Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit 156
dylanduck writes "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has slipped safely into orbit - unlike two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars. Remember Mars Climate Orbiter and the mix up between metric and English units? MRO is going to send back 34 trillion bytes of data, more than all the previous missions put together." From the article: "The spacecraft will use a suite of six instruments, including the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. This will image objects as small as 1-metre wide and should be able to snap pictures of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The instruments will track the planet's weather, geology and mineralogy, and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water."
For more information (Score:5, Informative)
NPR has an area on their website covering not only this orbiter but past probes as well.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Re:Yeah yeah (Score:2)
You're just jealous because I got FP and you didn't.
should be interesting (Score:1)
Re:should be interesting (Score:1)
Sprint Carrier-Pigeon Internet Service (Score:2, Funny)
I, for one, enjoy the relative safety and comfort of my fine tree. I am at a sufficient altitude to avoid the dangers that you "land-lubbers" deal with everyday. I'm shaded from... well, some of the harmful UV rays that you terra-firma-loving peeps drive your cars around on that spew out ozone-depleting compounds. I have fresh air to breathe, and best of all, those SEC officials will never find me out here!
Of course there are some downsides
Re:should be interesting (Score:3, Informative)
All in all this will be a fantastic mission -- it's been well thought out. For instance, HiRISE (the extremely high resolution camera, made by Ball Aerospace) is co-aligned on the spacecraft body with
Just read about it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just read about it (Score:1, Funny)
Not English (Score:4, Informative)
Pounds, miles, hogsheads etc are not "English" units. Please call them by their correct name "Imperial Units". This is not a joke name, it is what I was taught to call them when I was a child.
I went to an English "Public School" and am now over 40. I only know my weight in kilogrammes. We went metric a long time ago!
Re:Not English (Score:5, Funny)
If only we had. There are miles to go yet before we have fully.....
Re:Not English (Score:2)
But are we to take it you went to what we call a private school? Did you place "Public School" in quotes to show you meant private school, or, did you place "Public School" in quotes to show you meant public school as we mean public school, which is to say funded by the government and open to all?
English and American, two people separated by a "common language"... can't remember who said that... Mencken?
Re:Not English (Score:2)
Re:Not English (Score:2)
"England and America are two countries separated by a common language."
Re:Not English (Score:2, Insightful)
What's your weight in stone?
How fast do you drive on the motorway?
What size containers can you buy milk in?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not English (Score:2)
somewhere between 15 and 16
How fast do you drive on the motorway?
i don't drive myself but the speed limit is 70 mph and in reality lots of people go arround 80 mph
What size containers can you buy milk in?
doorstep deliveries still come in 1 pint glass bottles. Not sure what the supermarkets are doing.
Re:Not English (Score:1)
Re:Not English (Score:1)
I went to an English "Public School" and am now over 40. I only know my weight in kilogrammes. We went metric a long time ago!
Then you're pretty unusual - everyone I know who I tell my weight to in kilos just stares at me blankly. We have a long way to go before we go metric, everyone uses miles as has previously been mentioned, and most people still quote their weight in stones, which no one in the world uses apart from us. The funny thing is I accidently used stones to an American a while back, and h
Re:Not English (Score:1)
Consistent? (Score:2)
3 feet in a yard
22 yards in a chain
8 chains in a furlong
10 furlongs in a mile
or 63360 inches in a mile
1,000 millimetres in a metre
1,000 metres in a kilometre
Which sounds more consistent? - assuming I got the first section right anyway...
Re:Not English (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to be clear and accurate in your adjectives, pounds, feet, miles and such are referred to as part of the "US customary system" or "USCS" (contrast with "SI"). You abandoned it, we're still using them (and helped make the improvements to them that you didn't adopt until 50 years later), you don't get to claim them as yours any more.
Re:Not English (Score:2)
Cheers.
Re:Not English (Score:2)
Not always. (Score:2)
There's a difference in some cases. For instance, the English pint, as used by Americans, is significantly smaller than the Imperial pint, as used by the English. To be fair, if you had to drink their beer, would YOU want a larger glass?
And then there are at least three different definitions of the mile to contend
Re:Not English (Score:2)
Speed limits that are explicitly stated are usually either "30" or "40" - both meaning mph. 30kph is very slow...
But yes, supermarkets have everything in metric, by law. I think you can specify imperial units as well, but everything has to be sold in metric units. For example, we get 568ml bottles of milk (although most milk is now sold in integer or half integer numbers of litres - it's ju
Re:Not English (Score:5, Informative)
People weight: Most people use stones colloquially, lots use kg though.
