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Subscribe to RSSTeam members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.
"The Dark Knight Rises"? Bah! If you measure the heft of a movie trailer by dramatic impact, "Seven Minutes of Terror" is the one to watch. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the five-minute trailer today to tout the upcoming entry, descent and landing of its $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, starring the Curiosity rover. That price tag amounts to 10 times the estimated production budget for "The Dark Knight Rises."
The Batman movie is likely to meet with wild success when it opens July 20. The Mars mission could bomb utterly when it lands Aug. 5. The wildest part of the probe's seven-minute ride through the atmosphere will come when a hovering "sky crane" is due to lower the car-sized rover to the ground within Gale Crater, then blast itself away before it falls on top of the darned thing.
Even JPL's engineers admit they sometimes think the concept is crazy. But to get a true sense of exactly how crazy, you have to watch the video. "If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over," engineer Tom Rivellini says.
Another engineer, Adam Steltzner, observes that it will take about 15 minutes for signals to make their way back from Mars to Earth during the landing. "So when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been alive, or dead, on the surface for at least seven minutes," he says.
I'm getting chills already.
For more about entry, descent and landing, or EDL, check out Emily Lakdawalla's preview on the Planetary Society's blog.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Now that's some wild stuff there ....
They did a great job with that video , making it pretty clear how the landing is going to go down ....
I hate to think that the news for the August 5 event may not make much major news ....
Even though it would only be news of a successful landing or not ....
But guess what .... ??
I'll bet all I have to do to find out , is to check into "The Cosmic Log" ....
Thanks for the article and the video ....
I'll be down there for all the action, Ben, so you can bet this'll be covered big time. But it won't all be in Cosmic Log ... you'll want to keep a watch on space.msnbc.com for all the goings-on with history's biggest and most expensive Mars mission.
I'll be there too, but why the heck didn't they arrange the landing for a Friday or Saturday night? I gotta work the next day. The Spirit and Opportunity teams had the decency to land on Saturday nights when I could stay up late with impunity.
Seriously, I will be there on the night of August 5 and my heart will be.... making itself known.
Your so lucky Alan , to be able to join in on the hopeful celebration of this amazing event ....
Thanks , I'll be checking into "space.msnbc.com" on and off on Sunday August 5 , to see how this mission pans out ....
This is technology at its best ....
A car sized rover , $2.5 billion dollar cost , at least 36 million miles away from Earth , landing on Mars in the manner depicted in the video here ....
"Come on" , who could not think that this is one of the U.S.A's NASA's amazing proud moments .... ??
I'll be rooting for a trouble free successful landing of "The Curiosity Rover" ....
Because I am also curious .... "LOL"
Have fun ....
I expect to watch it live on NASA TV at the NASA website. As I recall, that's how I watched both rover landings -- live from JPL on NASA TV. Now, there's even a NASA TV iPad app.
Alan,
Will there be any video cameras aboard to film the descent/landing? Not live, I know, but it would sure be great to view the real thing after the fact.
CGI is nice but I like to see the real thing, unedited. The cameras aboard the Shuttle during launch were great. Wish they had tried some re-entry cams though.
I would imagine that, with every ounce of weight being precious, NASA would not install a camera devoted solely to documenting the descent of the rover. It would be an exciting sight, though, I have to say.
What a monumental waste of money, considering our current economical status.
bigbenalaska- you might be able to get a live feed from NASA at Spaceflightnow.com, thats what I always check for space related things and has yet to fail me. Im sure not a landing video, but live status updates as they give them out.
Thanks Moheeheeko ....
I just browsed that sight "Spaceflightnow.com" ....
Looks like a winner ....
Waste of money? So, it would have been better to lay off all the people who worked and are working on this (not just NASA, but the companies and universities that develop the components, build the chassis, feed the workers, supply the parts,....) and throw the country into further and deeper recession?
People really don't get it, but the time to cut government spending is when the economy is doing well. That way, the economy can absorb the cut workers and decreased demand on goods and services.
