nasa-celebrates-successful-mars-landing

Been there, done that

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-06/nasa-celebrates-successful-mars-landing/4180454


--
Don McKenzie

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I started watching the NASA channel about 4 hours ago and
stayed with it. (Still watching, while they are doing the
news conference event and just finished congradulating each
member of the EDL team (entry, descent, and landing.)

Australia was part of this success, as well -- at least in
terms of participating in the very much needed communications
portions.

What impresses me the most is that this trip was about 350
million miles, ending in a tight coordination with two
orbiting satellites, the ODY and MRO, and deploying novel
technologies to land a 1 ton vehicle (if I heard correct.)
Hard to believe that all of this could come together as well
as it did.

Jon

 

"Jon Kirwan"

** Wonder if " Howard Wolowitz " will be offering any chubby babes the
chance to drive this little BUGGY on Mars ??




..... Phil

 

Try and get people to believe that the Concord and 747 first flew in 1969, or that the B52 proto took to the air in 1952.

BTW The B52 is still a current work horse.
Only 6 new heads and 3 new handles.


--
Don McKenzie

Web's best price on Olinuxino Linux PC:
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/olinuxino.html

The World's Cheapest Computer:
DuinoMite the PIC32 $23 Basic Computer-MicroController
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/the-maximite-computer.html
Add VGA Monitor/TV, and PS2 Keyboard, or use USB Terminal
Arduino Shield, Programmed in Basic, or C.

 

I thought the over-hyped commentary during the landing and especially
in pre-landing videos (like the "Seven Minutes of Terror") was
embarassing and made the design engineers and mission planners sound
incompetent.

The commentators kept yammering on about how there was "zero margin
for error", and how "absolutely everything has to work right".

Really? A design with _zero_ safety margin? Who signs off on a
system design or mission plan like that?

I'm pretty sure that the "absolutely everything has to work right" is
also bullshit. I heard several people who seemd know know which way
was up talking about redundancy in the hardware design, the software
design, and in the mission planning itself.

The blockbuster-movie-preview-preview-style-over-hyped-bullshit just
detracted from what in reality was an utterly brilliant job. Even
though nothing _did_ go wrong (AFAICT), and they hit center of the
bullseye, I'm confident that there was both redundancy and margin for
error designed/built into almost everything.

 

Same thing crossed my mind. What if something that was ejected plonked
itself on top of the landed craft.

 

"Jordan"

** The first successful landing of a Mars probe complete with small "rover "
vehicle was in December 1971.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3

The Soviets reached the moon with a probe in September 1959.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2



.... Phil

 

Even the animated video of the skycrane clearly shows the rockets in
pairs, with only one of each pair in use.

Sylvia.

 

I like many watch the landing coverage. There are two
things that really impressed me.

1) The navigation to get them there on a really small landing
footprint

2) With all of the technology in the systems to land this
successfully, one number still is impressive. There were still
250 single point possible failures. The math against it working
was astronomical. If there was anyone involved reading
this I am all ears and you have my congratulations.

Listing to the systems readout after the landing showed it
almost everything was nominal.

Congratulations all

Walter Banks

 

Dr. Adam Steltzner probably deserves very high praise. And I
very much appreciated his sincere comments about others on
his team (some, he said, were better deserving and more
skilled than he) to have been given the honor he was given in
leading the EDL team who worked so hard at perhaps the more
problematic parts of the problem starting 7-8 years ago. I'm
sure he slave-drove these people, but he also was provided
the source of confidence and the energy to push through
problems with consistent and overwhelming force.

Oh, what I wouldn't do to get my hands on the optical design
of those devices and some ideas about sourcing parts here. I
have worked with spectrophotometers for decades now, going
back to the mid 1980's. Some of it expensive, but all of it
only to commercial standards. I started using the Ocean
Optics (because they were CHEAP) as soon as they first came
out with something decent. (Most of my work was in the
visible, near UV, and near IR -- but for very different
applications.) I still have some decent setups here and I've
designed some devices that can be made for only a few
dollars, and wavelength calibrated for $8 more, so that high
school students could actually built their own real-world
equipment that could genuinely "do science" and meet
calibration standards. No intensity calibration, though,
sadly. That costs money to do. (Unless you have a suggestion
about how to do it on the cheap?)

I think few people understand just what this kind of team
work means inside, how much it changes who you are, and what
it means when the work is suddenly handed off and you scatter
to the winds. Perhaps actors doing a long-running play, like
Les Miserables, would understand when the play breaks up
(though that one never seems to.) It's years of hard work
building up a team that in the end works superbly together
and has learned how it must be that each person makes up for
the deficits of each other, while capitalizing on their
strengths, into a whole unit that from the outside is totally
functional and complete.... only to have it dismantled
suddenly at the end. Or, at least, the serious threat of it.
All that has been so hard-won....

I feel for all here.

Jon

 

Of all those single points of failure, the ones that worried
me the most were the pyros. You can test a lot of things --
like the 65,000 pounds of force the parachute had to bear.
But you can't test the ACTUAL pyros you will use. No matter
what you do, the ones you place in there can't have been
tested. We know how to make explosives of great uniformity,
of course. But all of that has to go into a system and it
must fire exactly correctly, under buffeting circumstances,
without a single point of failure in a single pyro. Just one
and that is it. Not that the rest wasn't also difficult. But
some of the things, since as the novel use of an imbalance in
weight distribution in order to permit direction control
during entry, can have errors in one part of the software be
compensated by the outer control loop in another part. So
even there, there is a backup hope. But the pyros either
work, or don't. That's what I was watching mostly for, though
the rest was also sincerely knuckle-whitening as well.

Jon

 

I have met some of these people, and i couldn't tell the difference in a
few moments talking to them. Just the same they seem to be made of
sterner stuff than Dale six-pack.

 

However, you can have redundancy in some types of pyros such as wire
cutters and other release mechanisms. Whether such redundancy is worth
the extra pyro weight, cabling and switching is a matter for experts
to decide.


Mark Borgerson

 

Right up there is the first flight of the A-12 (predecessor to the SR-
71) in 1962. Of course, only a limited number of people really knew
about it at the time! ;-)

Mark Borgerson

 

More news here, and predictions about rocks.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nasa-now-almost-positive-mars-
is-rocky,29069/

 

Yeah, right. The Onion. Pure tongue-in-cheek.

Jon

 

Apparently the first pictures from the surface of Mars were taken by
Mars 3 in 1971, so successful landings happened a few years earlier.

 

It didn't take long before the A-12 became public knowledge. Revel even had
accurate models of it, and the D-21 drone, within a couple of years. They did
a much better job of covering up the B2 project.

 

Same for the attitude thrusters on descent stage used to steer during
the pre-parachute entry phase.

 

There was certainly lots of redundancy. One number that is still
impressive was that with all of the redundancy NASA identified about
250 remaining single point possible failures. The math on that many
series terms makes the comment understandable.

w..