Milk: Supermarkets sell in units of 1,2,4,6 pints (though they are marked in ml).
Some shops sell in 500ml etc but it isn't very common. Delivered milk is in pints.
All other food: Sold & marked in metric units.
Road signs: All in miles, mph, and yards.
Petrol: Litres
General distance: Miles
Clothes dimensions: Inches.
All science/engineering is done in SI units. God knows why you would use anything else.
Late Breaking News: (Score:3, Funny)
When someone asked why this satellite couldn't be destroyed as the other two alien satellites that were sent by the blue planet inhabitants, K'Breel ordered the traitor's immediate execution. This was the first case of someone being executed for stripping the word "evil" from the phrase "evil blue planet", according to the new law.
(My apologies to TripMaster Monkey)
Re:Late Breaking News: (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, he still owes us an apology for his sig.
trillion? (Score:5, Insightful)
For christ sake this is slashdot!
Re:trillion? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:trillion? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:trillion? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or 400 GB harddrives?
Or (now obsolete) '1.44 MB' floppies? (which was actually 1.44x1000x1024 bytes).
Sorry, but the (SI) metric system's prefixes for binary numbers isn't going to be changed, just because you think kilo should mean 1024.
Use kibibyte(1024 bytes), mebibyte(1048576 bytes), gibibyte(1073741824 bytes) and so forth. Otherwise, you wouldn't know whether a kilohertz is 1000 or 1024 hertz, or if a kilobit is 1000 or 1024 bits - which one is your linespeed measured in?
The m
Re:trillion? (Score:2)
Re:trillion? (Score:1)
Re:trillion? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:trillion? (Score:2)
When it says gigabyte, who knows if it is 10^9 or 2^30 ???
Beagle 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beagle 2 (Score:2)
Re:Beagle 2 (Score:5, Informative)
This might be of interest to you. From the nasa website: "The Mars Orbiter Camera can resolve features on the surface of Mars as small as a few meters or yards across from Mars Global Surveyor's orbital altitude of 350 to 405 kilometers (217 to 252 miles). From a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the camera would be able to resolve features substantially smaller than 1 meter or yard across" Take a look at the pictures on this site: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/m
The Surveyor orbits at 235 miles above Mars.
Re:Beagle 2 {may already have been found} (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Beagle 2 {may already have been found} (Score:2)
Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, which will photograph Mars in unprecedented detail once it reaches the planet next year, could confirm the tentative identification.
Re:Beagle 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Beagle 2 (Score:2)
most powerful camera? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:5, Informative)
HiRISE [arizona.edu], under the best of conditions, will do about 30 cm/pixel sampling, giving it a resolving power of just over half a meter. So it is indeed the most powerful camera in Mars Orbit.
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:2)
I know that NASA has published photographs that prove the "face" of Mars is not a face at all, but the published material is heavily edited...
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:2)
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:4, Informative)
Though, like you said, it doesn't matter: If you disagree with him, you're part of the conspiracy!
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:2)
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:1)
From what I remember, the MGS orbits usually take it further away from the planet, its only on a number of very low sweeps that it can get close enough for the really high detailed images.
Re:most powerful camera? (Score:2)
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!!!! (Score:2)
Oh frack! Belt-azr-ses, I've blown my cover! If you're monitoring this secure communcations channel I request immediate evac!
Re:ONE TRILLION DOLLARS!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the MRO telecommunications page [nasa.gov], the max bandwidth from MRO is 6 mbps. That's faster than my Cable internet connection!
Also, according to this page, our slashdot article summary is wrong. MRO is sending back 34 terabits, not 34 terabytes. Still that's a lot of (geology) porn. Looking forward to it. I wonder if the DSN guys will throttle their bandwidth?
At the press release... (Score:1)
Four out of five ain't bad ... (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks Zonk, for 'editing' (Score:1, Troll)
"Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit" (Score:1)
Re:"Orbiter Successfully Enters Orbit" (Score:2)
Orbit! Orbit! Orbit!
google mars (Score:1, Interesting)
Love the title (Score:5, Funny)
In other news Voyager has gone on a voyage, Mariner has
Re:Love the title (Score:2, Funny)
The fallback mission. (Score:5, Funny)
and even probe about a kilometre beneath its surface to hunt for water
This was the fallback mission in case it deorbited by mistake.
resolution of camera (Score:2)
I remember reading a Pop. Sci. article back in 1980 or so that showed declassified spy satellite images of someone in Central Park NY holding a book and you could read the title (approx. 1 inch high lettering). Is it not useful to have that much detail or what?
