NEWS: One Hell of a Game of Catch

Ouch.

Still, it reminds me a bit of the Mercury and Apollo missions where they had to reconnect the LEM to the Command Module.

not good, on the other hand perhaps the samples are ok. here's hoping.

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 11:36AM]

it crashed into the desert.

no one got a chance...it crashed into the earth

here you go:

They were doing it to practice techniques they might use in the case of an asteroid flinging to earth, or so I read. I saw this story on ABC SciTech but as usual was too lazy to write it up.

Makes you feel confident in their abilities to prevent an apocalyptic event don't it?

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 by AceTracer]

Well, if the samples did not survive, that still looks cool!

The damn thing crashed, just wonderful.
Oh well, time for dinner.

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 2:25PM]

I'm glad I'm not the guy who packed the chutes...

but really it would be a major bummer if the samples were destroyed...

is it my imagination or does NASA fuck up way to often. It seems like the trip to the moon was the last great mission that dident end teribely wrong. Wasent all this new technology and computer modeling suposed to illiminate stupid mistakes like this.

Fuck up often, when compared with whom?

NASA faces engineering challenges like none other. I haven't researched this mission specifically, but let me sketch a similar case: the mars rovers. OK, first off, these things have been running for months without supervision. You know how long the average mobile autonomous robot runs without supervision? A few hours, in most cases, before something crashes or something unexpected happens. You know how hard it is to expect the kind of things that will happen someplace no one has ever been to, where the atmosphere and gravity are fundamentally different, etc.? Now let's talk about the circuitry. First off, temperatures on Mars get low enough that not all the components will function. (Yeah, I know, opposite the usual problem for computers.) They actually keep the computers inside a heated, insultaed chamber in the rover. Now, these computers, the ones that run the AI that has to cope with rocky martian terrain and keep the rover from flipping over or getting stuck some other way. They're top of the line, best money can buy systems, right? Well, sort of. Consider that in the thinner martian atmosphere, background radiation is MUCH more of a problem. If you were sending a robot into a radioactive environment on earth, you'd just coat the entire logic system in lead, and consider yourself safe from having any of your bits flipped. For a space mission, that solution won't fly. The fastest processor NASA has to work with that's radiation hardened is about on par with an 80386. (i.e. 1992 level systems, a couple hundred times slower than a chip you could buy today.) Lastly, remember that a rolling robot is NOT a desktop system. It gets shaken, bumped, and bounced, hundreds of times a day. If a cable comes loose, if a chip pops off a board, you cannot plug it back in. It is on Mars. You are not. It is gone.

And yet, some of these rovers are STILL WORKING after months. It's fucking amazing they ever worked at all. I can only imagine that flying a probe next to a GIANT CONTINUOUS HYDROGEN BOMB EXPLOSION, skimming a little off the top, and returning it safely back to earth was a more challenging problem yet.



I loved this quote from the write up:

Don't you just hate it when all the science leaks out?

i head teh samples are comnaminated, (or could be) as the shuttle is cracked open

Baudot went to bat for NASA beautifully. NASA does an amazing, amazing job. I, for one, am in favor of doubling NASA's budget, effective immediately.

wow.. that sounded like it was going to be sooo epic.. and then SMACK,, what a buzz killllllll