Mars Race Heating Up
MonsieurEvil
Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 4Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
Join Date: 2002-01-22 Member: 4Members, Retired Developer, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
in Off-Topic
<div class="IPBDescription">Who will crash and burn first?</div> (from Astrobiology - <a href='http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=520&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0' target='_blank'>http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?o...order=0&thold=0</a> )
Even Japan and Europe are getting into the Mars game these days (funny how many western europeans don't like think of Russia as 'real' europe until they have to launch space vehicles. Then suddenly it's an all-european space venture <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo--> ). Not since America's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970's has so much space gear been sent to the red planet. Now all we need is Arnold to lose his memory of being a super-spy...
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The World Goes to Mars
Express, Hope, Spirit, Opportunity
by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
The pioneering science quartet is now en route to Mars.
The latest Mars rover, Opportunity, launched July 7th, and its sister rover, Spirit, which was launched on June 10th, have begun challenging trips to act as robotic geologists. The twin launches begin journeys leading to an eventual three months of exploration on the martian surface. To help scientists determine whether there was ever enough water on Mars to sustain life, the motorized explorers will send back images of sediment and mineral deposits.
Monday night's launch of the six-wheeled Opportunity rover-- about the size of a large riding lawn mower-- provides a vehicle loaded with equipment to analyze the Martian surface. Ten times bigger than the highly successful 1997 Sojourner rover, these twin vehicles are equipped to traverse the planet's surface over a daily distance of about a football field. With 6,000 miles separating the two landing locations on Mars, both surface missions will begin in January, 2004 and continue for three months through April, 2004.
Monday's take-off of Opportunity also successfully marked a remarkable joining of scientific cohorts to study the Red Planet. "It's one of the most intensive explorations of another planet in history," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Office of Space Science. The first launch of Spirit has so far performed its initial calibration maneuvers. It is currently more than 17 million miles from Earth.
Those twin rovers are following two other probes already on their way to Mars. Japan's trouble-plagued Nozomi is scheduled to arrive in late December or early January. Nozomi, first launched five years ago, is Japan's first attempt to explore the Red Planet. After gaining insufficient velocity on its first sling-shot pass by Earth, it maneuvered for a second pass that will take it towards its scheduled end-of-year encounter.
Scheduled to arrive at about the same time is the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and its British-built Beagle 2 lander.
Sending back images to Earth now, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey are already circling the planet and awaiting the rovers' arrival in six to seven months.
Weiler said, "Literally, the world is going to Mars."
Closest Approach
Successful launches, complex orbital manuevers, landings and remotely-controlled operations millions of miles away--those are just a short-list of challenges that await mission planners. Out of nine previous attempts to land on Mars, only three have succeeded because of the difficulty of traveling more than 300 million miles and landing on the windy, dust-covered planet. The cost of sending the two rovers to Mars is $800 million. "One for three is a good batting average in baseball," Weiler said. "But when these things cost so much it's not that great for space."
"Everytime I see the descent and landing video, I get nervous," said Weiler. "There are too many moving parts. Too many things that can go wrong. We can do absolutely everything right...after the failure of Mars 99, but if we get a gust of wind that exceeds the limits [on descent in January], we can lose the lander."
"There was a huge boulder next to Viking," noted Weiler, as he described the 1976 rocket-powered Viking spacecrafts' descent onto Mars. "All it takes is a boulder of the wrong size in the wrong place. Three [successes] out of 9 [attempts] aren't good odds."
But in addition to multiple landers increasing the chances for success, the primary reason for the summer flurry of missions is a unique close approach between Earth and Mars. Mars is approaching Earth in what will soon be the closest the planets have been in 73,000 years--a confluence set officially for 5:46 AM, Wednesday, August 27, 2003. That night, the Red Planet will be the brightest object in the sky as it reaches its closest Earth encounter, or opposition, at 34,646,418 miles.
