Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site | Hacker News Reader

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site

esa.int

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It is so bad ass that when we have a question about something that happened on another planet we can just point one of our other robots' cameras at the site!

I'm waiting for the day where someone can tell their rover to drive / fly over and find out what the heck happened.

Opportunity is not so far (it's actually inside a crater nearby I think), but it'd take months to get to place, and there may not be enough scientific value in doing so just to see the charred remains of Schiaparelli. But who knows, it's so over it's expected mission life that maybe someone goes "f* it, let's go take a look".

Opportunity tried to see the descent, but it did not work: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/1019152...

Damn. So cosmic rays are pretty intense huh?

Yes. Cosmic rays are a significant obstacle to any kind of automated event detection in imagery taken from space, especially outside low Earth orbit.

That streak was a classic CR. Depending on the angle of incidence on the CCD, you can see different shapes.

I love reading her stuff, even if I don't understand a lot of it. Her twitter feed is fantastic.

Opportunity is very very far, yes technically it is close if you are thinking about traditional modes of transportation, but it traveled so far only about 40KM, and it's max speed is about 2 inches per second it is not going to get there.

We're years away from landing anything that could dig a hole deeper than Schiaparelli's crater.

Depending on how hard it cratered, and how soon Opportunity could get there, it could be the most important thing for Opportunity to do.

Not necessarily. Schiaparelli used hydrazine for fuel, and if it smashed into the surface it seems to me that it's a reasonable assumption that the whole crash site is contaminated with it. Is that something we want to get all over the rover?

Both are good answers... let's see what scientists decide. In te meantime, MRO should give some interesting hi-res pictures.

Yes! I wasn't aware that a second fly-over with a better imager was going to happen, but now I'm morbidly curious.

Hydrazine is extremely unstable right? Would much of it remain after slamming in to the ground?

With a bit more Googling, it appears that hydrazine's lifetime in (Earth) atmosphere is measured in hours. I'm not sure what that would be on Mars, or if soaking into the soil there would increase its lifetime.

It's a fun mental exercise, I guess -- I'd love to hear from somebody in the field who knew more about hydrazine -- but as the Opportunity rover is still a long (likely impossible) distance away from the crash site, it will likely just remain a mental exercise.

> ...how soon Opportunity could get there...

Months, to say the least -- the rover moves very slowly. Ever since it got to Mars, it's moved at about ~3,5 km/year (just shy over 2 miles/year). I think a more realistic estimate could be "longer than it has been there".

We have proven designs for Mars rovers, and a proven delivery system. The R&D has been done, the infrastructure is in place - why don't we send some more? We should be able to make incremental updates and constantly improve the rovers capabilities.

The rovers we sent cost us about $400 million each. And one failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover

Considering that both rovers were planned to last for 90 days each both of them outlasted their mission like a boss you can't say any of them failed, yes Spirit has failed but after 2269 days in operation.

Opportunity by this time must be fueled by some dark magic since the darn thing out lasted it's planned mission by freaking 12 years.

https://xkcd.com/1504/

https://xkcd.com/695/

Are you Ken M? https://www.reddit.com/r/KenM/comments/4944og/ken_m_on_the_c...

It's like software. Once you finally manage to get something kinda reliably working, you ditch it and start a new one.

different hardware for different types of mission / cost

That's pretty much what we have done: http://imgur.com/3Hg9O (Pathfinder, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity). Mars2020 isn't designed yet, but it will be based on Curiosity.

Thank you, that is actually a great picture!

Most pictures of the rovers fail to depict the difference in size between Sojourner (the Pathfinder rover), Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity which is the largest to date.

Besides rovers, on the surface there are also several landers, sent by USA, USSR, UK and ESA.

A complete list of human made objects landed on extra terrestrial bodies is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterre...

I suspect the above link just made someone's week end ;-)

UPDATE On a separate note, it would be very interesting if future (manned or unmanned) missions could visit artifacts sent by previous missions and assess their state / decay over time. The only example that I know of is Surveyor 3 (moon unmanned lander) which was visited by the Apollo 12 mission a couple of years later.

