After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program put on a "world tour" of their capsules and landers to raise cash. Museums could pay them to setup a major staffed exhibit.
I had a chance to go when it was in SE Asia.
I got to:
- stick my head inside one of the capsules and see the "gyro globe"
- operate their lunar lander via a remote control
- learn about their numerous trips to Venus.
One of the highlights of my life actually.
Also got to see the Red Arrows do a full formation takeoff with 9 planes at high speed around the same time, and went to the Langkawi military air show.
After takeoff, they levelled off at 200' and accelerated to about 500 mph. They were a blur against the trees just below them - totally awesome.
(In Asia and S. America, jet airshows are still allowed to do low-altitude and supersonic flight over residential areas. Those are banned in Europe and N. America because of numerous previous accidents.)
> Also got to see the Red Arrows do a full formation takeoff with 9 planes at high speed around the same time
I saw Blue Impulse (Japan's military aerobatics team) last year. One of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Probably not too many airshows happening at the moment, but if anyone ever gets a chance to go to one, don't pass it up.
I feel that people that think robots are the future of space exploration don't follow these missions too closely. Robots are terrible and not getting better very quickly at all.
This thing has been trying to dig a small hole for more than a year, something any person can do in about 15 minutes. In 8 years Curiosity has covered the same distance as a long afternoon walk.
We're not gonna be able to send people to places like Europa, but any meaningful Mars exploration will need people.
That's not clear at all. Part of the reason why these robots are not very capable are very small mass budget and inability to iterate often, both due to high cost of shipping stuff to Mars. Under those restrictions, humans are not getting to Mars at all.
When those restrictions are relaxed enough to contemplate sending humans to Mars, the robots will become much more capable too.
Disclaimer: I'd still love to see humans on Mars because it's exciting as hell!
The robots can be iterated on Earth and the environments aren't much different. The problem here is NASA.
NASA is a politicized bureaucracy that has its hands tied behind its back. It cannot afford to take risks (both from a budget point of view and a politics point of view; failed missions are a wound to national pride). It cannot afford to hire the best and brightest because government payroll levels can't match industry wages.
NASA is mired in old engineering superstition and has wrapped all progress in procedures that make it impossible to iterate quickly. They've made hardware and software decisions produced for them by niche industries that charge 10-20x consumer prices for inferior hardware that is certified by NASA standards.
NASA is not the organization that made it to the Moon anymore.
Are you implying that 794lbs is substantially heavier than a human, plus supplies for over a year, plus the extra delta-v to lift the human and half those supplies back up off Mars?
Surprise, the clickbait headline misrepresents what the original article they were summarising said. They didn't hit it with a shovel, they used the shovel to add pressure:
> In late February, the team moved on to what Spohn calls “plan C.” They positioned the scoop above the mole’s tail and pushed it straight down into the dirt.
The "mole" is actually an interesting bit of engineering, since they wanted to dig to a depth of something like 16 ft IIRC, and obviously needed to keep the weight down. It's a sort of self-hammering nail.
And it almost turned into a highly engineered dud producing no scientific results for all the effort that went into it. I'm glad that they didn't give up on it easily.
They've previously coaxed the probe into the soil a few inches by applying pressure to the side, only to have it auto-reverse out when the internal hammer starts working after the pressure is released.
I can't find a reference to the specific dynamic process but it reminded me of how larger stones 'float' to the top during vibration because smaller stones/sand tend to fill the cavities below. To be honest I never had a feel for how this was going to work and just assumed Martian soil has some distinguishing features they'd tested before that would allow it to work. Turns out, not so much ...
Let's see what happens when the scoop is retracted. Perhaps if the probe can get entirely below the surface it will descend (at some funky angle now!)
Just curious - why didn’t they test the probe in different types of soils here on earth to see if it would get stuck? Or may be the article is twisting the actual reason? The article just says “It got stuck because the soil was clumpier than expected”. That can’t be the reason otherwise NASA would have tested it.
Read your comment again. Clumpier than expected does not mean they didn’t test it, it means they tested it against something that was a poor substitute for the real thing.
I’m sure on earth you can find soil both softer and harder. They didn’t make it to work against any kind of soil or rock you could ever encounter on earth because that is optimizing for the wrong thing at the cost of others.
Setting up an artificial Mars would involve different gravity, air pressure, atmosphere composition, and the weathering patterns of the material are probably difficult to predict.
Most of the reason to send a probe somewhere is to learn more about it, so I assume the only knowledge was sparse and possibly inaccurate educated guesses based on other data.
That's also probably a good reason to send up a wider tolerance, but less useful design first and follow up with a more targeted design that can do more as a revision on the product. Budgets are probably the reason to not do that.
There is commercial soil available that mimics the conditions of martian soil fairly well.
Gravity can be emulated by hanging the device from a spring (which you can optionally adjust to always take X newtons of force via a computer controller).
Atmosphere and weathering can be simulated in a vacuum chamber. All those things can be put into a vacuum chamber to simulate low pressure.
This is how NASA is developing their drone for the upcoming missions that will fly on mars and other celestial bodies.
If I'm not mistaken, they do a pre drill test of the soil and then adjust the drill settings for that so it's possible the dirty they tested wasn't an accurate representation of the composition beneath.
Yes, but by not being a vehicle you can allocate more schedule, weight, and money to the science type stuff on board instead of the locomotion type stuff.
Engineering for space is all about brutal trade-offs.
To emphasize this point, the InSight lander is five feet across and 800 pounds. Make all of that mobile, and either you need a substantially larger and more expensive rocket, or you need to dump a bunch of the planned equipment to free up mass.
I wonder if NASA machines could include small "3D printers" able to use sand and other local matherials so they could just print small glass objects in situ. That could improve some of the weight problems.
You could make an "unlimited" suply of high quality lenses to replace broken ones, replace small pieces or even fix small cracks in space hatches. If you can make a glass table in situ you don't need to pack it. You can just pack a set of legs for a small table and made it extensible to fit a bigger surface later (Metallic spacial furniture should be printed as a mess of spongy filaments in any case to reduce weigth without losing resistence). And another important matherial that will be needed at some time is the optical fiber, of course.
I assume that heating sand to 1400 degree would be expensive but possible in a combustion chamber with modified pressure and all rockets have some kind of this.
The need to cool the melted glass fast to harden it should not be a problem in Mars. Just put it outside. And there is plenty of sand available.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program put on a "world tour" of their capsules and landers to raise cash. Museums could pay them to setup a major staffed exhibit.
I had a chance to go when it was in SE Asia.
I got to:
- stick my head inside one of the capsules and see the "gyro globe"
- operate their lunar lander via a remote control
- learn about their numerous trips to Venus.
One of the highlights of my life actually.
Also got to see the Red Arrows do a full formation takeoff with 9 planes at high speed around the same time, and went to the Langkawi military air show.
After takeoff, they levelled off at 200' and accelerated to about 500 mph. They were a blur against the trees just below them - totally awesome.
(In Asia and S. America, jet airshows are still allowed to do low-altitude and supersonic flight over residential areas. Those are banned in Europe and N. America because of numerous previous accidents.)