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Science

Mars Deep Space 2 Crash Program 170

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-gravity dept.
NYFreddie writes "ABCNews has an article on NASA's Deep Space 2 program where two basketball sized probes will be dropped from above the Martian atmosphere to crash into the surface at around 400 mph where they are expected to continue operating and transmitting data. "
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Mars Deep Space 2 Crash Program More

Mars Deep Space 2 Crash Program

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  • What we did IIRC was use laser interferometry to establish the distance to the moon to within a few wavelengths, then we crashed parts of the lunar landers into it and saw what kind of disturbance we got.
    Um, I don't think so.
    1. The Apollo missions planted a number of seismographs on the moon (6 total); the laser reflectors are not useful for seismic data. The seismographs were lost to science when the ALSEP packages were shut down due to NASA budget cuts. This was a supreme waste, as they were functioning beautifully; Congress axed the funds for data collection and analysis, a pitiful hundred thousand dollars a year I believe. (Somebody please nuke Wisconsin, the state that re-elected William Proxmire over and over because it felt that milk price supports were more important than science.)
    2. One of the missions included a mortar firing grenades to get some reference seismic waves, IIRC.
    3. The lunar ascent stages were not deliberately crashed, IIRC; the Apollo 11 ascent stage was still in orbit until a few years ago, again IIRC. On the other hand, the SIVb stage which pushed the CSM/LM to the Moon was surplus after the injection burn, and at least some of them were sent to collide with Luna.
    You have the conclusions correct AFAIK.
    --
    Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
  • I worked on the design of parts for the DS2 aftbody. The deceleration forces in the aftbody are roughly 80,000g over ~1ms. The wide bandwidth of this impulse gives it a roughly white frequency distribution out to 1kHz. So the craft was designed with all resonances well above that freqency. Surprizingly, it's not that difficult to build (and test using an airgun at Sandia) electronics and sensors which will survive such a deployment. The clock crystals are one of the most vulnerable parts and _are_ necessary for telecomunications. It is ultimately a technology demonstration mission, but a rock would definitely put a hole in it. That's why they're dropping two...

  • Sensor technology, the control systems, mission objectives are all more complex today that in the '60s.

    I don't know, actually. Modern remote sensing technology is mostly based on previously classified military technology...which means it's at least 10 or 20 years old.

    If by control systems you mean RCS, then this hasn't changed much either...

    And mission objectives have never been as ambitious as Apollo...nothing we've done since has come even close.

    In the end spacecraft technology just isn't all that complicated. Advanced microprocessors and large pieces of software are quite a bit more complicated. Most of the excessive complexity seen in the areospace industry has been the result of having to work around old, expensive launch systems.

  • Score: -1 rehashing a tired joke

    Are those metric or US basketballs?
  • This mission takes more than an RTG. You're going to need a full fledged reactor to generate enough energy to melt through all that ice. Of course it will be a specialized reactor, you don't need much electricity, you just need a lot of heat supplied to the base of the craft. However, once you're through the ice, all that evergy is available for other uses. And in the case of a reactor, it can be turned off (or down) if you don't need it's full capacity at all times.

    Of course, since there may very well be life in the europan ocean, you'll want to do a good job containing the reactor. But thats not terribly difficult if you've got a decent mass budget to spend on shielding.

    A bigger problem is definitely going to be communications... I don't think a hard line will work...the tunnel that your craft melted is going to freeze up again pretty quickly, and it will likely break any line that tries to run through it. Perhapse the burrower could leave radio repeaters at intervals during it's decent, each one would need it's own RTG, but this is already going to be an expensive and nuclear mission so that shouldn't make much difference.
  • The theory is that there may be frost at these depths. Not a great deal, of course, but hopefully enough to detect. One has to remember that we have only ever tested the martian surface down to about 4 inches. Think of what one would find in the first 4 inches of a desert on earth....not a whole hell of a lot. Go down a few feet though and you might run into some moisture.

  • I don't exactly consider mars to be deep space.

    Maybe they're still going by the old definition of anything beyond lunar orbit being deep space...

  • As has already been mentioned, our non-local trash is pretty minimal. In your scenerio, if stuff even lasts that long, His Holy Roachness will probably realize that the items did not originate where they are found, since they would be pretty damned unique. Plus they would find a lot more interesting stuff right here on the earth.

    There is a problem with space junk though. It's in orbit around the Earth. I think there are periods annually where various comm. companies shutdown their satellites and rotate them such that they are protected from collisions with stuff that has been left up there. I remember recently reading about how they track X number of pieces of junk larger than basketballs and such. It's projected that in the next few decades we'll have to do something or we're going to lose the ability to put satellites in space with any kind of expectation that they will not be destroyed by our own filth.

    -sw
  • Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.

    NASA and every other space agency should be doing something, but with their limited money, they've got "better" things to do than clean up after themselves. This won't change until we get some approximation of the general public into space (and need to make it safer), but in a classic catch-22, we won't get the general public into space until this stuff is cleaned up (making space safe enough)!

    What I wonder is how many of the MIR, Hubble, and other space problems are due to them being smacked around by miniscule bits of space junk. There's a _lot_ of untracked stuff up there, discarded and floating freely.

