electronics to land Curiosity on Mars

If you choosing a mission to Mars, Nasa Chronology of Mars seek makes depressing reading. For every good Russian Mars 3 or American Viking 1, There an unsuccessful Beagle 2 (great britain) or Mars Polar Lander (associated with). the, Of the 42 quests listed, Only 17 have prevailed. the percentages, in the last half century, Of a Mars mission doing well are around 40%.

to work as fair, Several early missions didn even make it off the launch pad and it is likely that success have improved considerably over the decades. But you don have to go back far to see failure. Only yr after, Russia Phobos Grunt mission to the Martian moon Phobos failed making it out of Earth orbit (in fact, It did eventually when it burned up on re entry). the most infamous though is Nasa 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, Where a mix up between imperial and metric data sent the spacecraft careering into the Martian atmosphere to be destroyed.

On 6 september (GMT) 2012 Nasa will try again with what is definitely the most ambitious and exciting Mars mission ever launched. The Mars Science clinical (MSL) With the Curiosity rover [url=https://charmdatescamreviews.wordpress.com/tag/russian-woman/]ukraine wife[/url] is designed to review whether the planet ever had the conditions to support life.

The rover is basically a robotic geologist, That will collect and analyse soil and rock samples as it trundles it’s Martian surface. so it’s big: Around the figures on a Mini Cooper or small SUV; with 900kg (really a tonne), It heavy and when hurtling with regard to planet, It walking on at some 5km/s (mps), just about 18,000km/h (11,000mph).

in order, Here the design challenge: correctly land a rapidly moving, Car sized rover on an alien world. make sure you show your workings.

have a big vehicle, It actually very, very hard to slow down, Says Dan Rasky from Nasa Ames in Silicon vly, the state of california. Rasky, Now the director of the Emerging commercially made Space Office, Helped develop the MSL heat shield that will protect the spacecraft as it enters the Martian climate.

main issue with slowing down is being done with your heat shield, speaks Rasky. A very tenuous atmosphere much 100,000 feet [30,000 metre distances] Here on the planet but if you design things right, You can easily still slow things down enough that you can land safely. view

Nasa engineers initially planned to employ the same material that was used to land the Viking missions in 1975. But right after they tested it in a special wind tunnel, Equipped with high intensity heaters designed to simulate the conditions the MSL spacecraft will face, Things didn turn out evidently.

items didn work, Rasky informs me. Very high heat just burned through the heat shield which could have burned into the structure of the spacecraft. So you would have got to the outer lining in pieces. The engineers taken on Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, Or PICA for brief. Phenolic is the identical material that we use for saucepan handles, A vanity that burns but doesn melt. PICA was first used on Nasa Stardust mission and is also fitted to the SpaceX Dragon Capsule.

some of it that gets burned away. The Phenolic burns to locate a pyrolysis gas, Which actually is an important way that it absorbs the heat, Rasky exposes. promises to get multiple uses out of its heat shield, which you can do if you size it correctly. the heat shield has done its job, The MSL spacecraft need slowed to around 400m/s. every one of the rover still encased in the shell of the heat shield, The parachute deploys to slow the descent down a little more forward. Parachutes have a proven track record on Mars lately with the Phoenix mission. though MSL, The parachute is only the first stage in a much more advanced landing process. This will be the first mission to use a crane looks scary but it actually eliminates a lot of the issues that previous designs had, Says Nasa dorrie Sell, An engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who helped develop taking that approach.

On the head of it, The sky crane looks hopelessly complicated. Once released from its parachute and clean shell, The lander uses applications to slow the descent. at this time, The MSL resembles a flying bedstead with the rover slung first before the normal. As this mix nears touchdown, The rover is lowered on surface on cables and its wheels unfurl. on-contact, The cables are cut and the skycrane (Bedstead) Flies away and dives and the rover starts work.

What can possibly go wrong?

subtle entry

I ask Sell how they ended up with which so complex. You designing rover style missions gather, You quickly run into a problem where if you going to put the rover on top of a lander, via legs and rockets, You really need to get it off there somehow when you going to touch down, He details.

A very hard issue of designing a way to reliably, On all kinds of different destinies on slopes, On crud, On sand dunes drive something off the top of a stage. You also have a further complexity that for Curiosity, This rover is over five times larger than any previous rover built to land on Mars. Means that if they put the rover on the top lander, There every chance it would make the whole agreement too top heavy, initiating it to topple over. in addition, If you attached the rover beneath the lander, It might get trapped if the legs sank into sandy ground or landed at an odd angle. as out too.

another option that been used successfully most notably on the recent Spirit and Opportunity missions is airbags. with that design, The rover bounces across light encased in a cocoon. When you are looking at a stop, The airbags deflate, The cocoon unfolds and the rover trundles away. consider use that system?

You start attempting to make that [Airbag plan] more expansive, So it may well safely land a one tonne rover, You experience an airbag system that is very, very large just doesn scale up. It was back to enter board. Eventually, By a process of relief, They ended up with the sky crane.

Can think of the rover wearing a jet pack on its back, Says get rid of. We get 20m above the top, The jet pack lowers the rover on three bridles and that whole system keeps moving down your surface with the rover held seven and a half metres below the jetpack. Landing sequence from entry into the conditions, To the rover landing takes place expediently in just seven minutes. The last command sent to MSL will be two hours before landing and, the foremost problems time delay between Earth and Mars, Mission control won know whether it succeeded until some 14 minutes after.

The time we get the signal that says started entry it will already have been on the surface for seven minutes! Does more or less everything make Sell nervous? Actually makes me very self-assured and confident. Most of us on the project have been involved in the design and testing of the spacecraft for years now understand how everything on the spacecraft was built and tested and put together. though, Is a tad bit more cautious: Always a risk that something won go well but we are certainly hoping for the most powerful always that lingering doubt. You would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.