At opposition Mars will be as close as it has been since September 12, 57,537 B.C. or one-third closer than the average opposition. The next approach this close is August 28, 2287 A.D at 34,620,000 miles.
The planet's bright magnitude should begin August 20 and continue through September 2 but fades rapidly thereafter as Earth pulls ahead of it and the Moon begins to grow full.
Cornell University Professor Steve Squires, lead principal investigator of the science packages called Athena, noted one advantage of this orbital closeness is faster communication: "At closest approach, the one-way transmission time is around 11 minutes." [In contrast, Viking in 1976-77 took around 19 minutes for one-way transmission].
The NASA rovers are nearly sisters, but not exactly so in an engineering or hardware sense. Comparing the twin rovers, Squires indicated how the first and second surface missions differ: "The one intentional difference is they transmit on different frequencies. So we don't get confused which one we are talking to. The differences are very minor. One of the things we found, the actuator that moves the mirror on Opportunity is a little stiffer when it gets cold. So we have to be sure is to warm up Opportunity slightly more than Spirit."
Mars Express
Compared to the twin NASA rovers, the European lander is smaller, less mobile, and more biologically-oriented in its testing protocols. "This is the first time Europe has gone to Mars," continued Weiler, noting that the European Space Agency, ESA, launched its own probe June 2nd, called the Mars Express, with a lander, named after the famous voyage, Beagle, that carried Englishman Charles Darwin on his world tour in search of how life evolved on Earth. "I sent an email after the successful Mars Express, wishing ESA luck," said NASA's Weiler. "After the [first Mars Exploration Rover] MER-A launch, ESA sent me a congratulatory email."
"Beagle is a softlander," said Weiler. "It would be great to have multiple landers on Mars. The last time we had multiple landers on Mars was 1976."
With a landed mass of less than 30 kg, Beagle 2 represents the most ambitious science payload-to-systems mass ratio ever attempted. Almost a third of the payload will carry out various types of analysis or be used to manipulate and collect samples for study on the surface of Mars. One of its main tasks will be the step-wise heating of martian soil in a kind of oven, to determine the elemental composition of any volatiles including organic compounds.
Since its June 2nd launch from the Russian Cosmodrome, mission control for the European Space Agency has issued two status reports, noting the power-up and communication tests with their probe are proceeding.
On June 24th, mission engineers summarized their status: "All operations planned for the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP) have been completed and the near-Earth verification phase has commenced as planned. All operations are now being conducted via the high gain antenna, which is the nominal configuration. The performance of the ESA and [Deep Space Network] DSN ground stations supporting the mission is excellent throughout the communications passes. Spacecraft platform subsystems (power, thermal, attitude and orbit control, on-board data handling) behave in a nominal manner. Payload and platform commissioning continue in parallel. Just 3 weeks after the launch of Mars Express, initial checkouts reveal that the overall status of the Mars Express orbiter payload is nominal and very satisfying. One of the major upcoming activities will be the Beagle-2 lander checkout, planned for 4 and 5 July."
Following their initially planned lander checkout, on July 8th, engineers continued to view the progress favorably: "Spacecraft platform subsystems (thermal, power, attitude and orbit control, on-board data handling) behave in a nominal manner. Spacecraft commissioning will continue into the end of July. Payload commissioning, including the Beagle-2 lander checkout, will be completed by mid-July. All orbiter payload instruments are in good health. The initial checkouts and calibrations have revealed very satisfying results. The Beagle-2 lander has been successfully switched on for the first time in flight on 4 and 5 July and has been communicating with the orbiter. On the 2nd of July, the Mars Express Science Working Team decided to modify the baselined reference orbit, adopting a G3u-type orbit [tuned for optimal low-altitude day and night-side viewing] starting with a pericenter at the equator. This new reference orbit is taking into account the post-launch delta-V[elocity] budget, and allows for an optimization of the science return from the Mars Express mission."