    Of course, given our race's history, it's not surprising that we use space (and now Mars) as a garbage dump.

  • To be sure, the technology in the '60s involved systems that were far less complex than today's systems. When you try to do more (today), your confidence level will go down.

  • What sort of a crater would this make? Quite a large one, I would imagine.. Also, is the speed significant enough to move boulders out of the way of the soil (or was that the whole idea?).
    --
  • Given what we do know about Mars, it's climate, and geological nature, scientists ("Back off man, I'm a scientist!") are able to make predictions about where we will find various substances. I think they have a theory and decent evidence that suggests that if there is water-ice there, it will be detectable at 2-3 feet.

    -sw

  • Dateline: Canopis Canal City, Mars (Score:5)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @11:57AM (#1492785)
    UPI (United Press Interplanetary) - Amateur astronomers report monitoring two spacecraft obviously orignating from outside the Mars local orbit crashing into the atmosphere and landing near the remote town of Marswell, New Olympus. UMAF (United Mars Air Force) spokesmen claim to have retrieved the debris, and have issued a press release claiming that the phenomena were in fact due to two weather balloons released at high altitude during some test flights. This account is hotly disputed by three Marswell residents claiming to have reached the impact site before the UMAF.

    In an interview, local resident "Creepy" Pbtbtwzxk told this reporter that the capsules had strange markings on the exterior surface resembling markings found on other artifacts previously recovered by MUFOS (Mars Unidentified Flying Object Society) which have been the subject of several denials of authenticity by the UMAF. Pbtbtwzxk, waving all six blue tentacles stated emphatically that "The UMAF knows what is going on, but they are trying to keep it secret from the honest citizens of the United States of Canopis."

    Meanwhile several other residents of Marswell are in the process of constructing a small meseum and gifte shoppee to commemorate this mysterious event.

    ---30----
  • On behalf of the Roach Overlords of the disinformation caste, I assure you that your probes will never become public knowledge to the general roach population, as they are not yet ready to accept the concept of intelligent life other then the supreme roach race.

    We have to be careful, as one relic labeled 'Windows' nearly brought the destruction of our race.

    However after carefully examining some of your technology, we wish to know of the secrets of the 8 track, the hoola hoop, and we wish further information about Grand Emporer Gates, the ruler of your planet for a period of time in the 21st century.

  • They figured they'd work with what they know. :)
  • You can't analyze soil samples and such with a telescope. You can use hubble to do spectrum analysis on things that generate light, such as stars, to figure out what's in them, but the idea here is to find out what's in the soil and if there is any water underneath, which would be difficult just by looking at reflected light.

  • By Apollo-12 people were already complaining that NASA's budget could be better spent on welfare projects here at home.

    It's worse than that. By '65 nasa's research budget was already being seriously slashed. NASA's budget was way down quite a while befor we even made it to the moon. Apollo coasted to the finish line.

  • On purpose. (Score:5)

    by Stavr0 ( 35032 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @11:04AM (#1492791) Homepage Journal
    They're crashing on purpose, right? Not like the previous metric/imperial blunder...
    ---
  • Oh, I know...we should spend it on defense or something useful like that.
  • maybe Microsoft worked on this nasa project. there awesome at making things crash on purpose....
  • ARRGH...

    This is not being used as an alternative to normal soft-landings.

    This is a special case where they WANT the probes to dig themselves into the ground. So it's either make use of all the free energy mars' gravity is giving you, or carry a drilling apparatus plus enough fuel to soft land it on the planet plus an energy source powerful enough to drive the drill. Think about it...
  • Throw an object from the sky and have it crash-land at 400 mph. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out!


    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
  • The official Mars Polar Lander website is at http://www.marspolarlander.com/

    It's been pretty well publicised this last week in press releases and stuff.

    Anil Madhavapeddy, anil@mars.ucla.edu
  • It'd be amusing for them to have an outer case
    that looked like a Bob-omb (mario series).
    Seriously though, is it intended to observe the
    surface, or to dig into the soil?
  • We are using a combination of Solaris x86 boxes and Linux boxes to run the website, along with NetApp cache boxes and load balancing DNS around various hub points to handle the majority of hits.

    The actual Ground Data System uses Sun (sparc, ultra, etc) boxes, a lot of heavy SGIs and so on ... no hint of x86 procs there :-)

    Anil Madhavapeddy - anil@mars.ucla.edu
    Mars Polar Lander Project
    http://www.marspolarlander.com/
  • I doubt they mean for Windows to crash. It just happens.
  • I noticed after the Climate Orbiter was launched to much hoopla, the polar lander was launched with neary a web page about it. It was buried on their website all year but never linked to the main page like all the other missions. Meanwhile they were advertizing the hell out of the climate orbiter, which eventually crashed. Are they already hedging the bet on these inexpensive missions by not advertizing them?
  • Um. NASA _is_ landing a space craft on Mars. These are just two spin offs that release during the start of the landing sequence.

    Anil Madhavapeddy
    Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor
  • You're totally, completely, absolutely, utterly, beyond any shadow of a doubt certain that NASA, should it discover that half the internal workings will fall out, would actually say so? That they wouldn't mysteriously come up with a whole new batch of *COUGH!* "experiments" to explain why their probe is falling to bits?

