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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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Chuckie Love. And if Columbus had given up when the Portuguese turned him down for the trip to the new world, where would the world be now? Thank goodness the Spanish were more into exploration.
The space program has assisted in the advancement of all humanity. We would not live in the technical world we do if it were not for NASA.
Not sure to celebrate NASA or try to burn it to the ground on that last sentence.
It would not have ended for sure just different than today.
Just one more step closer to a mars colony, nothing happens over night. Everyone knows we will need a second home soon at the rate where going, I'm glad Nasa is smart and resourceful enough to think ahead.
Earth is a cradle for humanity, eventually we're going to need to get out of it.
Not likely to ever happen, better chance with a moon colony and that is a long shot but I do like the dream.
It'll happen. So will the Moon. These are not mutually exclusive, nor technically insurmountable.
I also think we will have colonies at the Terran-Lunar L4 and L5 positions, in addition to Lunar and Martian colonies.
Mars is a flickle hungry creature. History tell us that she has a special appetite for sophiscated high-tech Martian explorers. Many have already disappeared into the bowels of Mars, never to be seen or heard from. Occasionally in a bout of mercy, she relents as in the explorer Opportunity and Spirit. But her generosity is about tobe tested again. Already she is pushed and shoved again and again by ambitious earth creatures who have not bring offering of gifts.
This time the hunger panks are too great and has gone unattended for far too long. The earth creatures are over confident. Her demands must be satiated.
I think the odds are in Ms Mars favor.
Curiosity: The Movie! Coming soon (August, 2012) to a space blog near you! ;-)
Can't wait; I'm VERY excited about Curiosity and look forward to seeing the landing live (well, as live as possible with Mars/Earth time lag) at this year's Planetfest in Pasadena. Hope all goes well, as there's only one of these puppies....
Bon Voyage, Curiosity!
Great video! I'm now terrified for everyone who worked on it! I hope all goes well. JPL put out a animated short about the landing as well -- young kid friendly.
Good luck with that..... I will deff. be online to watch the results!!
What I think will be even more exciting is after this craft lands, all these scientist can use this success and generate more interest in science and math for our younger population to show them there is a need for future scientist to take over the baton. I think kids will really start to turn around this country's low scores in Math and Science if they see these scientists as leaders. Kudos to the design team for what will be a wild ride, but worth it.
Wow, how about those arm chair quarterbacks! If they had what it takes they would be working for JPL. Nuf said.
Great video! Its amazing all the things that could go wrong, but they manage to land these rovers on mars, it impresses the heck out of me. I am always interested in those missions, it is so interesting. Right now my desktop is a picture of earth taken from mars, puts things in perspective a little lol. Anyway, thank you for the article, keep them coming :)
I wish we could delete our comments sometimes ... so I could post a new one with a modified "interested/interesting" sentence. The missions are indeed very interesting tho :)
Dammit. Why do these videos use "dramatic" background music. I'm hard of hearing, and the music playing over the dialogue makes it difficult for me to hear what's being said.
*grumble*
*get off the lawn*
I do not agree with the landing scheme for this very expensive mobile laboratory (rover) Curiosity. The tethers will require to be in full tension to avoid any rotation modes of oscillations just before touchdown. The tethers can also get tangled when they are released, when the rover separates from the crane housing, will they all release at the same time and orientation?
I understand they require a pin point landing for best chance of landing in the crater and at the base of this specific mountain but there are other ways to soft land with precision. The Martin atmosphere is dense enough to glide down with enough control from orbit and/or ground telemetry.
I give this more than 50% chance of crash landing. For $2.5 billion we should have designed a better survivable landing scheme.
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I don't care how sophisticated the force transducers are, attaching the tethers to the crane. Once released the rover will rotate down, like a ball falling in a conical surface. If the rotations are not nulled out by the time it touches down it will touch on an edge and start tumbling.
This scenario may even screw up the control of the hovering crane and the whole system could come crashing down. Very messy landing, scheme indeed, too many degrees of freedom, too many components in the loop. In my long career with servo systems the more components your have in the loop the longer the time constant and so the steady state error when it touches will be an unknown.
I wish and hope it does land safely because this is the most sophisticated mobile laboratory yet and it is a good site. The mountain is high enough with gentle slopes so we can gather tons of data on the history of the planet. So good luck.
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http://www.planetaryprobe.eu/IPPW7/proceedings/IPPW7%20Proceedings/Presentations/Session5/pr478.pdf
Sorry I can't see equal tension in all the tethers during the 20 sec from separation to the snatch event.