For some reason, my dream is one day to be able to travel to Mars and visit Spirit in its final resting place at Troy[1].

[1] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA12205

Mars 2020 is designed yet, you can view its design and experiments here: http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Sure, it may not be fully officially built, but it has been designed almost to completion.

Since the vehicle design is based on Opportunity, I would say the biggest news is the array of sensor/instruments on board: http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/instruments/

Speaking of which, why didn't the Schiaparelli use a proven design for the landing system?

NASA was going to provide the landing technology, but the funding was cut.

The teams rarely stay together - there's often no stable funding source, and much of the grunt work is done by grad students. And the technology is advancing all the time - we're sending heavier and heavier landers, with better and better instruments. Even on Earth, if you were on a team investigating animal migration (say), you probably wouldn't be thrilled to use the same hardware that the last team used 8 years ago.

The main mission of this expedition is the Trace Gas Orbiter: http://exploration.esa.int/mars/46475-trace-gas-orbiter/

"the Trace Gas Orbiter will be deployed to detect a wide range of atmospheric trace gases (such as methane, water vapour, nitrogen oxides, acetylene), with an improved accuracy of three orders of magnitude compared to previous measurements."

In Rob Manning's book [0] : He explained how hard it is to land on Mars. It's nicely sum up in those two sentences :

“There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology completely,” said Manning, “and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. So, it’s in this ugly, grey zone.” [1]

The recent success of Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity must not shadow the fact that most Mars missions have failed.

[0] "Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-...

Also it's pretty dusty, so doing a controlled burn all the way down (like SpaceX does on Earth) kicks up a huge dust cloud which settles on all your nice solar panels.

To give it some context, here are the Mars failures:

Soviet Union/Russia: 1M No.1, 1M No.2, 2MV-4 No.1, 2MV-3 No.1, 2M No.521, 2M No.522, Kosmos 419 (3MS No.170), Mars 96 (M1 No.520), Mars 1 (2MV-4 No.2), Zond 2 (3MV-4A No.2), Mars 2 lander (SA 4M No.171), Prop-M Rover rover (SA 4M No.172), Mars 4 (3MS No.52S), Mars 5 (3MS No.53S), Mars 6 (3MP No.50P), Mars 7 (3MP No.51P), Fobos 1 (1F No.101), Fobos-Grunt

US: Mariner 3, Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 2

China: Yinghuo-1

UK/Europe: Beagle 2, Schiaparelli EDM lander

Japan: Nozomi (PLANET-B)

Also: Soviet Mars 3 lander (SA 4M No.172) landed, so counted as partial success, but contact lost 14.5 seconds later. And Soviet Fobos 2 (1F No.102) orbited successfully then lost communications during landing, so a partial success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

I don't think the atmosphere is the problem with landing heavy landers like we do on the moon. For some reason I think gravity is the main problem. The only effect I can think of the atmosphere would have is on engine efficiency, and it's so thin I doubt it's much of a consideration at all.

You are very wrong. Read the literature.

Yea I started thinking about it after I posted. Ya know, the heat and stuff.

> Estimates are that Schiaparelli dropped from a height of between 2 and 4 kilometres, therefore impacting at a considerable speed, greater than 300 km/h.

Ouch. It will be interesting to read the results of the investigation as to why the landing thrusters turned off prematurely.

Yes, it seems they made quite a dent on Mars

I'm not so sure that this should be interpreted as "thrusters turning off prematurely" rather, it getting to the point of shut-off sooner (and faster) OR it stopped because they hit the ground

I read in some of the reports (can't remember if official ESA, news, or twitter) that they were turned on for just 3 seconds (instead of the inteded ~50), plus the parachute was cut off earlier too. So, as this report from ESA says, it fell from at least a 1000 times higher than intended (the cut off altitude was 2m or so).

a 1000 times... that sounds rather metric.

It's an order of magnitude. 1e3, not 1.000e3 which would indeed be suspicious.

