Mission to Mars

[street]

Looking forward to seeing and reading about the landing today for the Rover to land on Mars. I beleive it has been in space for about 7 months now and will finally reach it's destination.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/

[marko]

Me too. I love seeing (and even hearing) the sights and landscape.

Sadly, it's becoming a regular event with regular photos of the planet (or is it just me because I'm so interested in it and view everything?)

Hoping to live long enough to see a human landing/colony!

[tominboise]

Me as well. Very interesting to see the technologies developed to deploy the rover, drone, etc. Gives me hope that our tech, engineering and science communities are alive and well.

[CaptTom]

I have a meeting scheduled to start 30 minutes after touchdown. I'm so bummed!

Then again, there probably won't be any real action until I get home, so I suppose it's OK.

My only fear at this point is the news has been hyping this up so much, they've jinxed it.

Fingers crossed that all goes well!

[DayDreaming]

I spent a lot of the morning reading about the instrumentation on this thing, it's pretty fascinating stuff:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/

It's also pretty wild how the rover will be storing rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, so that a future mission might be able to return those samples to earth.

[Gumby]

Successful landing. Sending out pictures from the surface of Mars.

[braumeister]

Love seeing those ear-to-ear grins on everyone at JPL.

Hoping the Chinese have good luck with their lander.

[Go-NoGo]

Love it.. what a landing!
Now waiting for all the science results to come back and the helicopter flight

[Koogie]

Good work NASA !!

That'll teach those dusters...


(Expanse reference)

[timo2]

I'm glad the USA mission is working. UAE and China are close behind this year.

[JoeWras]

First low res image, through the dust cover:


They are getting faster with the images. Missions from long ago used to take way too long.

[CaptTom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by braumeister Love seeing those ear-to-ear grins on everyone at JPL. Hoping the Chinese have good luck with their lander.

I didn't see any grins - they were all wearing masks!

Did you notice that the UAE sent a lander. The Chinese one-upped that with a rover. The USA sent a rover... AND a helicopter! AND we lowered the whole thing down with a rocket-powered sky crane!

(I wish all the missions well, and congratulate the other two. But I'm also allowing myself a little bit of national pride.)

[mystang52]

I've been absolutely addicted to astronomy since I was a little kid (parents bought me a telescope for my 9th birthday). All of these missions and discoveries never fail to put me in awe.
What also amazes me, though, is how beyond-brilliant all of these scientists are. You can't just point the rocket in the general direction of Mars and hope it gets there, somehow. Truly awesome stuff.

[skipro33]

Watched the whole thing from T-minus 1 hour before touch-down. What I found amazing was that there literally was nothing for anyone to do at JPL but watch. Everything had been programmed to happen at the right time and so that's the way it went down. All they could do was monitor the data.
BTW, takes 11 minutes to send a command and another 11 minutes to get a reply. 22 minutes round trip.
I also thought it was interesting how FAST things progressed after the capsule was freed from the rocket that brought it to Mars. A matter of minutes and it was on the ground!!

[socca]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaptTom ... AND we lowered the whole thing down with a rocket-powered sky crane! ...

I'm not fond of the sky crane approach - it looks like an overly-complicated, highly-risky disaster-waiting-to-happen. I'm glad everything went well this time.

Why not fly the payload directly to the planet's surface and separate from the rockets post-landing? I've never done any research or engineering in this area so my opinion isn't worth much, which is why I'm posting it on the Internet.

[f35phixer]

we watched too, Skip, yes they watched but they all had a job to do, not much different then flight test of jets, we all watching our screens.... Just we wouldn't have 11 minutes to tell the test director if something's jacked ;-) one thing i was wondering about, i did lots of mission planning, route planning, bomb drop locations using earths Lat/Longs etc. have they developed a Lat/Long system for Mars? They got her down pretty close to where they wanted.... also what happened to the PERV delivery vehicle, moved it a mile east and crashed her?

[CaptTom]

Quote:

Originally Posted by socca I'm not fond of the sky crane approach - it looks like an overly-complicated, highly-risky disaster-waiting-to-happen.

Yup. A uniquely American solution. Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of how NASA spent a fortune developing a pen which would write in zero-gravity, in freezing temperatures, in a vacuum, etc. Presented with the same problem, the Russians just used a pencil.

Quote:

Originally Posted by f35phixer one thing i was wondering about, i did lots of mission planning, route planning, bomb drop locations using earths Lat/Longs etc. have they developed a Lat/Long system for Mars? They got her down pretty close to where they wanted.... also what happened to the PERV delivery vehicle, moved it a mile east and crashed her?

I had the same thought. They used terrain for the final adjustments, and apparently the lander radioed its touchdown location to the MRO. They made a big deal about knowing exactly where it was. My first thought was whether they used terrain or a coordinate system for that positioning. And if the latter, what do they use for the prime meridian? That's the curse of having navigation experience. You can never get it out of your mind.

And yes, the PERV was just crashed a safe distance away. There was some talk about picking up the seismic activity from the landing on the sensors on another lander already there. Probably not the crash, but maybe the rocket vibrations.

[f35phixer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CaptTom Yup. A uniquely American solution. Reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story of how NASA spent a fortune developing a pen which would write in zero-gravity, in freezing temperatures, in a vacuum, etc. Presented with the same problem, the Russians just used a pencil. I had the same thought. They used terrain for the final adjustments, and apparently the lander radioed its touchdown location to the MRO. They made a big deal about knowing exactly where it was. My first thought was whether they used terrain or a coordinate system for that positioning. And if the latter, what do they use for the prime meridian? That's the curse of having navigation experience. You can never get it out of your mind. And yes, the PERV was just crashed a safe distance away. There was some talk about picking up the seismic activity from the landing on the sensors on another lander already there. Probably not the crash, but maybe the rocket vibrations.

maybe all they have is a compass, then they have MAGVAR to worry about too

[street]

Quote:

Originally Posted by skipro33 Watched the whole thing from T-minus 1 hour before touch-down. What I found amazing was that there literally was nothing for anyone to do at JPL but watch. Everything had been programmed to happen at the right time and so that's the way it went down. All they could do was monitor the data. BTW, takes 11 minutes to send a command and another 11 minutes to get a reply. 22 minutes round trip. I also thought it was interesting how FAST things progressed after the capsule was freed from the rocket that brought it to Mars. A matter of minutes and it was on the ground!!

Yes, I agree and it always amazes me how technology is so advanced.

[JoeWras]

Quote:

Originally Posted by socca I'm not fond of the sky crane approach - it looks like an overly-complicated, highly-risky disaster-waiting-to-happen. I'm glad everything went well this time. Why not fly the payload directly to the planet's surface and separate from the rockets post-landing? I've never done any research or engineering in this area so my opinion isn't worth much, which is why I'm posting it on the Internet.

Viking did a direct land. Another direct land approach (Polar Lander) failed.

The problem with direct land is primarily the shielding needed to deal with the rocks and dust coming back at the instruments. The sky crane allows the designers to skip all that, the instruments can nearly be wide open bare, with only light shielding needed, if any.

The bouncing airbags were cool, but not appropriate for something this size. This thing is HUGE!

So they came up with this idea.

Here's a good article on it: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the...l-land-on-mars