The joint ESA-Russian Schiaparelli probe was scheduled to land on Mars today, but there has been no contact with the probe since it began its descent into the Martian atmosphere.
Not a good sign...
fucking martians.....we may have to go over there and kick their ass for fucking wit it.....
Shit happens in space travel. Probes failing to successfully land is something every space agency is familiar with. Russians have an extensive history of failed probes.
Cydonia or bust!
...bust. :(
Message received!
[spoiler]'Are we there yet?"[/spoiler]
Quote from: PopeyesPappy on October 19, 2016, 02:32:32 PM
The joint ESA-Russian Schiaparelli probe was scheduled to land on Mars today, but there has been no contact with the probe since it began its descent into the Martian atmosphere.
Not a good sign...
Like NASA ... curse of the lowest bidder ;-(
Quote from: Baruch on October 19, 2016, 09:07:57 PM
Like NASA ... curse of the lowest bidder ;-(
Not necessarily. NASA lost the Mars Polar Lander because one team used metric and another used English units. It was a NASA engineering quality control SNAFU not a low bid contractor issue.
Quote from: Baruch on October 19, 2016, 09:42:25 PM
The QC team was probably a contractor that NASA hired. Called an integrating contractor ... I have known a few. NASA hasn't done their own work for decades.
Sorry but no. I was a NASA contractor supporting space shuttle and space station operations for decades less than decades ago. The people sitting at the consoles at Goddard and JPL telling these satellites what to do are NASA employees not contractors. That includes the QC people. I know. I've sat in enough meetings with them.
Did I accidentally put your last post in quotes when making my reply, Baruch?
We lost our Martian rocket ship, the high paid spokesman said
Looks like that silly rocket ship has lost its cone shaped head
We spent ninety jillion dollars trying to get a look at Mars
I hear universal laughter ringing out among the stars
Quote from: Atheon on October 19, 2016, 10:35:28 PM
We lost our Martian rocket ship, the high paid spokesman said
Looks like that silly rocket ship has lost its cone shaped head
We spent ninety jillion dollars trying to get a look at Mars
I hear universal laughter ringing out among the stars
The lander was supposed to work for a few days. The new satellite can stay up there for years. It's all relative.
Quote from: PopeyesPappy on October 19, 2016, 09:49:00 PM
Sorry but no. I was a NASA contractor supporting space shuttle and space station operations for decades less than decades ago. The people sitting at the consoles at Goddard and JPL telling these satellites what to do are NASA employees not contractors. That includes the QC people. I know. I've sat in enough meetings with them.
Good for you. Space Shuttle much? I was on a contractor on a development team that lost a satellite launch (not from Space Shuttle). We rocket scientists are all powerful, bow down and worship our ... science. I guess our actual experience (with aerospace in general) isn't consistent ... so reality mustn't be consistent. All government work, direct or contractor, is dependent on politics.
In other non-space work since, I have seen related government failure ... keep trying to save them from themselves but ... who will save he contracting company from their mistakes? I will tell you what works, repeated failure, but not giving up, but with the non-PC ability to correct mistakes. I have seen projects killed, that could have worked, but the management/customer gave up.
Quote from: PopeyesPappy on October 19, 2016, 09:50:17 PM
Did I accidentally put your last post in quotes when making my reply, Baruch?
Nope, that was my duplicate entry, and I removed one, and didn't bother to remove the superfluous quotes on the one I saved.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 20, 2016, 06:22:08 AM
The lander was supposed to work for a few days. The new satellite can stay up there for years. It's all relative.
Sometimes ground control can jigger a response from a lost probe, but might take several months ;-(
Quote from: Baruch on October 20, 2016, 06:38:39 AM
Good for you. Space Shuttle much? I was on a contractor on a development team that lost a satellite launch (not from Space Shuttle). We rocket scientists are all powerful, bow down and worship our ... science. I guess our actual experience (with aerospace in general) isn't consistent ... so reality mustn't be consistent. All government work, direct or contractor, is dependent on politics.
In other non-space work since, I have seen related government failure ... keep trying to save them from themselves but ... who will save he contracting company from their mistakes? I will tell you what works, repeated failure, but not giving up, but with the non-PC ability to correct mistakes. I have seen projects killed, that could have worked, but the management/customer gave up.
96 Flights. I worked STS-26 through STS-122. There is a framed STS-48 mission chart hanging on the wall above my desk as I type. The only satellite I remember us literally losing was the Italian tethered satellite. I've got a piece of the tether hanging on the wall at the office. There was plenty of that to hand out. I think there was 12 or 13 miles of it left on the real when the tether broke.
