Mars is hard

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El Guapo
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by El Guapo »

Is that where they are planning on filming the eventual Mars "landing"?
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Holman »

AWS260 wrote:My upstairs neighbors is away for a few months, on Mars:
That is very cool!

But she's going to be pissed when she finds out that real Mars is almost nothing like Hawaii.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Punisher »

El Guapo wrote:Is that where they are planning on filming the eventual Mars "landing"?
I am pretty sure they scrapped the moon landing set so they do need a new one..

But that is pretty cool. I think if I could bring my wife and wouldn't have to worry about bills, I would definitely sign up.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by McNutt »

No way in hell. Life is too short for me to be cooped up like that for so long. I don't have the ability to not freak out after one week.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kraken »

So NASA is really going to do this.



Story here
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Daehawk »

They should add a small blade above the solar panels to use to dust them off.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kelric »

Daehawk wrote: Fri May 11, 2018 8:26 pm They should add a small blade above the solar panels to use to dust them off.
The act of flying should clean them off, provided they can get the machine off the ground.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Holman »

The ornithopter swept over a bare rock plain. Paul looked down from their
two thousand meters' altitude, saw the wrinkled shadow of their craft and
escort. The land beneath seemed flat, but shadow wrinkles said otherwise.

"Has anyone ever walked out of the desert?" the Duke asked.

Halleck's music stopped. He leaned forward to catch the answer.

"Not from the deep desert," Kynes said. "Men have walked out of the second
zone several times. They've survived by crossing the rock areas where worms
seldom go."

The timbre of Kynes' voice held Paul's attention. He felt his sense come
alert the way they were trained to do.

"Ah-h, the worms," the Duke said. "I must see one sometime."

"You may see one today," Kynes said. "Wherever there is spice, there are
worms. "
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Stefan Stirzaker »

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa ... e-on-mars
Ancient organics and hints of CURRENT biological processes
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Daehawk »

With that copter......what happens if it falls over or gets blown over? At an angle sitting the blades on two sides would be touching the ground. Upsidedown all four would be flat on it.

And that self portrait from the organics article. What did it do set up a tripod and back up...i see no boom holding the camera out to take a selfie. How'd it do that?
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Hyena »

Daehawk wrote: Thu Jun 07, 2018 2:40 pm With that copter......what happens if it falls over or gets blown over? At an angle sitting the blades on two sides would be touching the ground. Upsidedown all four would be flat on it.

And that self portrait from the organics article. What did it do set up a tripod and back up...i see no boom holding the camera out to take a selfie. How'd it do that?
Those selfies are actually composite images from many different angles, and they piece the pictures together to remove the boom.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by AWS260 »

The Opportunity rover has been silent for two weeks, as a dust storm encircles the planet.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kraken »

Designed for a 90-day mission, it's in its 15th year. So even if Opportunity doesn't wake up...Mission Accomplished.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by msduncan »

Hope she wakes. Pulling for her.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Jeff V »

msduncan wrote: Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:53 pm Hope she wakes. Pulling for her.
Rover is not a feminine name. :P
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

Jeff V wrote: Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:57 pm
msduncan wrote: Mon Jun 25, 2018 4:53 pm Hope she wakes. Pulling for her.
Rover is not a feminine name. :P
Rover isn't the name. The name is Opportunity.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Daehawk »

Ive asked a couple scientists...one a MArs guy and one a planetary guy...about the copter and the rover. One said the copter is so far off but they are working on ways to keep it upright.

The other guy spoke about them knowing the seasonal trends on Mars as for dust storms. Usually the smaller ones clean off the rover panels. He said any rover stuff they knew when to move and where to. No idea though why this one is being caught in a planet wide storm.

I cant recall the one guy at all but the planetary guy I asked was a professor at Nevada.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by AWS260 »

Still silent.
sols 5203 to 5209, Sept. 12, 2018 - Sept. 18, 2018:
No Signal Has Been Heard From Opportunity for Nearly 100 Days


The Opportunity team is increasing the frequency of commands it beams to the rover via the dishes of NASA's Deep Space Network from three times a week to multiple times per day.

No signal from Opportunity has been heard since Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018). That's nearly 100 sols (days) without communication. It is expected that Opportunity has experienced a low-power fault, perhaps, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The dust storm on Mars continues its decay with atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover site below 1.5. The project has been listening for the rover over a broad range of times using the Deep Space Network Radio Science Receiver and commanding "sweep and beeps" to address a possible complexity with certain conditions within the mission clock fault.

Total odometry is 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers).
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Redfive »

Bumping this thread to prep for tomorrow's Insight landing.