    (Me? Cynical? Why would I by cynical? After all, I worked for them.)

  • Well, if you're going to stand there on your high horse at least learn how to spell!!

    I mean, for God's sake, Konsumer????

  • they are probably using Windows to run this because crashing is what Windows does best :)
  • in going to Mars to do this? I could swear we do it with the Hubbel on a regular basis.
  • Like the last couple of spacecraft they "eliminated".
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is probably off-topic... but, WoW! I'm surprised by the parallels to Open Source software... Just consider: these little tough probes are made by shooting them with air-guns into desert ground. Sounds like Open Source software being released to the public early, let people find where and why it broke, then developers use that to make it better, more crash-proof, and so on, ad infinitum, until we finally arrive at something like Linux, stable, robust, and just solid in general.

    This sure does sound like the Cathedral and the Bazaar (credits to ESR) to me... NASA had been spending all that money building these intricate "cathedrals" (aka the traditional spacecrafts). And, try as hard as they might, there have always been all kinds of problems with delicate equipment breaking, etc., and tons of $$$ are spent on fixing or preventing these problems. Compare this with the two "crash-land-with-style" probes: built by a totally different philosophy (ie., crash 'em as hard as you can then make it tougher so it won't break next time, instead of spending years at the drawing board coming up with a "beautiful" and complex cathedral design), very resistant to harsh treatment, etc.. This new approach is cheaper, smaller, better. Reminds anyone of MS bloatware vs. the small but super-stable Linux? The parallel to Open Source software is simply amazing...

    (Disclaimer: I have been reading Slashdot too much, and this Open Source thing is just getting into my head... argh, time to get back to programming! :-D )

  • Okay, I'm sure you are right. Can you please tell me why? I thought the following:
    1) a=V/T
    2) f=ma
    3) Therefore if the stopping time is the same, 3V=3F.
    Could you tell me why it should be 9 times?

  • what we need to do.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We need to put linux on these babies, link 'em together and we'll have the fastest moving beowolf cluster ever!
  • How do you think they first classified the Ranger and Apollo missions? No one knew in 1961 if it would be possible to land a human on the moon and bring them back. As a species we had never been in a high orbit, let alone to the moon. This mission is a testbed for later missions. It would be very expensive energy wise to build a probe that would soft land onto the martian surface and drill down three feet, where it would be very cheap energy wise to crash a hardened probe into the surface to get it down three feet. It's not easy to run a space agency on the paltry funds that space agencies today are run on. On the contrary it is very hard yet they still do it.
  • My friends at JPL (Hi Mr. J, Hi Silver!) suggested
    a similar Europa probe except instead of a crash
    landing through the crust the probe would use
    a forward spike of a nice hot isotope, say Pu239.
    The Probe would then melt right thru
    any and all ice crust and then after hitting ocean release
    the forward spike from the rest of the Probe.

    This proposition was in jest, of course, inspired
    by all the problems they had shipping the ion
    powered Deep Space 1 Probe across country:
    "Do you have all the Papers to ship that Rocket Fuel?"
    "It uses Xenon, a noble gas, it CANNOT burn, it will NEVER explode."
    "Sorry, no papers, no passage..."

    -JT


  • There is but one Monkey god, and his name is...

    MONKEY! Great Sage, Equal of Heaven and Eater of the Lemon Cake!

  • KE = (0.5)m(v^2)

    You are right (if I looked this over correctly) about how 3v = 3F. But what you are measuring when the lander crashes into the soil is Kinetic Energy. which is given by the equation above and is proportional to the velocity squared.

    Now that I think about it, I can't see the main problem with your reasoning, but I know the other guy was referring to kinetic energy. I think you may be right about the force...
    Augghhh! Now you got me thinking! I should know this! I'm in college physics for christ's sake! Anyway...

    --
  • yes they're doing it on purpose - basicly it's a cheap idea - you use something really simple with few things to break, ruggardize it up the wazoo and just depend on aeroshell braking to get it down. Last time I checked the electronics were really simple - just an 8051 [8-bit micro - Apple2 sized power] and not much more - that's toaster technology these days

    Check out http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/tech/tech.ht ml [nasa.gov] for more tech details.

  • Time measurement in space (in any scale, metric or otherwise) is not going to be accurate according to any standard (ie GMT) clock, due to its subjective nature. We all mostly labour under the delusion that Time is an absolute (like mass) because we all live on the same planet (and hence are all about equally distant from its mass, and travelling at the same speed). This probably isn't going to cause too many discrepancies at inter-planet distances/speeds, (appart from causing the odd probe to crash ;) but at interstellar distances/speeds the apparent distortion/dilation would really become noticable.

    Tom
  • The real question here would ofcourse be the ideal height to throw a cat off. This has been tested and if I remember this would be at about 7 meters. any lower, and the speed with which the cat hits the ground is too low to cause any serious damage. greater height improves a cat's chances to right itself, thus allowing them to escape injury. Don't think they tried this from outside the athmosphere.. might be a nice experiment.