Nozimi, Planet-B
Nozomi, a Japanese (ISAS) Mars probe, has also completed its final Earth swingby operation on June 19 (JST), and is on its way to Mars. Nozomi, which means Hope, passed within 18,000 km of the Earth in a manuever designed to use the planet's gravity to slingshot the probe toward Mars.
Nozomi, launched in July 1998, is Japan's first attempt to explore Mars. Its mission is to orbit Mars and gather data on the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with solar wind for up to two years. It was originally scheduled to reach its destination in October 1998, but an earlier Earth swingby failed to give it sufficient speed, forcing a drastic rescheduling of its flight plan. In April last year, a burst of solar flares damaged Nozomi's heating system and cut off most communication link between the probe and tracking stations on Earth.
The computer control systems on the probe were intact, however, allowing engineers on Earth to repair the spacecraft. ISAS will begin trying to repair the electrical damage from July through November. If successful, it will arrive in late December, and will be thrown into orbit around Mars.
What's Next
Each of the quartet has its own challenges and rewards. Beagle is smaller and will perform some of the first biology detection experiments since the 1976 Vikings first injected microbial nutrients in hopes of seeing evolved gases and byproducts of martian metabolism. Beagle will be less mobile, relying on a mole-like digging tool to burrow for its soil samples just below the dusty top-layers. The Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, will have panoramic cameras and much greater mobility to travel beyond where they initially come to rest. Late this year and early next will give focus to the international science effort to explore whether the 'wetter and warmer' Mars can be viewed up close.
In looking back on the success of the 1997 Mars rover, Pathfinder project scientist, Dr. Matthew Golombek, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reflected that: "Power for a solar spacecraft must be managed very carefully. Managing the lag in knowledge from one day to the next is also important. Better autonomy placing instruments against rocks and targets and more autonomous roving could help look at more materials on the surface and visit more sites. For deep space missions, all it takes is one mistake for the mission to fail. Every launch has a 5 times out of 100 chance of blowing up. Part of exploration is confronting the unknown and risk can never be removed completely. In cases like Pathfinder taking a little risk can result in an enormous payoff."
Orbital projections of where Mars Express and the Mars Exploration Rovers are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Even Japan and Europe are getting into the Mars game these days (funny how many western europeans don't like think of Russia as 'real' europe until they have to launch space vehicles. Then suddenly it's an all-european space venture <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo--> ). Not since America's Viking missions to Mars in the 1970's has so much space gear been sent to the red planet. Now all we need is Arnold to lose his memory of being a super-spy...
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The World Goes to Mars
Express, Hope, Spirit, Opportunity
by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
The pioneering science quartet is now en route to Mars.
The latest Mars rover, Opportunity, launched July 7th, and its sister rover, Spirit, which was launched on June 10th, have begun challenging trips to act as robotic geologists. The twin launches begin journeys leading to an eventual three months of exploration on the martian surface. To help scientists determine whether there was ever enough water on Mars to sustain life, the motorized explorers will send back images of sediment and mineral deposits.
Monday night's launch of the six-wheeled Opportunity rover-- about the size of a large riding lawn mower-- provides a vehicle loaded with equipment to analyze the Martian surface. Ten times bigger than the highly successful 1997 Sojourner rover, these twin vehicles are equipped to traverse the planet's surface over a daily distance of about a football field. With 6,000 miles separating the two landing locations on Mars, both surface missions will begin in January, 2004 and continue for three months through April, 2004.
Monday's take-off of Opportunity also successfully marked a remarkable joining of scientific cohorts to study the Red Planet. "It's one of the most intensive explorations of another planet in history," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Office of Space Science. The first launch of Spirit has so far performed its initial calibration maneuvers. It is currently more than 17 million miles from Earth.
Those twin rovers are following two other probes already on their way to Mars. Japan's trouble-plagued Nozomi is scheduled to arrive in late December or early January. Nozomi, first launched five years ago, is Japan's first attempt to explore the Red Planet. After gaining insufficient velocity on its first sling-shot pass by Earth, it maneuvered for a second pass that will take it towards its scheduled end-of-year encounter.