However, I would absolutely support more research in space, oceans, physics, biology, medicine, etc, just about everything exceptthe search for bigfoot.
Tony don't even bother responding to the Bucket. There is at least one of those on every discution of anything having to do with NASA. To this people if you can't use it right here right now, then you can't use it. They never bother to look at/ for the furture.
I know, but sometimes I just cannot help myself.
This project cost a little over $8 per taxpayer, and that is spread over years of planning, building and flying it there, so probably less than $1 per year per taxpayer for good research and information.
A good investment if you ask me.
Dave, as a matter of fact there will be a camera recording the descent ... known as the Mars Descent Imager or MARDI.
http://www.msss.com/all_projects/msl-mardi.php
These color, high-def images, captured at a rate of 4 frames a second, will be used for a variety of scientific purposes, but perhaps most importantly to figure out where the darn probe has landed. "Despite high-accuracy radiometric tracking and high-resolution orbiter imaging, it is still possible that the lander's position will not be known with respect to local surface features, especially if the terrain is relatively uniform or the vehicle lands in a crater," MSSS says. Of course, the lander will have to survive in order to send back the video.
cool video..........hope it works.........looking forward to seeing if it does.
I'm sitting on the edge of my seat because it's a real cliff hanger. Let's hope the landing goes as planned.
You`ve got to be kidding me...
They`ve got about as much chance of pulling this off remotely as a snowball does in h e l l...
That chute sequence alone is a ridiculous "stretch" and the tether is just plain stupid...
This is the best they could come up with? LMAO.
You probably think the earth is flat don't you?
The other 2 Mars rovers lasted years longer than designed and you question whether they can pull this off. The Voyager probes are still going after leaving the solar system and you questions whether they can pull this off? The computer you posted with has transistors so small that to make them much smaller they would have to be made from atoms and you question whether they can pull this off?
Why did you even bother to read the article?
@Brian: Ahhh....to wallow in one's ignorance. In looking at some of your other posts, you must be very very blissful.
Mitchell
Wow Brian, that is a strong statement. Why don't you post your calculations and we can discuss it at length.
Ignore the troll. If the rover lands successfully, Brian and his ilk will say that anyone could have done it and it was no big deal. If it fails, he and his kind will say they knew it was doomed all along. The point really is that the Curiosity rover and its delivery system are engineering marvels and my hat is off to NASA for attempting such a daring and difficult task. I say good luck to them and happy landings. They are doing us all proud.
but its so hard to ignore the troll! come on troll hit me! fight me! ....... give me a hug!
and precisely what, Brian, are your engineering credentials? Do you think NASA engineers designed this over cocktails after work? I wonder if we will hear from you after the successful landing
All I can say is, wow...
I surely hope this works, and given some of NASA's other achievements, I'm optimistic!
Go, Curiosity!!
It kinda flys in the face of the number one principle of engineering..KISS (keep it simple stupid). I hope all goes well...I'm old enough to have watched every space launch during the 60's and hope to be watching this landing. During times such as these.... a $2.5 billion loss would weigh very heavily on NASA.
It is an impressive venture and I wish them the absolute best of luck!!! However, Brian is right on one point in that the odds for them pulling this thing off is pretty darn astronomical. I'm perhaps a bit more hopeful though.
Not that I have a better idea but the more complex the greater the chances are for failure. Having designed tons of robotics and computer controlled systems there are probably about a million points for failure in the complexity of the way that they did it and one glitch the whole thing is likely to unravel. The unhooking mechanism alone probably has 1000 points for failure just in itself.
I do kind of wonder if they didn't create a Rube Goldberg machine to land this thing. One of the reasons they chose the landing system for the last rovers was that it was about as simple as one could get. This one is too heavy to bounce in though. Some engineers are going to either be heroes or never live this idea down. Hope it makes it!
