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Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission: NASA's Curiosity rover lands on Mars, 6th August 2012

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hiraethified


The video is amazing!

Because of the spacecraft's increased size, allowing it to bounce-land onto Mars' surface with the aid of airbags -- the technology* usually used by landing rovers -- just won't do. So instead Nasa has developed a sky crane -- a flying vehicle that can lower the rover gently -- to ensure a soft landing technique as Curiosity is lowered to the surface.

The sky crane will work with parachutes to land the rover during the last part of its journey. As the video shows, once the parachute has slowed the rover's descent, the heatshield, which protects Curiosity when it enters Mars' atmosphere, falls from the underside of the craft. Next a "descent stage" will also detach and rise up from Curiosity's upper protective shell and slow the rover's descent using four steerable engines which also protect against horizontal winds. Once the rover is nearing zero velocity, the descent stage will release it using an "umbilical cord" to lower it to the ground. While Curiosity is being lowered, its front mobility system will be readied so it can rove away as soon as it lands. Once computers on the descent stage sense a succesful landing, it cuts the bridle connecting it to the rover and promptly flies off to crash-land elsewhere on the planet.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/11/nasas-new-mars-rover
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It's an incredible plan. So many possible points of failure! This rover will kick lots of arse. Being nuclear powered and so much bigger than the current rovers, it will cover loads more ground and do much more science. Can't wait!
 
Lift off this Saturday - fingers crossed!

_56852276_mars_science_lab_624in.jpg


The one-hour-and-43-minute launch window will now open at 10:02 local time (15:02 GMT). MSL's cruise to Mars should take eight-and-a-half months.

The rover will aim to touch down in an equatorial depression called Gale Crater, where it will use its suite of 10 instruments to assess whether the Red Planet has ever been habitable.

It is not a life-detection mission as such; the $2.5bn robot cannot identify microbes or even microbial fossils. But it can assess whether ancient conditions could have ever supported organisms.

This means Gale must show evidence for the past presence of water, a source of energy with which lifeforms could have metabolised, and a source of organic compounds with which those organisms could have built their structures.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15821141
 
that looks like a well-dodgy plan. so many things could go wrong. lets hope this dude's not involved

beagle2_clamshell_sm.jpg
 
I found it easier to bump the older thread to get it on the front page along with the newer one, then you can select them both more easily.
 
bi0boy said:
I really hope they've tested that skycrane somewhere on earth. It looks totally made of fail to me.
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Indeed, I have just watched the video and there are so many things that have to work right to get the robot on the ground. Who is to say that it will be over a nice smooth bit of the planet as the video, what precautions have they against coming down on a mountain?
 
weltweit said:
Indeed, I have just watched the video and there are so many things that have to work right to get the robot on the ground. Who is to say that it will be over a nice smooth bit of the planet as the video, what precautions have they against coming down on a mountain?
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I expect they have checked out the landing site on Google Mars. Yes there really is such a thing.
 
weltweit said:
Indeed, I have just watched the video and there are so many things that have to work right to get the robot on the ground. Who is to say that it will be over a nice smooth bit of the planet as the video, what precautions have they against coming down on a mountain?
Click to expand...
Extensive surveys by the three current mars orbiters (NASA's Matrs Odyssey and Reconnaissance Orbiter, and ESA's Mars Express) have been used to select smooth landing sites. By making course adjustments on approach, the actual landing area can be narrowed down very well (an ellipse 20 x 25km). The lander itself has a downwards facing radar that scans the landing site starting pretty high up. Radar is good at differentiating smooth from rough surfaces, so that data will be used to steer the lander down to the smoothest possible surface.
 
Crispy said:
Extensive surveys by the three current mars orbiters (NASA's Matrs Odyssey and Reconnaissance Orbiter, and ESA's Mars Express) have been used to select smooth landing sites. By making course adjustments on approach, the actual landing area can be narrowed down very well (an ellipse 20 x 25km). The lander itself has a downwards facing radar that scans the landing site starting pretty high up. Radar is good at differentiating smooth from rough surfaces, so that data will be used to steer the lander down to the smoothest possible surface.
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I know they've done stuff about the landing site, but rocket-powered skycranes in sparse atmospheres are hardly a proven technology.