Scheduled to arrive at about the same time is the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and its British-built Beagle 2 lander.
Sending back images to Earth now, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey are already circling the planet and awaiting the rovers' arrival in six to seven months.
Weiler said, "Literally, the world is going to Mars."
Closest Approach
Successful launches, complex orbital manuevers, landings and remotely-controlled operations millions of miles away--those are just a short-list of challenges that await mission planners. Out of nine previous attempts to land on Mars, only three have succeeded because of the difficulty of traveling more than 300 million miles and landing on the windy, dust-covered planet. The cost of sending the two rovers to Mars is $800 million. "One for three is a good batting average in baseball," Weiler said. "But when these things cost so much it's not that great for space."
"Everytime I see the descent and landing video, I get nervous," said Weiler. "There are too many moving parts. Too many things that can go wrong. We can do absolutely everything right...after the failure of Mars 99, but if we get a gust of wind that exceeds the limits [on descent in January], we can lose the lander."
"There was a huge boulder next to Viking," noted Weiler, as he described the 1976 rocket-powered Viking spacecrafts' descent onto Mars. "All it takes is a boulder of the wrong size in the wrong place. Three [successes] out of 9 [attempts] aren't good odds."
But in addition to multiple landers increasing the chances for success, the primary reason for the summer flurry of missions is a unique close approach between Earth and Mars. Mars is approaching Earth in what will soon be the closest the planets have been in 73,000 years--a confluence set officially for 5:46 AM, Wednesday, August 27, 2003. That night, the Red Planet will be the brightest object in the sky as it reaches its closest Earth encounter, or opposition, at 34,646,418 miles.
At opposition Mars will be as close as it has been since September 12, 57,537 B.C. or one-third closer than the average opposition. The next approach this close is August 28, 2287 A.D at 34,620,000 miles.
The planet's bright magnitude should begin August 20 and continue through September 2 but fades rapidly thereafter as Earth pulls ahead of it and the Moon begins to grow full.
Cornell University Professor Steve Squires, lead principal investigator of the science packages called Athena, noted one advantage of this orbital closeness is faster communication: "At closest approach, the one-way transmission time is around 11 minutes." [In contrast, Viking in 1976-77 took around 19 minutes for one-way transmission].
The NASA rovers are nearly sisters, but not exactly so in an engineering or hardware sense. Comparing the twin rovers, Squires indicated how the first and second surface missions differ: "The one intentional difference is they transmit on different frequencies. So we don't get confused which one we are talking to. The differences are very minor. One of the things we found, the actuator that moves the mirror on Opportunity is a little stiffer when it gets cold. So we have to be sure is to warm up Opportunity slightly more than Spirit."
Mars Express
Compared to the twin NASA rovers, the European lander is smaller, less mobile, and more biologically-oriented in its testing protocols. "This is the first time Europe has gone to Mars," continued Weiler, noting that the European Space Agency, ESA, launched its own probe June 2nd, called the Mars Express, with a lander, named after the famous voyage, Beagle, that carried Englishman Charles Darwin on his world tour in search of how life evolved on Earth. "I sent an email after the successful Mars Express, wishing ESA luck," said NASA's Weiler. "After the [first Mars Exploration Rover] MER-A launch, ESA sent me a congratulatory email."
"Beagle is a softlander," said Weiler. "It would be great to have multiple landers on Mars. The last time we had multiple landers on Mars was 1976."
With a landed mass of less than 30 kg, Beagle 2 represents the most ambitious science payload-to-systems mass ratio ever attempted. Almost a third of the payload will carry out various types of analysis or be used to manipulate and collect samples for study on the surface of Mars. One of its main tasks will be the step-wise heating of martian soil in a kind of oven, to determine the elemental composition of any volatiles including organic compounds.
Since its June 2nd launch from the Russian Cosmodrome, mission control for the European Space Agency has issued two status reports, noting the power-up and communication tests with their probe are proceeding.