I think that their calculations suggest that they have a very good chance of pulling this off, but I agree that the landing sequence is overly complicated. There seems to be more steps and moving parts than is needed when a less complicated landing sequence was used for previous Mars landings.
I have to agree with the poster who said that this seems to violate the rules of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). This really looks cool and all , but all of those extra steps for a rover delivery? I thought the big rubber ball delivery was pretty simple, effective and ingenious myself. It certainly eliminated the need for a rocket powered delivery vehicle, like here, and leaves a lot fewer things at the mercy of Murphy.
Attention whores will say anything to get a high number of responses. Yes, I know I'm responding but I really could care less and I enjoy pointing out attention whores who say the stupidest things thereby proving their stupidity and mental issues. Take your med's, dude...
I used to work there and if anybody can do it, they can. It's the little things that are overlooked that worry me, like on the title card in the trailer about the "500,000 lines of cod3." Please tell me that was deliberate, as I don't have sound here.
"like on the title card in the trailer about the "500,000 lines of cod3.""
They tried (and failed) to be "cute". It's an axample of 1337$p34|< - "leetspeak" - substituting numbers for letters, etc - geeks have been doing it for decades... however it came across as being incredibly amateurish and out of place on a video for a NASA funded project.
It's geek-speak. Or, as I imagine, g33k sp3ak.
That's not what it said. It said "500,000 l1nes of cod3." You really thought that was a mistake?
In any event, the "l33tsp33k" really added nothing to the video.
They're just trying to make it seem cool to a generation that has largely become apathetic or outright hostile to NASA. I personally applaud them for their efforts. Anyway... I hope this mission is a success. I've been looking forward to it since before it launched.
Come on Equations, cut them some slack. NASA is famous for boring presentations of what can be pretty exciting stuff. This one is perhaps the best since the promotional video of the New Horizons probe to Pluto...
Very interesting.
Wow, mighty complex! I'm guessing that this craft is too massive to repeat the bubble-wrap/bouncing idea that was so successful for Spirit and Opportunity. That was pretty dang complex too. There are some seriously clever people out there. Wish I were one of them but I'm very thankful that at least I'm smart enough to groove on the results. Good luck guys.
Right you are, it's an innovative solution. If this is successful, it could lead to even bolder attempts in other parts of the solar system and that's a good thing. However; if they are not successful, I'm sure a great deal of knowledge will be obtained in the attempt. I'm looking forward to the landing and hope everything works as planned.
This will be an amazing feat of engineering if it works. There are so many things that could go wrong here. I will be disappointed if it's not front-page news if successful. You can bet it will be if it fails....
Careful cliff,
You`ll get called names here if you`re not in lockstep with the "can do = will happen" crowd.
He's right. Launch/mission failures will certainly get (the wrong kind of) attention. Even a commercial satellite launch that goes bad, with no government money involved (and many people not understanding that), ends up with the cost being the system's first name:
("A rocket carrying an $80 million communications satellite failed to reach orbit this morning...")
Is there any chance one of the orbiters will be in a position to monitor the decent?
If this weren't enough to amaze you, think about the approach that might be considered to land men on Mar's and safely return them to Earth.
Perhaps avoiding the complications of performing the whole feat in single "Moon Shot".
...
Yes, but as with Armstrong's avoidance of the 'football field-sized crater full of boulders,' I'd feel better with human eyeballs present to control things in real-time.
Even one of the Viking landers blindly came down uncomfortably close to a hefty rock that could easily have tipped it over at literally the last second.
Until we have advanced AI and/or FTL communications, this is how it's going to be, if humans can't be present, or very close in speed-of-light terms, for actual remote piloting...
dis some cool beans
With some of the greatest mind working for NASA everything is possible. Mathematic is a such a phenomenon that it'll be able to solve the equation on how to land on Mars successfully.
"Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
One of the reasons that NASA exists is to provide a challenge for the best minds from this country and the rest of the world. From those challenges come ideas and innovations that spill over into everyday life.
