It is so bad ass that when we have a question about something that happened on another planet we can just point one of our other robots' cameras at the site!
Opportunity is not so far (it's actually inside a crater nearby I think), but it'd take months to get to place, and there may not be enough scientific value in doing so just to see the charred remains of Schiaparelli. But who knows, it's so over it's expected mission life that maybe someone goes "f* it, let's go take a look".
Not necessarily. Schiaparelli used hydrazine for fuel, and if it smashed into the surface it seems to me that it's a reasonable assumption that the whole crash site is contaminated with it. Is that something we want to get all over the rover?
With a bit more Googling, it appears that hydrazine's lifetime in (Earth) atmosphere is measured in hours. I'm not sure what that would be on Mars, or if soaking into the soil there would increase its lifetime.
It's a fun mental exercise, I guess -- I'd love to hear from somebody in the field who knew more about hydrazine -- but as the Opportunity rover is still a long (likely impossible) distance away from the crash site, it will likely just remain a mental exercise.
Months, to say the least -- the rover moves very slowly. Ever since it got to Mars, it's moved at about ~3,5 km/year (just shy over 2 miles/year). I think a more realistic estimate could be "longer than it has been there".
Opportunity is very very far, yes technically it is close if you are thinking about traditional modes of transportation, but it traveled so far only about 40KM, and it's max speed is about 2 inches per second it is not going to get there.
We have proven designs for Mars rovers, and a proven delivery system. The R&D has been done, the infrastructure is in place - why don't we send some more? We should be able to make incremental updates and constantly improve the rovers capabilities.
That's pretty much what we have done: http://imgur.com/3Hg9O (Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity). Mars2020 isn't designed yet, but it will be based on Curiosity.
Most pictures of the rovers fail to depict the difference in size between Sojourner (the Pathfinder rover), Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity which is the largest to date.
Besides rovers, on the surface there are also several landers, sent by USA, USSR, UK and ESA.
I suspect the above link just made someone's week end ;-)
UPDATE
On a separate note, it would be very interesting if future (manned or unmanned) missions could visit artifacts sent by previous missions and assess their state / decay over time. The only example that I know of is Surveyor 3 (moon unmanned lander) which was visited by the Apollo 12 mission a couple of years later.
For some reason, my dream is one day to be able to travel to Mars and visit Spirit in its final resting place at Troy[1].
The teams rarely stay together - there's often no stable funding source, and much of the grunt work is done by grad students. And the technology is advancing all the time - we're sending heavier and heavier landers, with better and better instruments. Even on Earth, if you were on a team investigating animal migration (say), you probably wouldn't be thrilled to use the same hardware that the last team used 8 years ago.
Considering that both rovers were planned to last for 90 days each both of them outlasted their mission like a boss you can't say any of them failed, yes Spirit has failed but after 2269 days in operation.
Opportunity by this time must be fueled by some dark magic since the darn thing out lasted it's planned mission by freaking 12 years.
"the Trace Gas Orbiter will be deployed to detect a wide range of atmospheric trace gases (such as methane, water vapour, nitrogen oxides, acetylene), with an improved accuracy of three orders of magnitude compared to previous measurements."
In Rob Manning's book [0] : He explained how hard it is to land on Mars. It's nicely sum up in those two sentences :
“There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.” [1]
The recent success of Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity must not shadow the fact that most Mars missions have failed.
[0] "Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer
To give it some context, here are the Mars failures:
Soviet Union/Russia: 1M No.1, 1M No.2, 2MV-4 No.1, 2MV-3 No.1, 2M No.521, 2M No.522, Kosmos 419 (3MS No.170), Mars 96 (M1 No.520), Mars 1 (2MV-4 No.2), Zond 2 (3MV-4A No.2), Mars 2 lander (SA 4M No.171), Prop-M Rover rover (SA 4M No.172), Mars 4 (3MS No.52S), Mars 5 (3MS No.53S), Mars 6 (3MP No.50P), Mars 7 (3MP No.51P), Fobos 1 (1F No.101), Fobos-Grunt
US: Mariner 3, Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 2
China: Yinghuo-1
UK/Europe: Beagle 2, Schiaparelli EDM lander
Japan: Nozomi (PLANET-B)
Also: Soviet Mars 3 lander (SA 4M No.172) landed, so counted as partial success, but contact lost 14.5 seconds later. And Soviet Fobos 2 (1F No.102) orbited successfully then lost communications during landing, so a partial success.
