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Mission on Mars
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/7597361.htm ^

Posted on 12/30/2003 6:52:01 AM PST by rs79bm

If everything works as planned, panoramic cameras will send back extraordinarily clear pictures of the bleak landscapes that give the red planet its name. They'll have three times the resolution of the images beamed back by Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

``These cameras are 20-20 human vision,'' he said, ``so it really will be a walk on Mars.''

Next up: The NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity, each about the size of a golf cart and designed to roam up to 44 yards a day, snapping pictures and exploring sites that were chosen because they may have once held liquid water -- an essential component for life. They're part of a mission formally known as Mars Exploration Rover.

Spirit is scheduled to land Saturday at Gusev Crater, a large basin that may have once contained a lake. Opportunity will attempt a landing Jan. 24 at Meridiani Planum, or plain, on the opposite side of the planet, where previous missions detected a gray mineral called hematite that usually forms in the presence of liquid water.

Each rover is tucked into a lander and swaddled in air bags so they can bounce onto the planet, just as Mars Pathfinder did six years ago. The landers will boing around like beach balls and roll up to half a mile before coming to a stop, deflating their air bags and opening like the petals of a flower to release the rovers.

For G. Scott Hubbard, director of Ames Research Center, this mission is a milestone. Three years ago, after simple errors led to the embarrassing failures of two Mars missions in a row, Hubbard was named Mars program director for NASA. During the next 15 months he helped reshape the agency's plan for exploring the planet, lining up a string of missions through the end of this decade.

``It's an exciting time,'' he said of the upcoming rover landings. ``Everybody's got their fingers crossed. If this works as planned, we'll have live from Mars for six months.''

Although the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is in charge of the rover mission, Ames has played a major role, Hubbard said.

The heat-shield materials for the landers were designed, manufactured and tested at Ames. The tests take place in a facility built for the Apollo moon missions that takes up almost a city block and uses 100 megawatts of power. Most of the air is pumped out of the test chamber, to simulate the thin Martian atmosphere. The remaining air is zapped with arcs of electricity, like artificial lightning bolts, to create a hot plasma like the one faced by a spacecraft streaking through the atmosphere.

Ames also stepped in when the parachutes that were supposed to ease the landers' descent into the Martian atmosphere failed in last-minute tests.

Dropped from a helicopter a few months before the landers were scheduled for launch, ``the parachute just shredded -- it came apart,'' Hubbard said. ``The project was just appalled.''

The designers traced the problem back to some bad calculations and came up with three alternatives. But there was a concern that the traditional helicopter-drop tests might not be good enough to predict how well the chutes would perform.

Then someone suggested that the big wind tunnel at Ames -- the largest in the world -- could give the chute a more realistic workout.

``Our people really jumped in and got going in a very speedy manner,'' Hubbard said. The nylon parachute, 47 feet in diameter, was tested over a four-month period in conditions that simulate the descent. It's designed to open when a lander is five miles above the planet's surface and help slow the craft before it hits the ground.

Complicating matters, since the rovers are landing on opposite sides of the planet, they'll be carrying out their solar-powered forays at different times of the Martian day.

The first panoramic pictures will be beamed back from the rovers within a day or two of landing, along with data that may tell something about the minerals on the surface.

``The first week will be to figure out where we are'' within a few hundred yards, said Nathalie Cabrol, a planetary geologist at Ames and a member of the science team. Only then will the rovers begin their travels.

For her part, she said, she's mostly interested in understanding where the sediments on the surface of Mars are coming from: Were they deposited by water? Wind?

``It's such an amount of data that we never had before,'' she said. ``It's amazing.''

(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: jpl; mars; nasa; opportunity; rovers; spirit
Freepmail me if you want on or/off my Sci/Tech ping list.
1 posted on 12/30/2003 6:52:02 AM PST by rs79bm
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To: rs79bm
With a little luck, they might get a picture of the Beagle2...



2 posted on 12/30/2003 6:55:13 AM PST by bwteim (Begin With The End In Mind)
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To: rs79bm
Will these rovers be able to drive over to the Apollo landing sites? Quagmiring minds want to know!