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2, Informative)
Are you sure the pics in that Pop. Sci. article were from orbit? Many very impressive "spy satellite" pictures out there actually came from U-2 spy planes. I don't think we had that kind of resolving power from orbit 25 years ago.
Re:resolution of camera (Score:1)
Re:resolution of camera (Score:4, Informative)
Also, be wary of stuff that has been "declassified." The spy satellites can do some pretty amazing stuff to be sure, however I am a little skeptical of this claim. I've got a little experience with some of the people that do this work, and to be sure they can do some incredible stuff, but reading 1 inch tall lettering on the ground from space would be quite a stretch even now, and likely impossible back in 1980.
Re:resolution of camera (Score:5, Informative)
All of the electronics have to be radiation hardened. This usually puts back the technology by a few years to even a decade compared with what one could afford without the rad-hardening.
Given that, the actual resolution is 20-30 cm per pixel (depending on distance from the surface). That's 10 or so inches. However, you can't actually resolve/recognize anything that's only a pixel across. The canonical requirement is 3+ pixels to be sure you're detecting what you think you're detecting. So, the actual resolving power is about 1 meter.
If the spacecraft (and camera) had been designed to orbit at a lower elevation, the resolution would have been higher, but as it is, it's pretty darn close to Mars' atmosphere and you don't want to orbit there. MRO's orbit is going to be about 320 km above the surface. Some satellites at Earth (I have no idea if they're "spy" sats) orbit at around 150 km above the surface--much closer. Many spy planes fly over the surface at only a few tens of km. With that and some amazing engineering to reduce smear, they could easily resolve very small objects.
One of the major issues with HiRISE is going to be spacecraft jitter (the spacecraft shakes, other instruments move, etc.). This could effectively limit the resolution by a few factors if it's not resolved. There is a high stability mode in which nothing is allowed to move and the spacecraft holds itself still while HiRISE images very important targets (future landing sites, etc.), but that mode is resource intensive and excludes some instruments from doing certain activities. What HiRISE is trying to do is equivalent to trying to take a picture of the street through a glass-bottomed car at 125 about miles per hour.
Another problem is context--sometimes the MOC images are uninterpretable because we don't know what's going on around them. With too-high resolution images, we'll just be looking at... well, noise, essentially. We can't really understand things without context to place them into. That's why we have a MOC-equivalent "context" imager bore-sighted with HiRISE.
All-in-all, this is the most powerful telescope/camera sent to another planet.
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2, Interesting)
HOWEVER, I wonder out loud (and ask for all your input as I'd like to learn) if some of the resolution issues discussed here aren't VERY different between Earth and Mars based on the atmosphere. Earth has, as I understand it, a very heavy atmosphere, and Mars (according to a quick Google search) seems to have a thin, light atmosphere. But whether
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2)
Re:resolution of camera (Score:4, Informative)
>satellite (to read 1-inch high lettering, the
>targetting and stability problems alone would be
>quite difficult to solve for such high resolution;
>you'd have blurring (from spacecraft issues and
>the person holding the book), mis-targetting,
>etc.). Given that:
>
>All of the electronics have to be radiation
>hardened. This usually puts back the technology by
>a few years to even a decade compared with what
>one could afford without the rad-hardening.
I don't know why this keeps coming up. In applications like this, computing power *is not* and *has not* been a limiting factor on spacecraft performance. Period. "Faster computers" have provided nearly no improvements in performance in applications like this. In fact, if you are really serious about high-bandwidth control systems you are still better off with *analog* and the requisite technology for that has existed for 50 years with negligible improvements. In fact, most if not all of the sensors (like earth sensors, star trackers, and any variety of gyroscopes) still use analog at the lowest level.
If anything, the advent of "better computers" and "better computer languages/programming practices" have probably *set the industry back* in terms of performance, and certainly set it back in the area of productivity. OO programming is probably great for some applications, but a control system implementation is essentially a procedural task. I've been in the business long enough to see the switch from analog/logic matrix hybrids, to procedural (done in FORTRAN, JOVIAL, and assembly) to OO. Some of the most efficient, clearly written, and maintainable code I've seen was implmented *using only IF statements and gotos*. Yes, you CAN write spaghetti code with FORTRAN, etc, and you CAN write clear and straightforward procedural code with C++. I've seen some absolutely incredible examples of both. But, if nothing else, in the good old days, you couldn't use the sort of stuff that you see in OO programming, because your GET and SET functions alone would suck up the entire memory and/or CPU. All that "better computers" have allowed is massive bloat, and associated explosion of questionably-applied OO programming. For this application the desired level of abstraction is the *bit*. But I feel another rant coming on...