Amazing video; even more amazing concept.
This is a good use of my tax dollars.
I guess there's one in every crowd.
One what - one naysayer who pretends we haven't recouped our investment in NASA many times over?
Agreed. I detect no sarcasm in that assertion.
I agree with Steve. This is a very good use of my tax dollars. I wish more funding was devoted to NASA.
Oh I hope they succeed. What a wonderous thing they are attempting.
Go, go gadget NASA! Cut Congress' funding 50% and give it to NASA.
With the rovers, I remember how exciting it was when, not long after landing, the first photos were received at JPL. Hopefully, we'll get a repeat with the Mars Science Lab.
Mark my words, that sky-crane's going to land on some Martian and we'll get sued
Holy Crap! Amazing!
So, Um this crane thing couldn't use current helicopter technology? I mean sure let's make this as expensive as possible and cut the odds of it being successful because we wanted to create some rocket crane? WTF?
I'll tell you the reason, the atmosphere on Mars is significantly thinner than that on Earth, by around 60%. The size of the rotors you would need for a "helicopter" type delivery vehicle would be prohibitively large.
Let me also point out that our rocket technology is very reliable for this type of operation, as seen here...
Careful Toby,
Doubt will get you thrown out on this thread...
macgruber is right, also any kind of "helicopter" device would need an engine and the engines we have today all need oxygen to run, engines on earth are running at about 20-21 percent oxygen at around 14.5 psi, on mars they would have to run with less than .5 percent oxygen at around .25 psi. this means that whatever engine atached to this "helicopter" would be HUGE, if it were even possible at all. also because i know that someone out there is thinking "well it could just run off electricty" the mars rovers use reliable, stable, and clean electricty from the sun to travle a blazing...0.05 kph, any batery or solar aray paired with whatever electic moter you would use to turn the engines would have to be HUGE to get the rpms to lift the car sized rover and the HUGE engine in the thin martian atmosphere.
Even if the atmosphere wasn't too thin for such a concept to work it would likely be more complicated to deploy the rotors/ start the engine/ etc. than using rockets to slow the craft down further. You'd also have to protect all the components during descent and the weight of the engine and blades alone would be enormous.
It seems that they are reinventing different ways to land on
Mars. The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landed on Mars in 1976 using descent rockets, this is now 36 years ago, they speak in this video about 500,000 of computer code to land this latest probe but the Vikings landed with computers that where before the PC came around or the Apple 1 computer. Then there was the Pathfinder lander which landed with many crash bags around it and bounced finally to a stop and it came out as the bags deflated, it was about suitcase sized and had a stereoscopic camera so that you could see Mars in 3D with 3D glasses, they had those pictures on their website for quite a while. Then ater that there was the Opportunity and Spirit rover around the turn of this millennium, those also used giant crash bag....so it all comes back now to a more "dignified" way of landing on Mars not using bouncing crash bags, on rockets..which again, as you can google it yourself, was done way back in 1976. So when you look at the history of it all it seems like NASA is not really interested too much in just doing what worked before, they have files but maybe they are lost or they can't be bothered to look at methods that used little more than a slide rule or a seventies era computer. I think they should concentrate their science more on the science and mobility capability of their probes instead of constantly reinventing different ways of entering the atmosphere and landing when the oldest method employed by Viking I and Viking 2 worked just fine as it was in the seventies when Starsky and Hutch where constantly being screamed at by their Lieutenant on the TV on every episode.
s
ba
Then came the Pathfinder, it landed with a large
sammy999--
The thin atmosphere makes using wings or propellers too inefficient to land. The gravity makes using rocket motors too fuel-inefficient. The rover weighs too much to use the giant airbag trick.
The sky crane is a bad solution because it's very complex and has a number of failure points. Unfortunately, it's the best solution for this weight range.
If we absolutely had to land men on Mars at this time, I'm not sure what we'd do. For that amount of mass, the sky crane trick doesn't work.