Quote from: Baruch on October 20, 2016, 06:41:09 AM
Sometimes ground control can jigger a response from a lost probe, but might take several months ;-(
Yep, the slow march down every possible path in the software, looking for something that can be fixed. Been there.
Quote from: PopeyesPappy on October 20, 2016, 06:51:20 AM
96 Flights. I worked STS-26 through STS-122. There is a framed STS-48 mission chart hanging on the wall above my desk as I type. The only satellite I remember us literally losing was the Italian tethered satellite. I've got a piece of the tether hanging on the wall at the office. There was plenty of that to hand out. I think there was 12 or 13 miles of it left on the real when the tether broke.
Tethered Satellite? I was asked to be on that ... and I bailed after a few days ... accident waiting to happen unfortunately (on the contractor end). Don't know about the NASA or EU contribution to failure, except that the project was on hold for a long time, and lost the original contributors (at our end anyway, so failure of continuity). I will never forgive NASA for the Apollo 1 fire, or the two lost Shuttles ... all preventable. Better to use robots rather than callously lose astronauts to political calculation.
Usually most people are capable of handing things they have already handled .. until the system decides to take a left turn at Albuquerque. If they are extrapolating, instead of interpolating, the failure rate is much higher. They simply don't respect the unknown knowns, let alone the unknown unknowns. We engineers can be pretty complacent (see famous suspension bridge failure). But it takes a medical doctor to be really arrogant ;-)
Asking my Mars buddy if he knows what happened with the new probe. Remember, per Non Disclosure Agreement ... it is possible that except for scuttlebutt, we may never know.
Quote from: Baruch on October 20, 2016, 07:14:16 AM
Tethered Satellite? I was asked to be on that ... and I bailed after a few days ... accident waiting to happen unfortunately (on the contractor end). Don't know about the NASA or EU contribution to failure, except that the project was on hold for a long time, and lost the original contributors (at our end anyway, so failure of continuity). I will never forgive NASA for the Apollo 1 fire, or the two lost Shuttles ... all preventable. Better to use robots rather than callously lose astronauts to political calculation.
Usually most people are capable of handing things they have already handled .. until the system decides to take a left turn at Albuquerque. If they are extrapolating, instead of interpolating, the failure rate is much higher. They simply don't respect the unknown knowns, let alone the unknown unknowns. We engineers can be pretty complacent (see famous suspension bridge failure). But it takes a medical doctor to be really arrogant ;-)
Asking my Mars buddy if he knows what happened with the new probe. Remember, per Non Disclosure Agreement ... it is possible that except for scuttlebutt, we may never know.
On the first flight the tether jammed up in the reel after it had only unwound a few feet. I can't remember who was responsible. The re-flight was a freebie for the Italians. NASA let them piggyback on another mission at no charge. Everyone considered that one a success despite losing the satellite. I think it was out 10 or 12 miles and doing everything they thought it would do before the tether broke so they got good data. The failure that time was due to a hole in the insulation on the tether. It arced and blew the cable apart. Once again I don't remember who exactly was at fault because I don't remember if it was a manufacturing flaw or got damaged after it was built.
That one was memorable to me because the Italian PI wouldn't sit in the same room as the Italian hardware guy. They had been friends in college years before when they were working on their PHDs until the hardware guy stole the PI's girlfriend. Decades later he still hadn't gotten over it. We had to set him up with his own conference room so he could attend the mission briefings.
So ... vendetta?
"On the first flight the tether jammed up in the reel after it had only unwound a few feet." ... that was my exact fear ... that they didn't understand the dynamics when the probe was close to the Shuttle. I was afraid it would tangle up with the Shuttle, and they wouldn't be able to return to Earth. The probe itself was probably OK (I think that was the EU part). It was the integrating contractor's fault, and that is who I worked for. Of course there is no blame, if not an act of G-d it is an act of Nature ;-) Basically a failure to understand yo-yo physics (it is more than just centrifugal force). I have read that the stability of bicycles is still not properly understood (man in loop) in spite of being around for 150 years. Physicists are arrogant pricks too.
My piece of the tether.
(http://i.imgur.com/Knkubtu.jpg)
It surprised me when I saw just how small this thing was. It's only about a 1/16" in diameter. That's not very much for something that was supposed to be 20ish miles long.
