reason why a mission fails is because something went wrong, not because it was not tested properly. And what went wrong may even be something that was successfully tested thousand times.
I am really, really glad it was a success.
They tested parts of it. On the NASA web site is a video of drop testing of the sky crane mechanism using prototype hardware. What I did not like was the politicization by Holdren and the science advisor, who both had to get there praise of Obama in, how wonderful he was. After about ten minutes of that stuff though, they left and let the people who really carried out the project talk in the press conference. Could have done with none of the political stuff.
Transcript correction:
Touchdown time has to be 10:30:39 pm PDT
Massive Congratulations to all involved at NASA! A fantastic acheivement. It is great to see NASA have such a success, doing what they do best!
Excellent news! Congratulations to all involved!
This is US science and engineering at its very best, and to conflate it with the antics of an idiot like Hansen is a travesty.
Well done NASA!
Stick with space exploration, come out of climate alarmism.
I found the NASA TV in HD on YouTube. You can see what I was looking at here. It appears for the first time at 0:44 seconds in. It looks like they are names on the nameplates (not station ID’s). So most likely it is a very short name.
Congratulations to Adam Steltzner, the lead mechanical engineer for the crucial entry, descent and landing, and the team of up to 2000 who worked on the project over some ten years.
The best part about this is that if any science fiction writer had come up with so implausible a landing method, no reader or movie audience would’ve bought it. I love engineers, I really do. “If it’s crazy and it works, it’s not crazy.”
As for NASA – thanks, folks. Every now and then you remind me why it’s awesome to be a human being.
Congratulations to NASA on an amazing achievement. It’s great to see them doing good science.
2.5 billion dollars is a lot of money, but well worth it. In contrast, our UK government is squandering almost as much every year on wind turbines that don’t work most of the time. And as for the London Olympics….
I hope Curiosity (what a wonderful name!) will have a long, fruitful life and that it will discover amazing things.
Chris
I was cynical as all hell that this would ever work, simply because there were so many things to go wrong. I’m so happy to be mistaken.
The space bit of NASA is still good old-fashioned engineering. They may use computer simulations to test ideas but they never do anything without thousands of hours of mock-ups, physical tests and lots and lots of spectacular crashes. They know their stuff, unlike the environmental science types who exploit their attachment to NASA’s public image for their own benefit.
Well done to NASA JPL and all the engineers doing the real work that gets the job done.
Specs of the Mars Science Laboratory mission rover here:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/
Note the lack of solar panels. This one is nuclear power, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG):
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/technology/technologiesofbroadbenefit/power/
Solar just can’t cut it for what they need to do with this rover.
And it turns out, despite the famous pictures, solar didn’t do it all for the other ones either:
So when it really needs to get done, and done reliably, forget solar, go nuclear.
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Somewhere out in the world, right now, there is a Green head exploding at the thought of humans littering another planet with nuclear waste, obviously threatening alien life as we haven’t verified it doesn’t exist where we’re throwing away our radioactive garbage. Likely more than one.
I’m sure I could coax a few more explosions by pointing out how we’re contaminating the unknown Oceans of Mars with plastic garbage as well, just like on Earth. Give me a few days and I could get a good start collecting names for the petition to demand NASA makes all their probes biodegradable. Humans have already screwed up this planet beyond repair, why should NASA be allowed to wreck others as well?
Here are some comments from the Siemens website regarding the use of simulations during the design process: “Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used Siemens PLM (product lifecycle management) software during the vehicle’s entire development process in order to digitally design and simulate the rover and virtually assemble it without having to build a prototype.” … “Among other things, NX was used to create a temperature model of the rover. To do this, the researchers used hundreds of temperature sensors to test the rover in a special chamber in which a carbon dioxide atmosphere, a super-cold floor, and a sun-like radiation source imitated the conditions on the Mars surface. NX used the collected data and results to calculate a temperature model that can virtually simulate conditions that cannot be duplicated on earth. In addition to helping the researchers design and test the system, the 3D model is currently being used during the flight.”
“…wait until tomorrow…and you will all be wondering about that billion dollars . Absolutely impossible in my opinion. They may try and drag it on for a few days, like lost radar etc , or whatever , you know the usual excuses.
I will explain why I am so confidant in the eventual outcome tomorrow.”
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Good call, Ian. We eagerly await your explanation later today as to why this was ‘impossible.’
More info on simulation, design, and model validation on NASA’s web page. Google the phrase: “Langley is ‘All Systems Go’ to Make History on Mars”
Well done, NASA. Now all you have to do is fire Hansen, and my day will be complete…
PS. Relieved that the retro-rockets didn’t fry the tyres!
Way over the top on the dramatization.
The use of the term ‘terror’ was unfortunate. After the Aurora and Sikh shootings, we don’t want the term diluted in meaning.
The loss of the spacecraft would be simply a couple of billion dollars. No grieving family members in its wake. Not even a rounding error in today’s budget environment.
Blade says:
August 6, 2012 at 12:44 am
P.S. did anyone notice what the nameplate said on that one station…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuk_li
All you guys carping on about testing vs modelling need to realise that we are talking about something designed to operate on Mars, a planet with a much thinner atmosphere and completely different gravity. You can’t test something designed to operate in those conditions easily anywhere on Earth. The landing system won’t work here. The heat shield has to be different. The parachute has to open at a much faster speed and work in a much thinner atmosphere. The rocket stage has to thrust against a much lower gravity. The pulley descent system has to cope with a slower acceleration. This thing only works on Mars and a lot of it could not be tested ahead of time.
Modelling has its place. It is what engineers spend most of their time doing.
Well done NASA, see what happens when you give engineers the money!
Now get rid of some of those deadwood climate scientists…
Congrats, Nasa….see what can be accomplished when you put your focus where it belongs?
Bad news! Wolowitz is driving it!
I was hoping to see the actual landing, not just NASA people.
Blade says:
August 6, 2012 at 12:44 am
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The name in question is Fuk Li.