Also it's pretty dusty, so doing a controlled burn all the way down (like SpaceX does on Earth) kicks up a huge dust cloud which settles on all your nice solar panels.
I don't think the atmosphere is the problem with landing heavy landers like we do on the moon. For some reason I think gravity is the main problem. The only effect I can think of the atmosphere would have is on engine efficiency, and it's so thin I doubt it's much of a consideration at all.
> Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h.
Ouch. It will be interesting to read the results of the investigation as to why the landing thrusters turned off prematurely.
...says that the telemetry shows that the engines did fire, for at least a few seconds.
My uninformed hypothesis: the lander detached early for some reason, and started falling. As it approached the ground, the radar saw the ground coming, and it fired the engines for the final braking. But because it had been falling so far, it was now going too fast for the engines to stop it in time, and it hit the ground hard. (Mars doesn't really do terminal velocities.)
It says they have 600MB of telemetry. That's quite impressive.
That's if you were to start from velocity zero (e.g. fall off a balloon). If you start from orbital velocity, you have to slow down to terminal velocity, which takes a very long time.
I'm not so sure that this should be interpreted as "thrusters turning off prematurely" rather, it getting to the point of shut-off sooner (and faster) OR it stopped because they hit the ground
Lithobraking has actually been a feature in at least one Mars mission: the pair of impactor probes that piggybacked on NASA's unlucky Mars Polar Lander mission of 1999 [1]. The MPL itself, as is quite well known, ended up doing an unplanned lithobraking maneuver after its retrorockets shut down too soon (!) due to insufficient integration testing. The impactors were never heard of either; the exact failure mode remains unclear.
I read in some of the reports (can't remember if official ESA, news, or twitter) that they were turned on for just 3 seconds (instead of the inteded ~50), plus the parachute was cut off earlier too. So, as this report from ESA says, it fell from at least a 1000 times higher than intended (the cut off altitude was 2m or so).
Questions have come up about the landing strategy of the Schiaparelli lander. It uses a Doppler radar to get position and velocity, time deployment of parachute, and calibrate thrust for retro-rockets. The best references I was able to find are these:
What a shame. The only consolation, if any, is that they are not the first ones to crash on Mars. If I remember correctly the historic chances of landing successfully on Mars is about 50/50.
Reminds of the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video that NASA put out ahead of the Curiosity landing explaining how they intended to make it safely to the surface.
I'm still amazed that it succeeded. I was prepared to bet quite a bit of money that at least one of the many quite complicated stages of the landing would fail. I'm happy I was wrong.
To me, the air bags[1] used to land the Spirit and Opportunity rovers seemed like a saner way to go than trying to deposit them gently directly on to the surface using a sky crane. The reported reason the sky crane was used for Curiosity is that it was too heavy for the air bag approach.
But the Spirit and Opportunity EDL also involved retrorockets in addition to a heatshield, a drogue chute, a parachute and the airbags - it's just that the retrorocket part didn't have to be as precise as with Curiosity.
It was a trial run lander, the real one comes later. The primary purpose of the mission was the orbiter which is functioning, and lander testing, which failed but hopefully they get useful data from the failure.
Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs?
Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?
The landing techniques that are being used are bringing much larger payloads to the Martian surface than were brought in previous landings. Curiosity, for example, is about twice the weight of the Viking landers. In general, we're much more successful at landing and receiving data from mars-bound craft than we were back there; the soviets sent several probes to mars and got minimal data back from them before they failed.
Fast/accurate computing is needed for surface work on Mars because it means that the devices don't have to wait around for commands all the time. Giving more processor power and ability means that more flexible programs can be written to sift through the data and just send back the most interesting parts. Fast and accurate are very much needed for the kinds of lab experiments we're doing on mars.
Stupid question maybe, but would it not make sense to launch multiple landers with one rocket? The hardware cost of a rover must be peanuts compared to the engineering cost, the launch cost and the time to travel? How big is the lander compared to the launch rocket?
Given this account's admission of trolling and history of unsubstantive comments, we have to ask you to please stop. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12762670 and marked it off-topic.
Such as? Philae was a partial failure, certainly not catastrophic, but it was a "nice to have" addition to the Rosetta mission which as a whole was a huge success. Schiaparelli was an EDL engineering test and a landing failure was not exactly unexpected outcome. If the engineers can figure out what went wrong from the telemetry, it can probably be counted as a success. The actual beef of the mission is the Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft that continues to function perfectly.