That is when it switched from thrusters to lithobraking.

Lithobraking has actually been a feature in at least one Mars mission: the pair of impactor probes that piggybacked on NASA's unlucky Mars Polar Lander mission of 1999 [1]. The MPL itself, as is quite well known, ended up doing an unplanned lithobraking maneuver after its retrorockets shut down too soon (!) due to insufficient integration testing. The impactors were never heard of either; the exact failure mode remains unclear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_2

A proven method of matching planetary velocity.

According to the landing sequence...

...the lander was supposed to detach from the aeroshell at about 1km up. So if it fell from 2 to 4km up, that implies that it detached too early.

This article:

https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/10/20/last-data-from-schiapa...

...says that the telemetry shows that the engines did fire, for at least a few seconds.

My uninformed hypothesis: the lander detached early for some reason, and started falling. As it approached the ground, the radar saw the ground coming, and it fired the engines for the final braking. But because it had been falling so far, it was now going too fast for the engines to stop it in time, and it hit the ground hard. (Mars doesn't really do terminal velocities.)

It says they have 600MB of telemetry. That's quite impressive.

> (Mars doesn't really do terminal velocities.)

It depends on many factors, but as an order of magnitude terminal velocity on Mars is about 1000 km/h (speed of sound on Earth at sea level).

https://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/ter...

That's if you were to start from velocity zero (e.g. fall off a balloon). If you start from orbital velocity, you have to slow down to terminal velocity, which takes a very long time.

Questions have come up about the landing strategy of the Schiaparelli lander. It uses a Doppler radar to get position and velocity, time deployment of parachute, and calibrate thrust for retro-rockets. The best references I was able to find are these:

http://exploration.esa.int/mars/47852-entry-descent-and-land...

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/Bayle_ExoMars_EDM_Overview-... (solid, is undated, seems old and nonspecific in some cases)

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/7B.1_Lorenzoni_ExoMars%202... (from 2013, more detail)

What a shame. The only consolation, if any, is that they are not the first ones to crash on Mars. If I remember correctly the historic chances of landing successfully on Mars is about 50/50.

It was a trial run lander, the real one comes later. The primary purpose of the mission was the orbiter which is functioning, and lander testing, which failed but hopefully they get useful data from the failure.

The chances of landing are 100%.

But not successfully...

I believe rocket scientists make a distinction between landing and impacting.

Different intensities of lithobraking.

rapid unschedualed disassembly event.

Some landers failed to reach Mars and crash land. Check the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

He means that whether it crashes or not, it's a landing.

However there are projects that completely miss their target and just float in space, so even then it's not 100%.

That was my point, better worded :-)

Just about! For lots of fun info, check out the interplanetary Expensive Hardware Lob League:

https://www.strudel.org.uk/lob/

Ha! This deserves some credit. The tone of the writing makes me think of Starship Troopers. Very tongue in cheek and very funny.

This deserves its own thread entirely! Awesome.

Reminds of the "Seven Minutes of Terror" video that NASA put out ahead of the Curiosity landing explaining how they intended to make it safely to the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki_Af_o9Q9s

(Note: I get goosebumps every time I watch this, absolutely amazing problem solving.)

I'm still amazed that it succeeded. I was prepared to bet quite a bit of money that at least one of the many quite complicated stages of the landing would fail. I'm happy I was wrong.

To me, the air bags[1] used to land the Spirit and Opportunity rovers seemed like a saner way to go than trying to deposit them gently directly on to the surface using a sky crane. The reported reason the sky crane was used for Curiosity is that it was too heavy for the air bag approach.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRCIzZHpFtY

It's 185 kg vs 899 kg. I am already a bit surprised that it worked to land Spirit and Opportunity, but the lower gravity probably helps.

But the Spirit and Opportunity EDL also involved retrorockets in addition to a heatshield, a drogue chute, a parachute and the airbags - it's just that the retrorocket part didn't have to be as precise as with Curiosity.

