Nailed It !
Posted on 10/21/2016 2:24:09 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The lander, named Schiaparelli, stopped communicating with mission control about 1 minute before its planned touchdown on Mars Wednesday morning (Oct. 19). Newly released photos of the landing site by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) seem to confirm what ExoMars team members had suspected — that Schiaparelli died a violent death.
The photos show a bright feature consistent with the lander's 39-foot-wide (12 meters) parachute, as well as a 50-by-130-foot (15 by 40 m) dark patch likely created by the lander's impact, ESA officials said.
"Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometers [1.2 to 2.5 miles], therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h [186 mph]," ESA officials wrote in an update today (Oct. 21).
"The relatively large size of the feature would then arise from disturbed surface material," they added. "It is also possible that the lander exploded on impact, as its thruster propellant tanks were likely still full. These preliminary interpretations will be refined following further analysis."
ExoMars team members think those tanks were still full because Schiaparelli's data indicate that the lander didn't fire its descent-slowing thrusters nearly as long as it was supposed to, ESA officials have said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
“Ack ack ack ack.....”
The Europeans had a very poor plan for landing the Schiaparelli. The plan was to open the parachute upon impact, and then turn the reverse thrust on. Didn’t work, and the Martians are very angry. Who knows, that crash-landing probably wiped out the only traces of life on the planet.
Someone suggested that the conversion would be fast & complete if only Google would simply refuse to return results in imperial units.
Is this the planet made of cheese?
Nailed It !
A lot of thruster fuel is hypo-whatsit. Boom.
Our government agencies can locate a crash site millions and millions of miles away on a hostile planet, but can’t find 30,000 e-mails on a plastic and metal box here on Earth?
Yep, the good Lord took a liking to the probe and blew it up good!
Rack! Rack!
Good thing they weren’t spending their own money.
I’m sure they used hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide!
The ballistic entry of Schiaparelli is closer to that of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity than the guided entry of Curiosity. “The EDM is Europe’s first try at landing on Mars, and as landing systems go, it is pretty ambitious,” says Jorge Vago (ESA’s ExoMars Project Scientist). “Schiaparelli incorporates a sophisticated Doppler radar to measure distance to the ground and speed over the surface. The information is used to command the
pulsed hydrazine engines,
which are organized in three clusters of three motors each.”
With today’s launch, Europe and Russia seek to break the Mars “curse”
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/with-todays-launch-europe-and-russia-seek-to-break-the-mars-curse/
THE MARS CURSE
http://www.universetoday.com/13267/the-mars-curse-why-have-so-many-missions-failed/
With ExoMars, will Russia break its “Mars Curse?”
http://www.reallycoolblog.com/with-exomars-will-russia-break-its-mars-curse/
Parachute? I see the problem.
I’m shocked pink!
Wrong.
Engineering (machining) needs 1/10 of 1/1000 of an inch accuracies and definitions (screw threads, finishes, cuts, parts and die machining, tolerances, nozzle and gasket sizes, bolt holes, nuts, grinding grit, filters, seals, shaft clearances, etc.), and metric just can’t handle it without thousandths of a decimal place.
Which puts you right back where you are complaining now: millimeters are too “big” to be useful.
Metric works fine at deep submicron levels for integrated circuit design and fabrication. It also works great for PCB design (though we typically adopt a mil as a base unit for trace width ... 1/1000 inch ... Though I trust you’re familiar with it). Then again, in each case, you’re already working on a nm or mm scale overall and sizes are relatively close to one another.
I can’t see how one fractional unit is a bigger PITA than another. I’m probably biased since the work I do works well in both measurement domains :-).
Dusting off the Slim Whitman...
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