*fingers crossed*
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kraken »

When you read the description of the 1,000 things that have to work exactly right, autonomously and in rapid succession, it is astonishing that Mars landings ever succeed. There's just enough atmosphere to be perilous and not enough to be very helpful. Insight isn't one of NASA's sexier missions. Geology only ever arouses geologists, and now planetologists, and I'm not either of those...but I'm hoping for another success story tomorrow.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Alefroth »

Woo hoo!
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Stefan Stirzaker »

Stuck the landing! Noe we have 19/44 successful landings on mars. Fun to watch
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Re: Mars is hard

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:dance:
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Daehawk »

I really love seeing them celebrate but Id like to see pics or video from the landing itself.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

The Verge
Mars One Ventures — the company that claimed it was going to send hundreds of people to live (and ultimately die) on the Red Planet — is now bankrupt, according to Swiss financial notices. It’s an unsurprising development, as many experts suspected that Mars One has been a scam for years, preying on people’s desires to travel to space without having a real plan to get them there.

News of the liquidation first came to light over the weekend, thanks to a Redditor who spotted a notice for the company’s bankruptcy on a website for the city of Basel, Switzerland — where Mars One’s parent company is based. The source indicated that the the city declared the company bankrupt on January 15th, which then dissolved the organization. Mars One’s creator, Bas Lansdorp, confirmed the news to Engadget and told the publication he was “working to find a solution.” He noted that the non-profit arm of Mars One, the Netherlands-based Mars One Foundation, was still alive but lacks investment to do anything.
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Re: Mars is hard

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AWS260 wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 3:23 pm Still silent.
RIP
Opportunity’s historic mission, which uncovered signs of Mars’s watery past and transformed our understanding of the Red Planet, has finally come to an end after 15 years, NASA declared Wednesday.

The cause was system failure precipitated by power loss during a catastrophic, planetwide dust storm that engulfed the Mars rover last summer.
...
Opportunity’s mission was planned to last just 90 days, but it worked for 5,000 Martian “sols” (which are about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day) and traversed more than 28 treacherous miles — two records for NASA.

“It will be a very long time,” Callas predicted, “before any other mission exceeds that duration or distance on the surface of another world.”
...
The rover is survived at Mars by Curiosity, the InSight lander and six orbiting spacecraft. NASA’s next rover mission, which will seek out signs of ancient life, will launch in 2020.

As for Opportunity, its metal shell will remain in the spot where it sent its last message, on the rim of Endeavour Crater. “It’s always going to be there,” Zurbuchen said, “like a monument, or a shipwreck.”

It is a marker of where humanity has been. And a beacon for whatever comes next.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by AWS260 »

This is great thread by someone who was inspired by Spirit and Opportunity as a kid. (Click the date to read the whole thing.)

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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

Thanks for that. A touching read.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by LordMortis »

“My battery is low and it’s getting dark" just has a wave of heartbreaking feel to it.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kraken »

Odds are that if we ever do inadvertently develop a self-aware AI, it will be in one of NASA's robots.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

cnet
NASA's only working Mars rover had an attitude problem.
...
"Partway through its last set of activities, Curiosity lost its orientation," wrote Curiosity team member Dawn Sumner, a planetary geologist at University of California, Davis, in a mission update this week.

The rover stores in memory its body attitude and joint orientation. This includes details of the local landscape, the location of its robotic arm and the directions its instruments are pointing. It's all the data that helps the rover know exactly where it is on Mars and how to move about safely.

"Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered," Sumner wrote.
...
Good news came in the form of another mission update. "We learned this morning that plan was successful and Curiosity was ready for science once more," wrote NASA atmospheric scientist Scott Guzewich.

The rover team will work to prevent this glitch from happening again.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

Space
The first official science results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal a regularly roiled world.
...
Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, Banerdt added.
...
The stationary lander carries two main science instruments to do this work: a supersensitive suite of seismometers and a burrowing heat probe dubbed "the mole," which is designed to get at least 10 feet (3 meters) below the Red Planet's surface.

Analyses of marsquake and heat-transport measurements will allow the mission team to construct a detailed, 3D map of the Martian interior, NASA officials have said. In addition, InSight scientists are using radio signals beamed from the lander to track how much Mars wobbles on its axis over time. This information will help researchers determine how big and dense the planet's core is.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Holman »

Kraken wrote: Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:54 pm Odds are that if we ever do inadvertently develop a self-aware AI, it will be in one of NASA's robots.
Mars AI would benign.

We're more likely to get a consumer-analysis AI that jumps from trying to sell us useless crap to "Trust The Computer, The Computer is Your Friend!"
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Pyperkub »

Holman wrote: Mon Feb 24, 2020 6:35 pm
Kraken wrote: Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:54 pm Odds are that if we ever do inadvertently develop a self-aware AI, it will be in one of NASA's robots.
Mars AI would benign.