I actually laughed the first time I saw it because it looked so much like a Goldberg machine... But it cost 500M$... And they only got one try.

That 600MB of telemetry should provide extremely valuable in making that rover they are planning to land less likely to fail.

Sadly you really don't get that many attempts...

Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs?

Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?

Rockets blew up all the time back in the 60s.

The landing techniques that are being used are bringing much larger payloads to the Martian surface than were brought in previous landings. Curiosity, for example, is about twice the weight of the Viking landers. In general, we're much more successful at landing and receiving data from mars-bound craft than we were back there; the soviets sent several probes to mars and got minimal data back from them before they failed.

Fast/accurate computing is needed for surface work on Mars because it means that the devices don't have to wait around for commands all the time. Giving more processor power and ability means that more flexible programs can be written to sift through the data and just send back the most interesting parts. Fast and accurate are very much needed for the kinds of lab experiments we're doing on mars.

Vikings, MERs and Curoisty/2020 each used totoally different landing technologies. Amazing they all worked.

Stupid question maybe, but would it not make sense to launch multiple landers with one rocket? The hardware cost of a rover must be peanuts compared to the engineering cost, the launch cost and the time to travel? How big is the lander compared to the launch rocket?

I read the headline as "shrapnel landing site"

Splat. Not sure if that is a landing site or a crash site.

Now imagine there being 100 people onboard that spacecraft, as Elon Musk plans for.

Once again, billions of euros are put into use for what is essentially scientific curiosity instead of trying to solve the very real problems Europe is facing. I love astronomy and space exploration but the amounts of money wasted into it rather than other problems with a high priority is staggering.

The EU has a population of over 500 million. For a program like this (assuming it's all from public funds), each citizen paid on average less than a cup of coffee costs at Starbucks.

It's real money, but what pressing pan-European problem could you really solve with such a tiny budget?

Look at the economical situation of countries like Greece and Spain. That would be one starting point.

According to the easily-found stats on Wikipedia [1,2], the MRO cost $720 million, whereas the Greek bailout given in 2010 (alone) was €110 ($119) billion. Notice the "m" in the first and the "b" in the second- your "starting point" is orders of magnitude beyond the resources we're talking about here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis#2...

Indeed, the entire ESA budget for this year is €5.2 billion, of which a third is Earth observation satellites.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/01/ESA_budget_2...

And as a Greek I see that day by day we are taking advantage more and more the data available from EO satellites. You need lots of data to restart the economy.

Spaniard here, the lander and the upcoming rover feature different instrumentation developed in Spain, something which has allowed extra funding for advancements in research and manufacturing capabilities, space-worthiness certification, etc. for our institutes, universities, and companies.

This experience both in term of facilities and human resources will allow us to better compete in the market of space application and other high-tech fields, which is exactly what our country needs.

(Shrug) Send the money to Greece, or bury it in a crater on Mars. What's the difference?

Yeah! When has exploring ever benefited anyone! No more exploration!

The mission cost the citizens of Europe and Russia a bit over 1 Euro per person.

And how much return did the citizens of Europe and Russia get for this investment?

A better question is this: How much return did King Henry VII get from Columbus's expeditions?

The answer is nothing, because he rejected Columbus's request to fund his fleet.

The same if not more. The way ESA operates, each Euro paid by a member country is supposed to come back to that country's economy via ESA contracts.

The amount of money we waste on military expenditures is staggering compared to the amount we spend on scientific exploration.

Given your name, this opinion seems quite surprising.

It's not wasted. This is important.

I'm with you, to some extent. As a libertarian-minded person, I wish there were a way you could opt out of funding space exploration missions and other expensive projects that you might not agree with. If there were, I might be able to avail myself of the same choices when it comes to funding things that I disagree with, such as massive social engineering projects and trillion-dollar wars of choice.

But as a flawed, selfish person, I also wish there were a way to make sure that you and your descendants never see any benefits from the research you thought wasn't worthwhile.

Money can be spent on more than one thing at a time. This is a drop in the bucket compared to other "wastes".

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