I see here they have tested the crane bit in a lab, but surely they'd want to test the crane hovering over some high-altitiude Peruvian desert laying down payloads.
 
It's all built for martian Gs though. You'd have to test one built for earth Gs and then you're testing something else :D
 
The final part of the landing system is very similar to the Surveyor moon probes in that it is a rocket to slow descent. The difference being it hand the probe like a parachute rather than being underneath.

Hmmm the AI on the lander though, thats gotta be a fair bit of code.
 
Man oh man, I'm keeping everything crossed for this landing but it seems so ridiculously complicated I'm harbouring a few fears.

The 900kg rover will approach Mars enclosed in a protective capsule - the biggest capsule Nasa has ever used, bigger even than the Apollo Command Module.
It will arrive at the top of the atmosphere travelling 20,000km/h.
All that energy has got to be dumped. When the rover's wheels touch the ground six-to-eight minutes later, they must be moving no more than about 1m/s.

What scares the uninitiated most perhaps is the complexity of it all.

It starts with very precise navigation through space.
If the rover has any chance of reaching its equatorial target of Gale Crater, it must first hit an "entry keyhole" in the sky just a kilometre or so across.

As the capsule thunders downwards, it ejects ballast blocks to move its centre of gravity and tilt its angle of attack.
This will give the vehicle lift. And with the aid of thrusters and some dead-reckoning, the entry capsule will fly a path through the upper atmosphere.
The underside of the capsule will get hot as it rubs up against the Martian air - the heat shield will experience temperatures above 2,000C.
More ballast blocks are then ejected to straighten the vehicle before, at 11km altitude and with the descent velocity now reduced to 1,400km/h, the capsule deploys a supersonic parachute.

This immense canopy will open instantaneously and must absorb an impulse of almost 30 tonnes.
Half a minute later, what is perhaps the most important event occurs - the separation of the heat shield.
Unless it comes off, Curiosity's descent radar cannot see the ground.

"The radar is fundamental," says Matt Wallace, the flight system manager on the project.
"You have to land softly or else you'll break the rover. To land softly, you have to know how high you are, obviously, from the ground. But more importantly you have to know how fast you are going - both vertically and horizontally.

It's a pulsed-Doppler system and has the benefit of being extremely accurate in both velocimetry and altimetry, and it's very hard to fool."
The parachute will further slow the fall to about 450km/h, and it's at that point, at an altitude of about 8km, that we see the so-called "crazy" stuff.

A "sky crane" holding the rover drops away from the parachute, using thruster rockets to further slow its descent as it heads down towards the surface.

At just 20m above the ground, the sky crane hovers and lowers the rover down to the surface on three nylon cords.
Once the wheels make contact, the cords are cut, and the crane flies away to crash at a safe distance. Steltzner and his crew can breathe again.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18933037
 
Tonight at 9pm:
Mission to Mars
b01llnb2.jpg

Duration: 1 hour
Horizon goes behind the scenes at NASA as they countdown to the landing of a 2.5 billion-dollar rover on the surface of Mars. In six days time, the nuclear-powered vehicle - the size of a car - will be winched down onto the surface of the Red Planet from a rocket-powered crane. That's if things go according to plan: Mars has become known as the Bermuda Triangle of space because so many missions there have ended in failure. The Curiosity mission is the most audacious - and expensive - attempt to answer the question: is there life on Mars?
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01llnb2
 
Arse. I'll be travelling from about 5 am to the Olympics on Monday morning. I think I'd rather "watch" the landing.

I bet they won't carry the Mars news on the scoreboards. Philistines.

I liked the bit on the Horizon programme when they said every part of the mad-cap descent was the right solution to an engineering problem. If that's the answer, the question must have been pretty majestic.

I can't find a bookie that's offering odds on the landing (but Paddy Power is offering 16/1 against alien life being discovered in 2012).
 
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