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Nasa has enjoyed great success with its Curiosity landing craft in recent days but their plans to launch another space rover were brought down to earth with a fiery bump at the Kennedy Space Centre. During a so-called autonomous free-flight test, Nasa said the vehicle lifted off the ground successfully but "then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight." No one was injured in the accident, which followed nearly a year of testing on Morpheus.
Nasa TV footage showed the space capsule engulfed almost totally in flames after the crash, with little left to salvage. The US space agency said engineers were looking into test data to determine the exact cause of Thursday's accident, but further details were not immediately available.
The landing machine is powered by liquid oxygen and methane, which NASA says is a safer alternative to traditional spacecraft propellants
Well it might not be but I'm sure from an engineering persepctive, testing prototypes meant to land few hundred million miles away vs less than a million miles away are much diferent.
Originally posted by Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by hp1229
Right now it is an Earth lander......On fire!!
So doesn't really seem to matter which one at the moment.....No?
Oh ok. So basically its a propulsion and autonomous control tests. I'm sure they'll come back with a better platform from the lessons learned. Sh*t happens.
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by hp1229
It's not either one really. It's a test bed for new propulsion and autonomous control systems. At some point the technology may be used for planetary landings of small payloads but there are no such missions planned as yet.
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edit on 8/10/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)