    //rdj

    PS you wouldn't happen to have the email of the guy who threw cats with 2/3 of their brain missing?
  • a tad offtopic, yes? :(

    You use "dd", base 10 numbers. Ie. Number 44 is written 44, 5 can be written 05 (or just 5) for clarity. Because base 100 is far too difficult to manage in terms of individual symbols, it's interpreted by using 2 base 10 digits, one to the power of ten, the other of no power. (ie. 65 = 6*10^1 + 6, as in digit1*10^1 +digit2).

    Ps. happy birthday ...

  • Posted by cookieman.k:

    The ape has a brain and he KNOWS he's the center of the universe!
  • >Projects which have a low probability of
    >succeeding will not, for the most part, get
    >better results. Weird how that works.

    If NASA had that attitude in the '60's, we would never have made it to the moon.
  • Last week's Quirks & Quarks program from the CBC had an interview with a scientist for the mars microprobe project. There are a few extra details in the story that the ABC article didn't cover, so check it out.

    The show is available in RealAudio from here [radio.cbc.ca] .

    This program also includes a story about a Planetary Society project to send a microphone to mars..

    Pentop

  • I'm so tired... (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @12:25PM (#1492832)
    of seeing all the posts berating NASA. In space exploration probably the most important factor in any mission is energy. With no energy you can't launch a probe, send it to its destination, land it, take measurements, ect. Whenever an engineer can save energy he/she will. The more energy you have the more things you can do. On a spacecraft the energy available is limited because we don't have an infinite amount of money and time to build a system with next to unlimited energy. It's MUCH more effective to use the probes momentum to bury it three feet into the ground than it would be to soft land it and then have it drill down three feet. NASA could feasibly build a space craft with huge energy reserves but that would cost a good deal of money, one thing NASA no longer has. It seems to me NASA served its political purpose, it got men to the moon and returned them safely home. After Apollo NASA saw it's funding cut more andmore. Had it not been cut we would probably have moon bases and permenant space stations by now.
  • a=dV/dT.

    If you stopped in the same DISTANCE, not only would the change in V be three times as great, but the time it takes would be three times shorter. Hence, a=(3/0.3333)=9. F=ma, so the force is 9 times greater.

    BTW- I don't want to double post, so I'll reply to your top comment- free fall in earth atmosphere is ~120mph in the lower atmosphere for the average human; higher for a more aerodynamic (force of gravity higher than force wind friction) object like an airplane, lower for a less aerodynamic object, like a feather. NASA says the probes will impact at 400mph; even at those speeds, a rugged object will survive-- think airline flight data recorders. The probes are built for the same purpose-- surviving a 100000+ m/s^2 deceleration (not sure of the actual numbers; that would be 10000 times the force of earth gravity) and providing usable data; it's something that's difficult, but quite possible for someone with enough resources.

  • I don't know about you, but it seems pretty deep in space to me.
  • What's missing in all this is the fact that the antenna on that puppy appears to be designed not to beam back to earth, but rather to talk to an orbiter, which, as I recall, crashed the other day.

  • Pragmatism (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just hope NASA doesn't become too focused on a pure crash landing. Things they should consider: 1) Streamers to help slow the pod down for a software impact. The streamers might burn up, but could take a large amount of momentum off of the pod. 2) Hitting Mars at a very oblique angle. This would let the atmosphere slow the pod down more. It doesn't have to be extremely oblique, otherwise it might skip off :-) 3) Put a thick layer of weak concrete around the probe. It would start burning up early, slowing the probe down. Just some ideas. It sounds like not everything in the probe will be solid state. There will be a cable and a drill, right? How will those survive a 400mph impact? NASA should try to find ways to reduce the impact to, say, 150mph.
  • Personally, I think that all space probe should be equipted with a small mount of explosives so that, at the end of their usefull career, they can be blown to pieces. Not only with this somewhat negate the presence of just, but we can also grin evilly while hitting the "self-destruct" button. Think of the possibilities!!!! ;)
  • Don't get your panties in a knot about this, boys.
    If you haven't noticed, there is always an add at
    the top of the main page. I'm willing to bet that
    /. get's something like $0.05 every time somebody
    clicks on it. Running a website costs money, you know...
    But about the source:
    1. How would it affect their pocketbooks? Would somebody try to start an alternative /. ? I think not.
    2. This stuff isn't hard to write... come on.
    3. I do agree they should release source to lots of their code, but this isn't a big thing.
    AFAIK this has never been an issue. Maybe if some people get together and do something about this in an ORGANIZED fashion something will happen. Has anyone even asked in the first place?
  • No idea, but if you check back issues of new scientist you can see some interesting effects of animals falling from heights.

    When a cat falls from a great height (block of flats etc) its usually when its alone, accidental maybe, or perhaps suicidal. Dogs however tend to either be tricked into the jump by vicious children, or just damn stupid.

    Dogs tend to just land, whilst cats experience secondary bouncing.
  • Next morning: "It has been reported by several observaories that there now apear to be several Venus-size chunks orbiting where Mars used to be."
  • I know you're trying to be funny...but... :-)

    Most of the first space probes were impactors. The soviets started with Luna 2 in '59. The US followed in '62 with Ranger 4. The first soft landing didn't occur until Luna 9 in 1966.
  • Anonymous Coward wrote
    > 3) Put a thick layer of weak concrete around the probe...