We're more likely to get a consumer-analysis AI that jumps from trying to sell us useless crap to "Trust The Computer, The Computer is Your Friend!"
I'll go with financial trading AI. It's where the actual money is.

On the other hand, AI has been impacting the world for decades (great talk by Charles Stross - one of my favorite SF writers):
I lack inside information but I'm pretty sure if you did a deep dive into what's going on behind the trading desks at FTSE and NASDAQ today you'd find a lot of powerful GPU clusters running Generative Adversarial Networks to manage trades in billions of pounds' worth of assets. Lights out, nobody home, just the products of the post-2012 boom in deep learning hard at work, earning money on behalf of the old, slow, procedural AIs we call corporations.

What do I mean by that — calling corporations AIs?

Although speculation about mechanical minds goes back a lot further, the field of Artificial Intelligence was largely popularized and publicized by the groundbreaking 1956 Dartmouth Conference organized by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The proposal for the conference asserted that, "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it", a proposition that I think many of us here would agree with, or at least be willing to debate. (Alan Turing sends his apologies.) Furthermore, I believe mechanisms exhibiting many of the features of human intelligence had already existed for some centuries by 1956, in the shape of corporations and other bureaucracies. A bureaucracy is a framework for automating decision processes that a human being might otherwise carry out, using human bodies (and brains) as components: a corporation adds a goal-seeking constraints and real-world i/o to the procedural rules-based element.

As justification for this outrageous assertion — that corporations are AIs ...

...Companies don't literally try to pass the Turing test, but they exchange information with other companies — and they are powerful enough to process inputs far beyond the capacity of an individual human brain. A Boeing 787 airliner contains on the order of six million parts and is produced by a consortium of suppliers (coordinated by Boeing); designing it is several orders of magnitude beyond the competence of any individual engineer, but the Boeing "Chinese Room" nevertheless developed a process for designing, testing, manufacturing, and maintaining such a machine, and it's a process that is not reliant on any sole human being.

Where, then, is Boeing's mind?

I don't think Boeing has a mind as such, but it functions as an ad-hoc rules-based AI system, and exhibits drives that mirror those of an actual life form. Corporations grow, predate on one another, seek out sources of nutrition (revenue streams), and invade new environmental niches. Corporations exhibit metabolism, in the broadest sense of the word — they take in inputs and modify them, then produce outputs, including a surplus of money that pays for more inputs. Like all life forms they exist to copy information into the future. They treat human beings as interchangeable components, like cells in a body: they function as superorganisms — hive entities — and they reap efficiency benefits when they replace fallible and fragile human components with automated replacements.

Until relatively recently the automation of corporate functions was limited to mid-level bookkeeping operations — replacing ledgers with spreadsheets and databases — but we're now seeing the spread of robotic systems outside manufacturing to areas such as lights-out warehousing, and the first deployments of deep learning systems for decision support.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by AWS260 »

Perseverance.
NASA's next Mars rover has a new name – Perseverance.
***
Perseverance is the latest in a long line of Red Planet rovers to be named by school-age children, from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012.
I like it.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Daehawk »

No Rover McRoverface?
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Kraken »

It's a good name. It shall inevitably be called Percy.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

ars technica
Welcome to Edition 3.08 of the Rocket Report! We are now approaching the middle of the 2020 Mars launch window, and it appears as though we will see the UAE, China, and United States all launch missions to the Red Planet during the last 10 days of the month. Exciting times ahead!
...
Hope Mars probe launch delayed by weather. After two previous weather delays, a Mars orbiter financed by the United Arab Emirates will be launched between July 20 and 22, the Khaleej Times reports. The new launch time will be announced depending on the weather conditions.
...
July 23: Long March 5 | Tianwen-1 Mars mission
NASA
Mission Name: Mars 2020
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: The Perseverance rover will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.
Launch Window: July 30 - Aug. 15, 2020
Launch Location: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
Landing: Feb. 18, 2021
Landing Site: Jezero Crater, Mars
Mission Duration: At least one Mars year (about 687 Earth days)
Tech Demo: The Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration, hitching a ride on the Perseverance rover.
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Holman »

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Jul 17, 2020 11:00 am
Mission Name: Mars 2020
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: The Perseverance rover will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.
I assume the samples are simply going to be stored, with actual return to be done by a player to be named later?
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Re: Mars is hard

Post by Isgrimnur »

Yes
At a time and place of the team's choosing, the samples are deposited on the surface of Mars at a spot that the team designates as a "sample cache depot." The depot location or locations must be well-documented by both local landmarks and precise coordinates from orbital measurements. The cache of Mars samples remains at the depot, available for pickup and potential return to Earth.
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