More computing power and digital flight control systems provide much more flexibility and more easily-implemented features - but they DO NOT necessarily have anything to do with improving pointing performance.
In any case, the limiting factor in getting high-resolution has absolutely nothing to do with rad-hard technology dragging down performance. Sufficient controls performance can be acheived without computers at all, and was possible and achieved in the 60's
Structural exitation (jitter, bending) IS a limiting factor on performance, and most of the items that need to point some device accurately are designed with this in mind. But it's always a tradeoff between rigidity/damping and weight.
In any case, the ultimate limiting factor on the resolution is the size of the objective (almost always a mirror), and there's only so much glass you can launch to Mars with a relatively inexpensive rocket. You want to double the resolution, come up with 10x the money, and I'm sure we can figure out a way to get it.
Brett
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2)
Of course the telescope matters. If you can't get a good telescope to Mars, you can't get decent resolution images. However, we COULD NOT collect the data coming through those optics with a MOC-equivalent computer/CCD. We had to have something faster and more reliable.
HiRISE's computer drives the elect
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2)
Re:resolution of camera (Score:2)
ISS's orbit does not define the orbits of all satellites.
Re:That's not how resolution works (Score:2)
Resolution is the physical size of a pixel's footprint on the object in question. The pixels on HiRISE cover about 20-30 cm on the surface of Mars, depending on distance from the surface. That is the resolution of the imaging system. You are right in that it is independent of any human or computer recognition algorithm. That's also why I made a distinction between resolving and resolution.
The resolving power, or how large something must be to be recognized, by a human or computer, as a disti
Re:resolution of camera (Score:3, Interesting)
The limitations of
"English" units?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"English" units?? (Score:2)
Re:"English" units?? (Score:3, Insightful)
For better or worse, they are units that the English came up with, used for quite some time, and we still use. If you don't like it, pour money into a metric USA campaign.
In the end, it's just a system of measurement. It's no better or worse than any other system. It's not good, it's not evil, it just is. One may be able to make the case that in some circumstances (or even most circumstances) another system is ea
Re:"English" units?? (Score:2)
It's no better or worse than any other system.
It's a hell of a lot worse than the metric or SI systems. Would that be pounds mass or pounds force you're talking about? What's with that Farenheit scale anyway? And don't get me started on pints, gallons and fluid ounces.
Or pounds, shillings and pence. /me winces.
Re:"English" units?? (Score:2)
-Adam
Of course it did! (Score:2)
They're still mixing units (Score:2)
Re:They're still mixing units (Score:2, Interesting)
I just found this description on nasas site [nasa.gov] that has a nice summary of the state of the metric system:
Most of the world uses the metric system. The only countries not on this system are Burma, Liberia, Muscat,
Here's BitTorrent's chance! (Score:2)
Great! Here's BitTorrent's chance to prove that it's designed to speed up downloads and not just to trade movies! Only problem is the lack of peers, as Spirit and Opportunity's ISP is running packet filtering. (Clearly, this story should have been filed under the heading "Your Rights Online.")
To the OP (Score:2)
"Non-Orbiter Fails to Enter Orbit"
"Parabolic Object Fails to Enter Orbit"
"Orbiter Successful" would have been sufficient, no?
I've got it! (Score:2)
Is your glass half empty or half full? (Score:2)
Another way of saying it would be "just like two of the last four orbiters NASA sent to Mars".
Also news: Lou Gehrig dies of Lou Gehrig's disease (Score:2)
give it a rest (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you hate it when you make a mistake and even your friends never let you live it down? I mean, isn't it galling to do something right and all people want to talk about is the one you screwed up years ago?
Lessons Learned (Score:2)
Plus don't underestimate the power of americans wanting to bash europeans over their mistakes and europeans who aren't familiar with space science wanting to bash americans over their antiquated measurement systems.
Great headline (Score:3, Funny)
Sojourner (Score:3, Interesting)
Urban legend (Score:2)
What few remember is the true cause of the loss of the MCO, a low budget leading to insufficient analysis of the trajectory.
Re:google acquires solar system (Score:2)
Consider it done! (Score:2)
Re:google acquires solar system (Score:2)
Re:google acquires solar system (Score:2)