Mars Rover Lands PHEW!
August 6th, 2012
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I don’t know if I’m the only one who felt this way, but upon seeing the first images come back from the most ambitious mars rover yet last night, my mood was less excitement and more relief. It worked! It did not crash nor did it somehow fail to communicate to earth. It made it down safe and sound. The most dangerous part of the mission is finished.
The reason for my relief is not simply that the heavy rover required a complex and new method of landing, but simply the fact that so much can go wrong even with more conventional landings. Not only could the landing go wrong, but the consequences would be enormous. Had one of the earlier two rovers failed, there would have still been the other. But the rover Curiosity is one of a kind. There is no backup plan and all the eggs in this mission are in one basket. The mission has cost over two billion dollars and used much of the available stockpile of precious plutonium-238.
In other words, we really only had one shot at this and had it gone wrong, the consequences for the US space program could have been enormous. Unmanned deep space missions are a crap-shoot. Even the best engineered and tested ones can and do fail. Well, this one didn’t. We’ve already got a few black and white photos back from it. We’ll see what kind of discoveries it will make in the days, weeks months and hopefully years to come. Now that we’ve let out the sigh of relief, it’s time to get excited!
This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Announcements, Good Science, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 6th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
My hat’s off to NASA/JPL too and can’t wait till the lab starts rolling!
This is also a magical time for NASA to really start mentioning that Curiosity is nuclear powered to the visitors to its facilities to help de-Darth Vaderize a source of energy. At the Smithsonian, they just couldn’t mention enough over models of Spirit and Opportunity that they were solar powered. This is where nuclear energy can positively shine to the public in a friendly way, and NASA shouldn’t act grudging to mention it!
James Greenidge
Queens NY
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August 6th, 2012 at 7:31 pm
There was a good question at the JPL Curiosity briefing this evening: Why are you waiting until daylight to do work with the rover when it’s got a round-the-clock nuclear power source?
The answer, basically, was that there is only so much power per sol to work with – not enough for continuous active rover operation – and it makes sense to use that power during the day. The night among other challenges is cold, and extra power would be required from the limited budget, for example to warm up actuators. Of course, the night is also dark which would make imaging tricky.
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August 6th, 2012 at 9:39 pm
I’m not even involved and the stress damned near killed me, it’s a wonder that those who bet their careers on this mission weren’t jibbering from it yesterday.
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August 7th, 2012 at 12:31 am
I’m not the only one getting those weird characters in the post, am I?
Jeez. I’ll figure this out. Really. I somehow managed to eliminate them from the old posts while adding them to the new ones!
Go figure.
I’m working on it
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August 7th, 2012 at 8:10 am
Considering how badly NASA needed a succes with a Mars-mission it was even more disconcerting when you looked at the landing seequence…and they somehow managed to pull it off!?
Well done I say!
What wierd characters?!
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August 7th, 2012 at 9:06 am
Spirit and Opportunity’s photovoltaic systems allowed them to remain useful far beyond their projected life spans. If I remember correctly, the nuclear decay battery on Curiosity has a stated life of something like 2 years. Does that put a hard limit on Curiosity’s useful life, or is it sort of like the stated life on an LED bulb: beyond two years power output drops below X% of maximum, but the rover will continue service in diminished capacity for years to come?
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August 7th, 2012 at 11:42 am
Shafe: Curiosity’s nominal mission is 2 years (compare to nominal 90 days for the MERs). I expect Curiosity to still be going long beyond that. I think I heard that the power supply is good for at least 14 years. However half-life of plutonium-238 is 88 years, so I think it must be that other usage wear effects of the power supply are the limiting factors there.
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August 8th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
…and somehow it managed to land on the last Martian cat.
But seriously – Godspeed, Curiosity.
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