Also, only one snatch event of 2 sec duration, really? A slight gust of side wind will challenge this event, surely. Allowing for 2 or even 3 snatches would have been more prudent, but I am guessing the fuel expenditure did not allow it? Also allowing a single 2 sec transient for a 12 sec event?
Another observation, if the attachment point on the rover are representative as shown in the power point the horizontal force components in the transducers are order of magnitudes smaller that the vertical. i hope you are using to scales or error terms since the time constants will be different.
Good luck.
do you really think they haven't considered these things a million times over?
NASA Guys The Space Braniac's are Awesome!!!
Now if we only knew about all the Top Security stuff they were working on Like New engines like for instance the Aurora 's New Hydrogen Propulsion SCRAM Jets
These guys are WAY Too Smart....Love It!!!
Great way to Promote NASA and its New Adventures!!! I'll be watching..Beam Me Up Scotty!!!
This is wonderful! I look forward to watching. All of these great minds who have put their talents to such a great use deserve all the tribute they can have, in thanks for their putting them to good use.
Nice stuff , good work. Crazy kwl
Thanks Alan--very cool!
Good to see NASA doing some real exploration. Hope we can get men back in space one of these days. Folks are really getting bored of simulated adventure. We're natural explorers and this is the kind of thing that we do best. It also generates knock-off benefits and stimulates the national psyche. Heaven knows we need that now more than ever.
Good luck boys & girls!
Mars is full of trees, water and blue skies and there are lots of artifacts from Egyptians who have been there who were actually servants and offspring of aliens who are still there and they are going to shoot this thing down then sneak back through the stargate.
So why did they change the way they landed than the first time? The first time they put everything in a big padded ball and it just bounced to a landing. It worked well enough that the rover was in service for far longer than expected. Why reinvent the wheel?
No accuracy with the "bouncing ball". They want to land it inside the crater and just beside the mild slope at the base of the mountain. Hard to get inside the crater with the bouncing ball.
More importantly, the 'bouncing ball' approach does not scale up very well (I don't care what you saw in the movie 'Red Planet'). Above a certain weight range, it's just not practical.
Sorry guys, but for reasons stated in the video (too much gravity to easily use rockets alone, not enough atmosphere for better use of aerobraking and parachutes), it's hard to get large payloads onto the Martian surface...
I agree. This seems to have a ton more points of failure then the first landing design. The whole parachute opening, jets firing, tethering, rube goldberg would be impressed. I am really curious why they went away from the bouncing ball design.
F = kx ...
This payload is much heavier hence will require a vibration isolation (damping) system with a ridliculous large displacement. A very large bouncing ball and hence a ridiculous large mother spacecraft to carry it to Mars. The whole scenario is unacceptable.
The root problem is greed. As scientists and engineers, especially NASA managers, we want to see our ideas played out while we are still on the project. But sometimes complicated problems take a long time to workout, like placing a large payload on Mars, or anything concerning with Mars.
We should slow down and develop a soft landing spacecraft, like the lunar module, for large payloads. If we are to send humans to Mars, which I am totally against, we will need a soft lander anyway.
That is very cool. I sure hope this works, and I bet it will, but I agree that it seems unduly complicated.
NASA has achieved some miraculous things. But before we do too much chest thumping, let’s remember that we sent the Mars Climate Observer all the way to the red planet and then incinerated it by confusing English and metric measurements.
KISS is still a good operating principle. NASA stressed simplicity after losing the MCO, and that’s part of why Spirit and Opportunity had such a (relatively) low-tech landing method. The toughest part was coming to rest upright. Curiosity is mobile - why can’t it just land anywhere near its initial objective and then drive to where it needs to be?
One of the posters above could/should have been more diplomatic in expressing his skepticism, but skeptics make the best scientists. That’s okay, the forum members here demonstrated their scientific open-mindedness by declaring him to be a troll and then collapsing his comment.
A dounting prospect! Man against the infinite prospects of Murphy's law! What I wouldn't give to have been part of the design team!!
"NASAfiled for bankruptcy a short while ago and had a going out of business sale."
Really? Do you have anything to support that assertion? No? I am officially calling bull@!$%# on your post, then.
Government agencies don't go bankrupt, only individuals, businesses...and maybe entire cities (NYC?), states, and countries can.
It just doesn't work that way.
A quick check reveals the NASA bankruptcy story is posted only on right wing neo-nazi zombie sites. Those are places where conspiracy theories and lies are fed to the gullible and clinically insane.
Wow! 5,000 lines of cod3. I hope they bug-checked their cod3 better than their video.
Great informational video, but the damn music is too loud.
WOW!!! This is so exciting.