On June 24th, mission engineers summarized their status: "All operations planned for the Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP) have been completed and the near-Earth verification phase has commenced as planned. All operations are now being conducted via the high gain antenna, which is the nominal configuration. The performance of the ESA and [Deep Space Network] DSN ground stations supporting the mission is excellent throughout the communications passes. Spacecraft platform subsystems (power, thermal, attitude and orbit control, on-board data handling) behave in a nominal manner. Payload and platform commissioning continue in parallel. Just 3 weeks after the launch of Mars Express, initial checkouts reveal that the overall status of the Mars Express orbiter payload is nominal and very satisfying. One of the major upcoming activities will be the Beagle-2 lander checkout, planned for 4 and 5 July."
Following their initially planned lander checkout, on July 8th, engineers continued to view the progress favorably: "Spacecraft platform subsystems (thermal, power, attitude and orbit control, on-board data handling) behave in a nominal manner. Spacecraft commissioning will continue into the end of July. Payload commissioning, including the Beagle-2 lander checkout, will be completed by mid-July. All orbiter payload instruments are in good health. The initial checkouts and calibrations have revealed very satisfying results. The Beagle-2 lander has been successfully switched on for the first time in flight on 4 and 5 July and has been communicating with the orbiter. On the 2nd of July, the Mars Express Science Working Team decided to modify the baselined reference orbit, adopting a G3u-type orbit [tuned for optimal low-altitude day and night-side viewing] starting with a pericenter at the equator. This new reference orbit is taking into account the post-launch delta-V[elocity] budget, and allows for an optimization of the science return from the Mars Express mission."
Nozimi, Planet-B
Nozomi, a Japanese (ISAS) Mars probe, has also completed its final Earth swingby operation on June 19 (JST), and is on its way to Mars. Nozomi, which means Hope, passed within 18,000 km of the Earth in a manuever designed to use the planet's gravity to slingshot the probe toward Mars.
Nozomi, launched in July 1998, is Japan's first attempt to explore Mars. Its mission is to orbit Mars and gather data on the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with solar wind for up to two years. It was originally scheduled to reach its destination in October 1998, but an earlier Earth swingby failed to give it sufficient speed, forcing a drastic rescheduling of its flight plan. In April last year, a burst of solar flares damaged Nozomi's heating system and cut off most communication link between the probe and tracking stations on Earth.
The computer control systems on the probe were intact, however, allowing engineers on Earth to repair the spacecraft. ISAS will begin trying to repair the electrical damage from July through November. If successful, it will arrive in late December, and will be thrown into orbit around Mars.
What's Next
Each of the quartet has its own challenges and rewards. Beagle is smaller and will perform some of the first biology detection experiments since the 1976 Vikings first injected microbial nutrients in hopes of seeing evolved gases and byproducts of martian metabolism. Beagle will be less mobile, relying on a mole-like digging tool to burrow for its soil samples just below the dusty top-layers. The Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, will have panoramic cameras and much greater mobility to travel beyond where they initially come to rest. Late this year and early next will give focus to the international science effort to explore whether the 'wetter and warmer' Mars can be viewed up close.
In looking back on the success of the 1997 Mars rover, Pathfinder project scientist, Dr. Matthew Golombek, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reflected that: "Power for a solar spacecraft must be managed very carefully. Managing the lag in knowledge from one day to the next is also important. Better autonomy placing instruments against rocks and targets and more autonomous roving could help look at more materials on the surface and visit more sites. For deep space missions, all it takes is one mistake for the mission to fail. Every launch has a 5 times out of 100 chance of blowing up. Part of exploration is confronting the unknown and risk can never be removed completely. In cases like Pathfinder taking a little risk can result in an enormous payoff."
Orbital projections of where Mars Express and the Mars Exploration Rovers are right now, can be continuously monitored over their half-year journeys. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
Someone save me from undereducated teens...