Unfortunately, in both cases people end up thinking that the whole mission has failed when actually just a small part of it did :(
Philae was a success. Especially considering they had no clue what they were landing on when designing Philae (the only info they had were a few bright pixels + limited spectroscopic data).
Some experiments couldn't be performed as hoped due to the lander orientation (e.g. the drill, however they could still analyse "atmospheric" dust that the drill transported to the analytical apparatus). But that does not make a mission unsuccessful. What did not succeed was the extended mission due to limited amounts of power. But this was always an optional add-on.
Well, except for one of the two data channels being lost, and a design that had a major flaw that was overcome only with heroic engineering effort (and a major mission redesign). Both of these are discussed in the wikipedia page.
Well their actual mission was the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Since they were sending hardware to Mars orbit anyways, they decided to try and attempt a landing. The rover was not designed to last very long - 7 days battery. Their actual high quality lab on wheels will be going out in 2020.
Yes, the point wasn't the lander but the _landing_ .
If the landing works, they can try an expensive rover in 2020. Now, they can fix what they think broke, but they're never sure until it (fails to) land.
Or if it lands they can say "see? we learned to land with the crashed Schiaparelli, so it was good sending it in the first place". But a succesful landing would've been better, now they may face a few objections arising from the failure.
>Or if it lands they can say "see? we learned to land with the crashed Schiaparelli, so it was good sending it in the first place"
Failures may not be bad, but they're still failures.
Apollo 1 was a failure. Sure, it helped NASA make future spaceflight safe, and may have saved more lives in the long run (Apollo 13 makes it even) , but it didn't accomplish its goal.
Especially that a successful lander is a reality check. We did it once and we can do it again.
A failure doesn't say anything. It could have been a stuck thruster, it's fixed, and then the crush-zone is found to be defective.
That's why first (and test) flights tend to be cheaper and failure prone.
> Especially that a successful lander is a reality check. We did it once and we can do it again.
Not necessarily. A successful landing may be "we got really lucky". You may not succeed a second time, even with the exact same hardware and technique.
I heard them saying that before the crash though, so it's not just trying to downplay the failure. From what I understand Schiaparelli could only do a relatively small amount of experiments and only for a handful of days before the battery ran out.
Still, even if it's "just" a test run it means they need to correct their copy by 2020. I hope they'll be able to figure out what went wrong and why.
Schiaparelli's official name is the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module --- EDM for short. It only had a few basic science instruments and enough battery to last for a few days. It really was just an experiment.
Back in 1997, Mars Pathfinder was 175 million USD. They did try new entry-descent-landing techniques in preparation for Spirit/Opportunity, but the scientific return was pretty weak. It was a demonstrator mission, also for faster-better-cheaper, but we all know how well that works.
Once again, billions of euros are put into use for what is essentially scientific curiosity instead of trying to solve the very real problems Europe is facing. I love astronomy and space exploration but the amounts of money wasted into it rather than other problems with a high priority is staggering.
The EU has a population of over 500 million. For a program like this (assuming it's all from public funds), each citizen paid on average less than a cup of coffee costs at Starbucks.
It's real money, but what pressing pan-European problem could you really solve with such a tiny budget?
According to the easily-found stats on Wikipedia [1,2], the MRO cost $720 million, whereas the Greek bailout given in 2010 (alone) was €110 ($119) billion. Notice the "m" in the first and the "b" in the second- your "starting point" is orders of magnitude beyond the resources we're talking about here.
And as a Greek I see that day by day we are taking advantage more and more the data available from EO satellites. You need lots of data to restart the economy.
Spaniard here, the lander and the upcoming rover feature different instrumentation developed in Spain, something which has allowed extra funding for advancements in research and manufacturing capabilities, space-worthiness certification, etc. for our institutes, universities, and companies.
This experience both in term of facilities and human resources will allow us to better compete in the market of space application and other high-tech fields, which is exactly what our country needs.
I'm with you, to some extent. As a libertarian-minded person, I wish there were a way you could opt out of funding space exploration missions and other expensive projects that you might not agree with. If there were, I might be able to avail myself of the same choices when it comes to funding things that I disagree with, such as massive social engineering projects and trillion-dollar wars of choice.
But as a flawed, selfish person, I also wish there were a way to make sure that you and your descendants never see any benefits from the research you thought wasn't worthwhile.