(Anyone have a link to an article that explains in detail the problems caused by Mars' gravity, thin atmosphere and increasing probe mass?)
Well sammy at least you haven`t been called a troll yet.
rob of unspace-- i think that if we absolutly had to work on a way to land men on mars it would be done in several units at the same time, somthing like: land the humans (fully equiped)/any extremely soft or delicate equiptment in seperate small heavily padded pods using the skycrane method (risky yes, but the best option i can see) and then land everything else by splitting it into chuncks (shell of the living area, food and water storage, life suport, interior elements (toilet, sleeping surface, exercise equiptment), ground vehicle in several parts, return vehicle in alot of parts (pretty much a DIY kit), and anything else people would need to visit mars) and puting them into seperate airbag units.
By my count there were about 30 missions to Mars. Only 12 were successful. Maybe now you can understand the need to experiment with new landing methods.
The sky crane idea is interesting but it seems that it would have been simpler to provide a dust cover for the Lab module and then land the vehicle on the surface using rocket descent. That eliminates the problem of dust damaging the Lab, and also replaces the complexity of the lowering mechanism and the weight of the extra fuel to allow hovering, with a lightweight car cover.
It's all about payload size and the altitude at which you want to land.
Greater challenges demand different technology be used.
The Voyager probes are just leaving our solar system after 35 years of flight, Rovers exploring Mars... very exciting times.
I know we have brilliant scientists behind this, and I truly hope it all work, but what I find interesting, is if John Q. Public had suggested this, I think the term Rube Goldberg would have been used.
Also want to point out that Mars Climate Orbiter failed because one person was working in feet and another in meters. How many different systems are involved in this and how many different people worked on those systems?
Hate to think that way, I am a space fan and truly hope all goes as planned.
Two in a row failed because of the meter and feet miscalculations. At the rate we're pillaging the earth we better find some alternate sources soon.
AMAZING how NASA is using a very poor propaganda machine to get support for someone's very expensive Hobby. NASA filed for bankruptcy a short while ago and had a going out of business sale.
Sadly, NASA is still pursuing these very stupid and expensive projects that are just a very very poor waste of time and resources. There’s plenty of problems to solves right here on earth with many milestones that could benefit mankind that’s a fraction of the cost of searching for big foot on Mars.
Booooo to NASA for not rethinking their priorities and for very poor judgment.
YEAHHH to the Air Force for dumping the ball and chain (NASA) in order to lead the world in accomplishing practical space goals with real world missions.
I have a feeling your trolling here
Did the fat guy eating chicken give it away?
Your feelings are not the issue; but now your IQ is suspect. Yes, I love chicken, watermelon and true science.
Seriously, Chuckie? You mean the Air Force that keeps everything confidential until it is obsolete so nobody can benefit from it except their designated contractors? How is that practical? NASA has done far more for the US economy than any other arm of the government, simply because the technology is open for all to use. And this project certainly pushes the envelope more than most.
And, uh, FYI - NASA did not file for bankruptcy. It's a government agency, so won't go bankrupt until the fed government does. Not saying that can't happen, but it hasn't yet. Honestly, don't know where some people get this stuff...
What are they talking about with this video? We already have landed rovers on Mars or that is what I
thought. Why now are they telling us they need a different landing approach?
This rover is far more massive. Airbags are out as a result. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so parachutes and/or wings and/or propellers and/or helicopter wouldn't be enough. Mars has a truckload of gravity, so retrorockets would use up too much fuel.
The skyhook is needed. Weird, iffy, but the best we can do right now.
The reason they don't use rockets is that they worry it kicks up to much dust, so they use the sky crane, keeping the rockets away from the surface.
That is insanely intense! So all of that is going to be going on during a communications black out? That is amazing and has to be the most tense 7 min. for all of those involved in this project. Congrats to those who can make these kind of things happen and pave the way for the first human landing on Mars, these marvels definitely do not get the attention that they deserve. I'll be waiting to hear more. =)