    Concrete: just one small problem - mass!!

    To get a thick layer of concrete into space in the first place takes energy - to get it to Mars takes energy - I assume they're trying to make the various probes as small and light as possible for this reason.

    If they were going to use a material for that purpose then I presume they'd settle for a similar material to the Space Shuttle coating, which IIRC is quite light and very heat tolerant.

  • Cannon Satellite (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I saw a thing on TV a long time about some scientist who wanted to shoot stuff into orbit with a giant cannon. Aparrently he made it past the half way point with a payload that sent a signal back to earth and worked until impact. He was well on his way (he just kept making the cannons bigger and bigger).

    Then the government he was working under cut his funding, of course.

    I thought it was amazing when I saw the special, but figured that no 'serious' electronics could stand the stress of being hoofed into orbit. Obviously I was wrong if NASA expects these things to thwack into Mars and then transmit back to earth.

    I remember (poorly) that the cost of blasting somthing into orbit would be around $5000. Very cost effective. Besides, there is somthing very appealing about the 'force it' approach.

  • To be sure, the technology in the '60s involved systems that were far less complex than today's systems.

    This holds for most technology, but not aerospace technology. Most "modern" spacecraft and launch systems are built with almost entirely 1950s and 1960s technology.

    Every single US launch vehicle (of any larger size, anyway), apart from the shuttle, is based on 1950s era ICBMS. The only alteration made to these ICBMS are usually in the area of control systems.

    The shuttle is early 1970s technology.

    There has been no new rocket engine development in this country since the SSME was developed in the early 70s. And this one (realitively) new engine is only used on one booster. All other US boosters use engines from the 1950s.

    The very first US LH2/LOX engine, the RL10, is still in heavy use, for gods sake.

  • I was always of the impression that the cat righted itself with the tail flick, via conservation of angular momentum.

    I do know, however that a cat with 2/3 of its brain missing can still perform this feat (I'd hate to meet the guy who tested this tho :/)
  • At least they're doing something what the hell have you contributed to in your miserable life? Wasting resources with your mere existance? Way to go, thanks a lot.

    http://www.zdnet.co.uk/pcmag/tinas/ 1999/82.html "No other company [Microsoft] has come close to providing so many innovative and groundbreaking products." I'll bet we never see that written about any Linux company or community.

    How is it that the Microsoft advocates manage to bash everything, and still praise Microsoft. This is way offtopic, but I've got to ask, how is the Mars Crasher Probe IN ANY WAY related to Microsoft's innovation and bets about Linux companies not getting equivalence praise!

    Why am I writing this!? Why is this here? What is wrong with these people!

    That's it ... I'm outa here.

    Tut Tut Tut tut tut tut ... tut ... tut

    /SLAM

  • DS2 can also use MGS as a relay.

  • Very interesting.

    Nevertheless, rocket technology is but one area that makes up a mission. Sensor technology, the control systems, mission objectives are all more complex today that in the '60s.

  • Kind of a catch-22 situation, isn't it. The more common primes divisible by the base, the less repeating digits through divisions by common primes. 5 and 2 are good for 10, whereas 2 and 3 are good for 6. But the bigger the base, the harder it is to keep track of. Ie. base 2310 is great, except it's huge. (I know a fellow who went to Waterloo who worked in base 100 on a regular basis. He had issues. :) )

    There IS a reason that the SI units have been adopted by all but two nations of the world (I think it's the same two nations that haven't adopted the Rights of a Child, just out of irony.) However, what you have said is good insight into the problem with the base for our number system. The SI philosophy is more intuitive for superscalar things, but as you say, imperial is great for everyday things.

    Although, I must say, feet, yards, and inches may be a bit misleading at times. (Some feet are bigger than others ...)

  • I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?

    Absolutely. I propose that from now on, NASA incorporates a small (in the area of 1 megatonne) nuclear bombs in all probes that are to land somewhere. The explosion vaporises the probe, effectively tidying up the landing site. Or did you have a better plan?

    Abandoned probes can actually some day provide us more information than they ever did when they were active. For example, studying a probe that has been sitting there untouched by man for 50 years can really give us insight to the sand storms that occur on Mars. Knowing how the storms consume human-made materials can help determine how to make long-lasting buildings on Mars.

  • Separting plutonium from water is a no-brainer..
  • Try "Internet Time" from Swatch. [swatch.com] It is cool.
  • A number of variations of this method have been bouncing around for years now. I used to participate in ICEPIC, which was a listserv setup to discuss various problems for such a mission and propose methods to overcome them. Most members were hobbyists/scientists just discussing this stuff in our free time, but there may have been some professional spacecraft designers that took part in the discussions, I'm not sure.

    Lots of interesting problems and propositions appeared. For example, getting through the ice. Do you drill, or use an RTG. RTG seems like the best way to go, but you cannot just 'turn' the RTG 'off' once you're through the ice. Hope it doesn't mess up any discoveries that may await. If you 'drop' the RTG spike, as the poster suggested above, then you had better either have some other sort of power source on the hydrobot, or have your several km of tether to the surface craft (see below).

