Mars landing: Do-or-die time for Curiosity rover; it's on its own

reply to post by Phage


STOP IT, yer breakin mah heart.
Poor rover...
Lil guy did his best.

Originally posted by sonnny1
reply to post by elitegamer23

 

He will be Up. Even if he was in school, I cant take it away from him.

Man,you are a cool parent-
I remember my mum went into my school and asked the headmaster to let me see the very first space shuttle launch,STS-1,April 1981.
He pulled me out of class and showed me on a TV they had set up specially.

I remember being terrified,he was a scary man and I was only 6-I thought i had been naughty.
But when I saw the shuttle launch I was chuffed!

I bet your son will remember this night fover too.

I cant help thinking the entire delivery system for the new rover is reckless.

I'm not saying i could do a better job but why use a system with so many stages with absolutely zero redundancy? From what i can tell if any of the stages goes wrong that's it..its all over. All that time and money wasted.

Im sure if it was the military doing this they would have some sort of backup plan. It just seems that so much can go wrong.

Originally posted by PhoenixOD
I cant help thinking the entire delivery system for the new rover is reckless.

I'm not saying i could do a better job but why use a system with so many stages with absolutely zero redundancy? From what i can tell if any of the stages goes wrong that's it..its all over. All that time and money wasted.

Im sure if it was the military doing this they would have some sort of backup plan. It just seems that so much can go wrong.

i think the reason they are trying it this way is because curiosity is way too heavy to try a bounce landing or anything else we have tried and they want to keep as little dust as possible on the rover when she lands.

why it isnt just landing with rockets.
i read somewhere that nasa says it only has a 1.7% chance of failure.

sadly if something bad happened to the rover they say it might kill the mars rover programs. how stupid is that.
man didnt get anywhere by not trying and failing. we got to where we are today because when we failed, we tried even harder the next time.

lets hope for a wonderful and successful mission and hope lots of people become interested and more money is spent on such endeavors.

I have DirecTV and no high speed access at home (dial up) to watch the landing. Will any channels on DirecTV or news channels be broadcasting this?

Originally posted by Thrace
I have DirecTV and no high speed access at home (dial up) to watch the landing. Will any channels on DirecTV or news channels be broadcasting this?

i think nasa will b showing this live all over tv.
try cnn maybe.

reply to post by Phage


Mission Control to Rover: "We're sending help." Over.

It'll be a work of art if'n the strings dont break !!





www.jpl.nasa.gov...

reply to post by mungodave


the last part of the landing seems very complicated!

here is something cool i ran across.


Mars engineer did his best to trip up Curiosity rover
www.latimes.com...

Regardless of whether the Curiosity rover lands safely on Mars on Sunday night, Manning can say, with a clear conscience, that he did his best to ruin it.

Manning heads a team of hundreds of engineers who design, test and operate the Mars Science Laboratory, as the rover mission is officially known. But for nine days, he becomes his own team's worst enemy.

The cheerful veteran of two previous rover missions devises horrible scenarios for the team to face. He throws solar flares at the rover and pokes holes in its fuel system.

You know Murphy's law, that anything that can go wrong will go wrong? "Well, I'm Murphy," Manning said.

are we there yet

Originally posted by geobro
are we there yet

15 hours til touchdown, very close.

imagine how nervous the people at nasa are right now.

reply to post by elitegamer23

Wow man- that video was cool! Hadn't seen that-Cant wait for the real deal now. Hope all goes well.

Thanks for posting that! s&f

Originally posted by JimmyJagov
reply to post by elitegamer23

 

Wow man- that video was cool! Hadn't seen that-Cant wait for the real deal now. Hope all goes well.

Thanks for posting that! s&f

exactly what i saw when it was first released.

jpl/nasa need to create more stuff like that to get the general public interested more.

the quote at the end of the video is what humanity should aim for.

"dare mighty things"

reply to post by elitegamer23

cant wait for the black & white film ? are we there yet

Originally posted by geobro
reply to post by elitegamer23

 

cant wait for the black & white film ? are we there yet

13 hours we will b finding out if its do or die.

please let it happen!

Can't wait..

this is going to be so cool..

www.nasa.gov...

here is a reason why you should get excited about the landing spot.

planetsave.com...

NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity is set to land on Mars early on Monday morning, August 6th. The focus of its exploration will be Mount Sharp, a 5.5-kilometre-tall mound of layered sediments that time and pressure have squeezed into a mountain of rock, strangely located in the center of the large Gale crater.

The landing is set for 05:31 GMT on 6 August, “NASA’s Curiosity rover will spend its working life climbing up the lower part of the mountain, which is named after Robert Sharp, a pioneer of planetary geology who died in 2004. Researchers hope that as the compact-car-sized rover ascends Mount Sharp, it will unpack the hundreds of millions of years of Martian history that are hidden in the mountain’s layers.”

“The making of Mount Sharp
Gale Crater’s central mound, nearly two-thirds the height of Mount Everest, features several distinct layers of rock spanning hundreds of millions years. Some of these layers seem to have been laid down at very different times, leaving a mysterious gap in the geological record. Here is one way to account for the formation of Mount Sharp and its associated features.”

pathfinder and the twins sent back amazing photos, but i think we are in for some breathtaking images with curiosity.

Just over 11 hours to go... Everything running smoothly so far...

Curiosity Closes in on its New 'Home'
Sun, 05 Aug 2012 12:20:24 AM GMT+0100

With Mars looming ever larger in front of it, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover are in the final stages of preparing for entry, descent and landing on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6). Curiosity remains in good health with all systems operating as expected. Today, the flight team uplinked and confirmed commands to make minor corrections to the spacecraft's navigation reference point parameters.

This afternoon, as part of the onboard sequence of autonomous activities leading to the landing, catalyst bed heaters are being turned on to prepare the eight Mars Lander Engines that are part of MSL's descent propulsion system. As of 2:25 p.m. PDT (5:25 p.m. EDT), MSL was approximately 261,000 miles (420,039 kilometers) from Mars, closing in at a little more than 8,000 mph (about 3,600 meters per second).

The new Mars rover --- Curiosity --- is yet another example of a failed technological achievment that should not be allowed to explore any planet, including our own planet Earth. I'm talking about the obscene amount of plutonium dioxide [11 pounds] that is stored on the rover that generates heat, which is converted to electricty to recharge two lithium-ion batteries.

Whatever NASA is thinking...is not conducive for safe space travel --- and sets an example to other-worlder's --- that Earthling's do not care for the safe enviroment of other planets.

I believe... that full UFO disclosure by the United States government --- does not come to fruition --- because NASA wants the funds to keep coming for probes that try to discover extraterrestrial life; even though TPTB try to keep secret from the public: other-worlder visitations on our own planet.

reply to post by Erno86


yeah and think of all the pollution created here on earth to create this robot and get it into space. i am one of the biggest haters of pollution of our own planet but i can handle dealing with sending a robot like this to explore mars. sometimes you have to weight the positives against the negatives.
it is science like this that can one day maybe save our race.

id guess at the rate were going humans have polluted .0000000000000000001% of the universe. its not as big a problem as you make it seem. its only been in our backyard and who knows maybe it will be the death of us someday.

in 5 billion years the sun will eat earth and mars and it wont matter at all what we have done and any pollution will be wiped away.