Stiffness ... particularly for the first 100 meters reeled out. The tensions in the tether overwhelm whatever is happening to the probe in zero G. Mass ratio only matters if the probe is moving relatively at high velocity (momentum) ... at low velocity a feather can move it. Of course a spreadsheet could be used to simulate a model of this.
My other problem (as seen later) was that bolt that cut into the tether. Don't leave any sharp edges in the way, boys! At least use round heads.
(https://www.wired.com/geekdad/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Screen-Shot-2012-10-01-at-10.02.00-PM-660x456.png)
Look at the size of those brains! Typical Progressives ;-)
Yes, Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call" makes my head explode. What about it?
The probe most likely went splat (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37731671).
They lost communicate about a minute before landing. Seems possible that everything else went right but it can't phone home.
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 20, 2016, 06:22:08 AM
The lander was supposed to work for a few days. The new satellite can stay up there for years. It's all relative.
Mars is sort of a graveyard of landers. But I'm confused a bit. I thought we (collectively) had figured out how to use bouncing bubble-wrap (so to speak) and dropped-near-surface techniques. Did this one try something new or did a previously successful way fail?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
Pretty much a crap shoot, but most failures are human induced, sometimes at the drawing board stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM_lander
The various space agencies have tried various methods, not just the bouncing ball version.
Usual European project ... declared a success in spite of failure ;-)
Quote from: Cavebear on October 22, 2016, 07:40:44 AM
Mars is sort of a graveyard of landers. But I'm confused a bit. I thought we (collectively) had figured out how to use bouncing bubble-wrap (so to speak) and dropped-near-surface techniques. Did this one try something new or did a previously successful way fail?
Bubble-wrap is okay if you don't want to stick the landing, and your pay load is very rugged. There's a whole lot of bouncing goin' on in that system.
Curiosity used the sky-crane system, it worked once but no guarantees it will work every time.
Schiaparelli just used rockets, rather like trying to soft land a Gemini capsule.
Quote from: Cavebear on October 22, 2016, 07:40:44 AM
Mars is sort of a graveyard of landers. But I'm confused a bit. I thought we (collectively) had figured out how to use bouncing bubble-wrap (so to speak) and dropped-near-surface techniques. Did this one try something new or did a previously successful way fail?
There are a variety of ways of doing it, each with their advantages and disadvantages. According to the link I posted, its parachute was jettisoned too early and its retrorockets didn't activate for as long as they should have. Basically, it didn't hit the brakes long enough. End result: splat.
My usual theory ... is that they are using Windows, and they got a corrupted Registry when they did an app update ;-(
"Splat". Got it. You know, until we can put landers safely on Mars routinely, I'm not going to volunteer for the trip...
Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on October 22, 2016, 08:33:07 AM
Bubble-wrap is okay if you don't want to stick the landing, and your pay load is very rugged. There's a whole lot of bouncing goin' on in that system.
Curiosity used the sky-crane system, it worked once but no guarantees it will work every time.
Schiaparelli just used rockets, rather like trying to soft land a Gemini capsule.
It has always been a Russian thing ... to land on hard ground, not in the sea like the US. So they should have known how to do that.
Quote from: Cavebear on October 22, 2016, 08:46:51 AM
"Splat". Got it. You know, until we can put landers safely on Mars routinely, I'm not going to volunteer for the trip...
Don't want your 15 minutes of fame like those other dopes? Early steam trains were death traps too.
A lot of the problems associated with early steam trains were scheduling related. i.e. two trains were scheduled to occupy the space space at the same time. If memory serves it's one of the main reasons we have set time zones today.
Quote from: Baruch on October 22, 2016, 08:47:46 AM
It has always been a Russian thing ... to land on hard ground, not in the sea like the US. So they should have known how to do that.
They landed on the ground because it was such a big target, and they were paranoid that if landed in the sea some fascist navy would get the capsule before they did. /history
I would note that it wasn't always successful for them.
Quote from: Cavebear on October 22, 2016, 08:46:51 AM
"Splat". Got it. You know, until we can put landers safely on Mars routinely, I'm not going to volunteer for the trip...
Just give it a few years.
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/66/9b/43/669b43e7b1170cdc535fb186f3713df6.gif)
Mars is going to look really nice in the future.
After 10K years of microbial engineering?
Quote from: Cavebear on October 22, 2016, 11:29:44 AM
After 10K years of microbial engineering?
We are already terraforming this planet ... to death ;-(