    Another problem is power, but if you've got that RTG onboard, you may be cured of this. If not, then you must run a tether to some sort of power source (solar panels or similar) down a several km-long tether to power the hydrobot.

    Also interesting is comm. If you run a tether, which is a royal pain in it's own way, you've got many channels of fiber to talk through. Otherwise, RF transmission through many km of ice and water is too difficult. Another possibility is using a sonar-based modem, but can this transmit from water through several km of ice, or does it reflect off the ice?

    These just off the top of my head. Very tough problem, considering the huge initial expense (in terms of mass, power, and even money) to get to the reaches of Europa. Better have lots of reduncancy and other plans in case things don't work right (which of course, they won't).

    "In a world without walls, who needs Windows" - Someone from LinuxToday

  • Hmm.. Well I plan to vacation to Mars in about 15 to 150 years. I'll swing by and pick that stuff up for NASA. It would make a great collectors item.
  • The seismographs were lost to science when the ALSEP packages were shut down due to NASA budget cuts. This was a supreme waste, as they were functioning beautifully; Congress axed the funds for data collection and analysis, a pitiful hundred thousand dollars a year I believe.

    It was much more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. The ground network of tracking stations spent a large amount of time collecting and recording ALSEP data. This was expensive and used a large percentage of a scarce resource. The story that I heard was that there was a warehouse full of ALSEP tapes, but no money to reduce and analyse the data. There wasn't much of a point in gathering more ALSEP data if it was just going to rot in storage. The laser ranging part of ALSEP continued on to the present day.

  • The Mars Polar Lander also has its own antenna. Althought it is less powerful, it can still communicate directly to earth in a slower speed. Moreover, NASA said that they could reconfigurate the Mars Global Surveyor to act as the relay although we have yet heard the definited words about that.

  • Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?

    I think this is a pretty good example of the current environmental movement's misunderstanding of scale...

    Think about it, we have maybe 10 probes sitting on Mars (3 or 4 landers, and several crashed orbiters). But then think about how big of a place mars really is. The chances of anyone running into one of those probes during any mars operation is extremely small. I suspect that by the time humans get there we will have a very hard time even finding any of our older probes, as they will be quite well covered with dust and therefor very hard to see.

    There is also the physical problem of cleanup. How do you suggest our probes clean up after themselves? There is no physically possible way to return them to the earth, there simply isn't enough launch capacity for that. Someone down below suggested blowing them up, but that also would cost a decent ammount of mass and wouldn't solve the problem anyway (you're still polluting, you've just spread it around a little more).

  • > Doesn't take a rocket
    > scientist to figure that one out!

    ...but it does take one to have the device
    continue to work and transmit data after such
    an impact!

  • I don't know if it's just me, but what I really like about all these "crashing" probes is that I can hardly imagine the faces of the NASA investors when the engineers initially came to announce that all the money would be used to crash all that very expensive equipement on a planet jillion of miles away from Earth.

    I sure know that I'd think they'd be on something pretty bad at first. Somehow I can't get out of my head this image of a room filled with necktie investors looking really serious and this NASA techie that just finished explaining that yes, he's not out of his mind, he's proposing to crash the thing on the surface of the planet.

    Well, maybe it's just me then :)

  • Re:Cannon Satellite (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    More Info: http://world.std.com/~jlr/doom/bull.htm
  • No, there's only one non-metric nation left. IIRC, Brunei Darussalam went metric a few years ago.

    The other country that failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child is Somalia, which has no effective government at this time. Somalia has been metric at least since the Marxist coup in '74.

  • I've looked at life (and metric) from both sides (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @02:51PM (#1492878)
    I'm a Canadian who grew up in an imperial measurement - based society until high school, so I have a feel for miles, inches and Fahrenheit. In university I was exposed to metric (actually SI for Systeme Internationale) and Canada converted to kilometers, centimeters and Celcius. With all due respect, and having had experience with both, imperial grew while SI was planned, and it shows in terms of convenience. I don't want kids to think it sensible that there are 16 ounces to the pound, 12 inches to the foot, three feet to the yard and God knows how many feet to the mile. It's madness, pure and simple. I can explain everything you need to know about SI in five minutes, but I can't believe you're expecting anyone to remember there are 180 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water in Fahrenheit or that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees above zero. In SI, it's a hundred degrees and water freezes at zero, mass is in grams or some ten-based derivative, volume is based on the volume of a kilogram of water at sealevel and Bob's your uncle. The reason that we don't use metric time is because we do have to care about the duration of the day, month and year as these affect us directly (the week and millenium are arbitrary conventions). I expect one reliable clock to use in space will be the exact length of time in seconds since the launch of the first human in space (Gagarin Universal Time, anyone?) or the number of seconds since the first human object to reach orbit was launched (Sputnik Standard Date?) or the number of seconds since Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first humans to land on another heavenly body (no Baywatch jokes here). We only need to use nonmetric time as long as we are associated with planets rather than living in our own artificial habitats in open space. If we do this, each habitat can pick its own unique daylength. My personal day tends to run about 28 hours, which is similar to what people who lived in mineshafts for months found in their Circadian rhythm studies in the 1970's and 1980's. Metric time will come once it is useful. There is already a metric date used in spreadsheets and by timekeepers- called the Julian date if I'm not mistaken. Anyone else know?
  • I didn't realize cats were supposed to land on their noses. All my cats have been doing it wrong.
  • The goal of this mission is to have part of the probe stay on the surface, and part of the probe dig beneath the surface to search for water. The two parts will be connected by a cord, and the surface part will (hopefully) transmit data gathered by the part inside the Martian soil back to earth. It should be able to determine if any water is left in the soil of Mars. The truly amazing thing about this speed in which it is going: 3 times the speed of a free-fall decent on earth. Imagine the force of a airplane crash times 3! The mission will be considered a success if ANY data is transmitted. From a earlier USA Today article, it didn't sound like NASA was supremely confident that this thing would work.