Ontopic: I'm not sure what we(homo sapiens) are going to achieve by conquering Mars but I guess it's just progress which is good...usually.
Btw: Russia is not european because most of it is in Asia(on it's own earth-plate thingy - I'm dumb and as I said, I can not be bothered to check what's the real word for it) <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
And they were first in space which I feel is much bigger step than going mars <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->
<b>Edit:</b>
MonsE: I'm not talking about WW2. They were taking competitions on who can cut off most chinese villagers heads with two-handed swords somewhere in the pre/post medieval times.
<b>Edit2:</b>
Sorry for my part of derailing.
Can we please keep this on topic about Mars and how the human race is doing something good for a change, exploring the solar system and exchanging information in a non-competive and pure science way? Can we? Please?
Right.
Maybe it's this:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->NASA: The Next Generation
NASA's latest space probe is so high tech, even its name sounds like something from the world of Star Trek. Deep Space 1, which launched on October 24, is the first of a series of New Millennium spacecraft. Each of these is designed to test novel technologies that could make future missions smarter, faster, and cheaper. Deep Space 1's most notable innovation is the use of ion propulsion, rather than chemical propellant, to accelerate the craft. Electric energy from the probe's solar panels is used to strip electrons from stored xenon atoms, which are then expelled at high velocity. The resulting thrust is weak but highly efficient, and it can be maintained for extremely long periods. <b>Ion propulsion could speed up both unmanned and manned exploration of the solar system.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Plus the British Beagle2 mission is a whole new concept in probes. Very experimental in how it operates, and I think NASA wanted something relatively traditional that they know has worked in the past. NASA gets inertia like any other big government agency.
That pretty much sums it up. I was down at Kennedy Space Center on vacation about a month ago, and they were doing a huge PR campaign about the two new rovers. They basically admitted the new rovers are just improved variants of Pathfinder. But, that's not a bad thing since Pathfinder was simply amazing it what it did.
I think China takes the cake for most daring mission though. They've announced plans to not only visit the moon, but establish a base on it. <a href='http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/05/20/china.space/index.html' target='_blank'>http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/05/20/c...pace/index.html</a>. As someone who hopes to work for the space program one day, I'm hoping they succeed because that would likely set off another space race which hopefully I could get involved in.
And yes, i personaly like the idea of science's time going towards exploration and bettering mankind, instead of inventing new and bigger weapons. It is highly unlikely we will live to see the results of this though, or even know if any of the tests worked <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
But... pulling space through the ship??? Ship...not.....actually.......moving???
Oh no i've gone cross-eyed.
I'd be very sceptical with this. China is notorious for big plans - they use such as a kind of inflated PR, trying to give the heterogenous country a joint identity - which then tend to come out pretty bad; see their Yangtse dams, for example.
Personally, I'm happy to see this 'friendly' space race between NASA and ESA: They're both in relatively different positions with the NASA being established, experienced, but forced into conservatism on the one, and the rather 'new' ESA that can risk unconventional projects, but isn't capable of maintaining it all alone on the other hand. Maybe they manage to create some 'synergy'.
China does like to talk big. Then you read about how they have not got indoor plumbing in the majority of their homes yet, and can't seem to train their doctors not to leave buckets of SARS-infected feces around hospital patients. You can add a decade onto their space program estimations at least, and more than likely they will go for topping Russia's record of 400 dead in their space program on the way...
I just hope that these Mars missions pan out. As the article highlights, after 30 years of visiting, we only have about a 30% success rate due to the extreme difficulties of these missions. I want to see little green men!
Ehh? Dosent it have to have fast thruster speed otherwise its not that effiecient? Maybe they mean its low amount of matter realesed but at high speeds.
I just hope Nasa dosent have a problem like with m = ft thing. God you think they would all work in meters.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I just hope that these Mars missions pan out. As the article highlights, after 30 years of visiting, we only have about a 30% success rate due to the extreme difficulties of these missions. I want to see little green men! <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Best chance of finding evidence of life is probably gonna be in the oceans of Europa. I think it's the only large body in the solar system with large quantities of water other than Earth. But, I too hope something great like fossilized microbes will be found on Mars with these missions, but I'm not holding my breath.
