It's aliens!
Posted on 10/24/2016 9:38:14 PM PDT by aquila48
Europe's ExoMars lander apparently crashed on the Red Planet, and an orbiting NASA spacecraft has spotted its grave, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said. 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. MRO took the photos with its relatively low-resolution CTX camera. The orbiter will image the crash site with its sharper High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera next week, ESA officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Nah, that’ll buff right out. :=)
Lucas Electronics?
Lucas, the Prince of Darkness...
My point concerns navigation to Mars, not the failure to land unbroken.
OK, it’s semantics.
arrival 1: the act of arriving 2: the attainment of an end or state
I say a cataclysmic crash is in no sense an arrival, except perhaps ironically.
Certainly, the 1st sub-definition describes my intended point.
Politically, I suppose the flight was a disaster, but from the engineering standpoint, the team made progress.
Checking out, g’night.
Politically, you say? ... made progress you say? Anybody might bombard Mars with projectiles.
I would advise you not to console the Schiaparelli team by telling them they "made progress". The landing is the WHOLE THING. Can't you see that?
Aliens make the best hackers. :-)
With a Charlie Daniels voice-over => 'That's how it's done, son.'
It's aliens!
>>> That sucks. But it arrived nonetheless.
There is no ‘participation trophy’ for this one.
What is the goal of this mission? It failed.
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