  • Reentry is expensive. Designing a probe to do a nice soft landing is
    hard.

    Personally, I admire NASA for trying to cut costs in this way.
    Build the vehicle to survive the crash, and then just drop it. Why
    go to all the expense of providing a nice soft landing when you can
    simply uses a protective areoshell to protect the probe from the
    impact? Faster, better, cheaper.

  • Hmm...Basketball sized huh? (Score:4)

    by Ikari Gendou ( 93109 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @11:19AM (#1492883)
    ...Off the valleys, around Mt. Olympus, over the Phobos, under Deimos, nothing but soil.
  • Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. (Heck, I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)

    About the only reason I log on to the various mainstream newssites these days is to catch the space news - who launched what, what blew up on the launch pad, who has the latest mass-market space stuff in experimental stages, etc.

    And I love hearing about the exploration of Mars, and the moon, etc.

    But one thing that keeps bugging me is that we're littering all this Earth trash all over these external bodies - there's a Hasselblad sitting on a Lunar Rover on the moon, pointed at the stars ... there are 2 dead robots sitting close to each other on Mars ... there are strange devices hurtling towards the stars ... whoa, lyrics!

    Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.

    What if we come to an early demise as a species, and in a few millenia the 'roaches or whatever evolve a Space-faring Caste and they start making their way out to distant rocks, and they find all this crap - and some half-wit 'roach from the Religious Caste holds it up as evidence proving that life once existed on these foreign planets!

    Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?

    :)

  • From their mission page - http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds2/missio n/mission.html [nasa.gov]

    "On impact, each shell will shatter, and its grapefruit-sized probe will punch through the soil and separate into two parts. The lower part, called the forebody, will penetrate as far as 0.6 meters (about 2 feet) into the soil; the upper part of the probe, or the aftbody, will stay on the surface to radio data to the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, currently in orbit around Mars, which will then send the data to Earth."

  • It's been done before, sort of (Score:3)

    by Sylvestre ( 45097 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @11:22AM (#1492886) Homepage
    In the past both the US and the USSR crashed probes or stages of spacecraft into the moon in order to obtain geological data about it. What we did IIRC was use laser interferometry to establish the distance to the moon to within a few wavelengths, then we crashed parts of the lunar landers into it and saw what kind of disturbance we got. Again IIRC it rang like a bell, indicating an essentially homogenous sphere of rock instead of a seismically active body with a molten core.

  • Purple Monkeys on Mars (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If NASA carries through with this experiment they will surely discover something that has intrigued mankind for ages. The lair of the Purple Monkey.

    Little do most people know, but the lair of the Purple Monkey lies below the martian surface. It is here that the Purple Monkeys live in harmony, programming Amiga software and writing for Amiga publications.

    Some say Amiga is on the decline, but the hyper-intelligent Purple Monkeys know otherwise. They know that they were put on Mars for one purpose. Total Galaxial Domination.

    After the Purple Monkeys enslave humans they shall wage war on the Green Pandas of Mercury. It is only a matter of time before us humans are used as projectile weapons against the Green Pandas of Mercury. See.. the Green Pandas have a weakness.. and that weakness is their inability to NOT eat humans. The Purple Monkeys will use this knowledge to hurl us at the Green Pandas, rendering them unable to resist the temptation of human flesh. While the Pandas feast, the Monkeys will take over Mercury and drive it in to the sun.

    Only the great Monkey god of Naditz-7a knows what shall follow.

    Just thought I'd give everyone a heads up on whats to come.


    -rdogg [mailto]
  • Tonight, on News at 11....

    Earlier today the tiny Deep Space 2 probes crashed into the Martian landscape. Shortly after they landed NASA called the project a resounding success, and proof the Millennium Program works. However, later in the day after analyzing the data from the probes the project was termed a "successful failure".

    It has been reported to News At 11 that while the first probe returned all of the expected data, the second only transmitted on word then stop responding.

    "Ouch"
  • I just hope NASA doesn't become too focused on a pure crash landing.

    Unfortunately, but in what seems to have become a rather typical event on /., the posting here, and responses to it focus in on the first few lines of the article and does not examine the topic in any depth.

    The actual crash landing probes are hitchhiking on a much larger probe that will (hopefully) be making a soft landing at the south pole and be doing all sorts typical stuff like grabbing soil samples, listening to the wind throug a mike (run by Linux), taking pictures and doing it's best to disturb the local population.