3 posted on 12/30/2003 6:55:22 AM PST by You Dirty Rats
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To: rs79bm
Will they be able to see the footprints of the guy who talked of one giant step for mankind? Sheila Jackson Lee wants to know.
4 posted on 12/30/2003 7:03:03 AM PST by Piquaboy
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To: You Dirty Rats
"Will these rovers be able to drive over to the Apollo landing sites? Quagmiring minds want to know!"

Wrong rock.
5 posted on 12/30/2003 7:05:18 AM PST by DB (©)
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To: rs79bm
All this assumes they finally got a programmer who can do metric conversions correctly.
6 posted on 12/30/2003 7:06:01 AM PST by js1138
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To: You Dirty Rats; DB; Piquaboy
One of the first images received from Pathfinder:


7 posted on 12/30/2003 7:08:33 AM PST by Sloth ("I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" -- Jacobim Mugatu, 'Zoolander')
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To: rs79bm
Unlike the 1997 lander/rover this set of rovers isn't range limited by the need to relay though the lander base.

So, in theory, they could travel as far as they could get before they conk out.

In reality the plan is for them to explore about a mile radius from the landing site during their estimated three month life span.

The life span is just an estimate based on dust accumulation on the solar panels. They might only last a month or they might last six months.

But they aren't going to be hotdoging it across mars, the collision avoidance system limits the speed to a couple feet a minute
8 posted on 12/30/2003 7:16:43 AM PST by apillar
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To: Sloth
No wonder so many fail on impact...
9 posted on 12/30/2003 7:21:39 AM PST by DB (©)
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To: rs79bm
The landers will boing around like beach balls and roll up to half a mile before coming to a stop, deflating their air bags and opening like the petals of a flower to release the rovers.

Got my fingers crossed, and it worked great last time the Americans did it. But where do bouncing balls tend to end up on uneven surfaces? In deep holes and crevices. Somebody tell me that NASA has double, triple and quadruple checked that there are none such within miles of where these bouncing landers will be touching down. I'm losing faith in that agency.

10 posted on 12/30/2003 7:21:41 AM PST by LibWhacker
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To: DB
So much would be possible if only we could get beyond the monopolistic corruption that still pervades our bureaucratic governments’ SOCIALIST space programs. Related thread:
Did Astrium, an ESA-anointed monopolistic contractor, actually WANT its lean-budgeted Beagle 2 Mars mission to fail in order to secure greater funding for subsequent interplanetary missions funded by increasingly stimulated European taxpayers? Why won’t ESA and NASA simply offer COMPETITIVE PRIZES?

11 posted on 12/30/2003 7:27:42 AM PST by Analyzing Inconsistencies
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To: Sloth
Did you have to post that pic?

The world was made more stupid simply by that pic being posted. That is except for liberals. They're stupid to begin with. But if it's possible to become more stupid once the bottom of the pit of stupidity has been reached, liberals will find a way. And when they get there, they'll find Sheila Jackson Lee and her commie comrades with shovels digging to see just how much more stupid they can get.

Liberals; at least they're good for a laugh. And to pick up the garbage once a week. And occasionally you can teach them to flip burgers.
12 posted on 12/30/2003 7:53:37 AM PST by USA4ME (Let's Roll !!!!)
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To: LibWhacker
Ames also stepped in when the parachutes that were supposed to ease the landers' descent into the Martian atmosphere failed in last-minute tests.

Dropped from a helicopter a few months before the landers were scheduled for launch, ``the parachute just shredded -- it came apart,'' Hubbard said. ``The project was just appalled.''

*** ** ***

That is the stuff of "government work". Remember when they confused english and metric measurements? How much of this stuff is cutting edge any more? They should be able to plan. If suppliers are providing fraudulent materials they should be prosecuted.
13 posted on 12/30/2003 7:58:57 AM PST by longtermmemmory (Vote!)
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To: Sloth

14 posted on 12/30/2003 8:02:02 AM PST by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: dead
just ban that nutcase's picture.

Send her to the sun. Tell her it is safe. She will believe you, if you tell her we are sending her to the night side.
15 posted on 12/30/2003 8:15:20 AM PST by longtermmemmory (Vote!)
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To: rs79bm
I'd like on the sci/tech ping list, please. Thanks!!
16 posted on 12/30/2003 6:51:45 PM PST by kimmie7 (I need more time, more coffee, and more bandwidth!)
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