Quote from Nem:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I'd be very sceptical with this. China is notorious for big plans - they use such as a kind of inflated PR, trying to give the heterogenous country a joint identity - which then tend to come out pretty bad; see their Yangtse dams, for example.
Personally, I'm happy to see this 'friendly' space race between NASA and ESA: They're both in relatively different positions with the NASA being established, experienced, but forced into conservatism on the one, and the rather 'new' ESA that can risk unconventional projects, but isn't capable of maintaining it all alone on the other hand. Maybe they manage to create some 'synergy'. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ok, my hope and faith in China is mainly purely selfish. I'm studying Aerospace Engineering at college and am angling to get into the space program when I graduate. So, a Chinese moon mission would start a new space race imo which would help me get a job <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo--> But in all likelihood, there mission won't pan out by 2010 like they're aiming for. They're space prog is likely not gonna develop to be ready to go to the moon by 2010. As far as the ESA and NASA synergy, that would be nice, but the ESA isn't all that established (relative to NASA) but if they keep up their nice reliability as of late (<a href='http://www.asi.org/adb/04/01/01/01/01/space-faq-launcher-current-world.html' target='_blank'>http://www.asi.org/adb/04/01/01/01/01/spac...rent-world.html</a>) that would help. Also, if they finish fixing the French Ariane-5 rockets(<a href='http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/ariane5_ap_030107.html' target='_blank'>http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/arian..._ap_030107.html</a>) that would really help.
<!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
It works because of Newton's Second Law (Force = Mass * Acceleration). Here, thrust (force) is small, but the lower mass due to the reduced fuel mass needed enables a decent (relatively speaking) acceleration that can be sustained for a long time. The long constant thrust enables a long stretch of constant acceleration and thus an eventual high velocity with low fuel expenditures.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Ehh? Dosent it have to have fast thruster speed otherwise its not that effiecient? Maybe they mean its low amount of matter realesed but at high speeds.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Fast thruster speed can mean high efficiency in chemical rockets. The ion drive is a solid fuel rocket though which makes a big difference. With chemical rockets, you want to use what is known as a "Hohlman Transfer" when moving an object between different orbits (for instance orbit around earth to an orbit that intersects with Mars). A "Hohlman Transfer" relies upon large relatively instantaneous thrusts (relative to total flight time so for transfer between earth and mars a 10-minute thrust or so would be considered instantaneous), for breaking out of the initial orbit and then entering the second orbit. So, you use just two pulses of thrusts at the beginning and the end and just coast for the rest. So, in order for a Hohlman transfer to work you need a high thrust. With a sold fuel rocket though (ie a ion drive) you use a different transfer method that ever so slowly spirals outwords and thus relies on a constant thrust which can only be sustained with a long lasting thrust that the ion drive provides. The reason that the ion drive is considered so efficient is because it uses so much less fuel than a chemical rocket despite being constantly running and achieves the same result. Basically, Ion drive requires less fuel so it is cheaper, which is the main concern of most space projects.
Pf = (m - R delta t) (v + delta v) + R * delta t (v - uex)
Since you expel fuel in space the way for a more effiecient engine is to have a faster exhaust speed (uex). The rocket along with its fuel maintains constant momentum if there are no outside forces. So it dosent matter if a ion engine can be used longer if it dosen't have faster exhaust speed. If an ion engine can be used longer time intervals that just means its power can be less. The power being less does not mean that the exhaust speed is less however.
However, again IIRC, it also takes a ridiculously long time to get to that speed <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
But people <b>own</b> part of the moon. Acording to some treaty, they can pass over it legally for "exploration purposes" but cant mine, build etc on someone elses land.
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Heh, isn't that how the spice-fueled ships in Dune worked?