  • Hehe, I posted that comment just to (indirectly) hint that too many slashdotters are just going overboard with this OSS thing (although I've nothing against OSS and in fact everything for OSS). I think it won't be too much to say that too many slashdotters are religiously following OSS and religiously hating MS, rather than really "seeing the light", so to speak.

    BTW I was talking about OSS, not about Linux specifically, though it did serve as an example.

    The Linux Zealot profile:

    1. Reads Slashdot regularly.
    2. Occasionally posts pro-Linux or anti-MS comments on Slashdot, regardless of the topic at hand.
    3. Will spread FUD about how MS sucks the same way MS spreads FUD about how Linux sucks.
    4. Gauges the accuracy of benchmarks by whether Linux outperforms NT on it or not.
    5. Will fall prostrate before Linus and, if so asked, serve him as a Linux Priest for the rest of his life.
    6. Goal in life is to make a pilgrimage to the University of H (for Holiness), Finland.
    7. Will flame me for this post.

    :-D

  • Do you think we should have a Linux installation flipbook???

    How about a windows NT installtion book:
    1) Me brining in the cd and putting it in.
    2) 3 formatted disks? Ok, me rebooting, going to a previous installtion of something, formatting all 3, and going ahead.
    3) One of the disk doesn't work.. Ok... Me switching the disk.
    4) Me falling asleep for the 70 hours it takes for NT to copy all those files to the disk.
    5) What the hell are all those hexidecial numbers doing with a blue screen backdrop?
    6) Repeat steps 1-5 2 or 3 times over.

    note: my experiences installing anything don't mean that you will have a problem installing it...
  • I am going to try to impress my coworkers by using metric time from now on... "I will be ready in 3 Kiloseconds"

  • Lunar Surveyor used for materials analysis (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the later Apollo missions to the moon picked up part of an old unmanned soft landing Surveyor probe and retrieved part of the probe to analyse on Earth to examine how the materials held up to solar wind, micrometeoroid bombardment and thermal flux in the years since it landed there.

    We can't yet send return missions to the outer solar system (we're just about to do this to Mars and the Soviets did return some lunar materials from at least one Lunikhod mission - after Apollo IX returned, however) and the capacity to go past a place will always precede the ability to orbit, land and return.

    Unless the original poster of this thread wants to wait until we can fly a return mission to Mars, I trust s/he won't begrudge the rest of us having Mars unmanned landings since 1976.

    Besides, what the hell would you do about Venus, with near Earth escape velocity, a sulphuric acid atmosphere hotter than an autoclave and hundreds of times greater pressure than sealevel? Wait until we can put oversized oven gloves around the lander and huge launch return vehicle?

    Look, only the Soviets got to Venus, and the precious jewel lens (I forget if it was an emerald, ruby, sapphire or diamond, but it sure cost the "worker's paradise" a bundle) *melted* after a few hours. And I'm not prepared to wait for a return vehicle to the outer solar system.

    Look, while you're at it, why use Earth-based radar imaging of Venus? After all, not all those radio waves will come back, and so we'll be heating up Venus and possibly screwing up the local conditions.

    Yeah, that's it. How about if you just quit your day job and look at Venus with really big binoculars until the clouds open up and you can describe the surface to the rest of us?
  • My question is, what kind of maniacal plan have the people at NASA come up with this time? Building probes that can survive 400mph impacts is surely more expensive than adding a couple parachutes or whatever they use to slow the things down...Could this be another freakish post-coldwar conspiracy targeted at chewing up precious tax-dollars?
  • say again? "Purple Monkey" just sounds dirty to me, like something I would say back in like 8th grade and giggle for about 2-3 hours:

    What did he say?
    Purple monkey...
    huh huh, heh heh cool
  • Can't NASA just land a spacecraft on Mars?

    Can't you read the article for some reason? The reasons are all explained.

    Makes me wonder why you got a positive moderation point.

    -- Abigail

  • Humans produce very little garbage. We should look at the material in landfills as an untapped resource, not garbage.

    Likewise, all that space junk, drop in the bucket though it may be, is just some stuff that is slightly more organized than the stuff that was there before, but really little different than the rocks and sand that are also there.

    In the future, when you refer to the Moon and Mars, and envision the possibilities for exploiting the resources there, remember that a small amount of steel, aluminum, and plastic might be available for you to work into your plans. Might as well break an old habit on a new world.


  • DS2 Flipbook animation (Better, cheeper, faster?) (Score:3)

    by jtribble ( 120262 ) on Tuesday November 30, 1999 @11:27AM (#1492909)
    Check out the DS2 mission flipbook. [nasa.gov]

    Do you think we should have a Linux installation flipbook???

    -JT



  • 3 times the speed = 9 times the energy. If you stop in the same distance, the forces will be 9 times as high. This assumes that Martian soil is about the same consistency as Mojave desert soil, of course.

    I wonder if these little babies carry high-speed accelerometers to infer the mechanical characteristics of the stuff they're plowing into... could be useful information.
    --
    Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,

  • ... it was more of a commentary on the fact that our space program has become a "Galactic Trash Program" more than a "Woohoo, Vacation on the Moon" program...

    Guess that was missed a bit.

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