Octopus Overlords

The UAE has successfully launched its Mars probe, named Hope, making history as the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.
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Hope launched from the Japanese space center on Sunday, having been delayed from the previous week due to poor weather conditions. Within a few hours of liftoff, the ground segment at Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre established two-way communication with the probe.
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The Hope probe, a $200 million project called “Al Amal” in Arabic, is scheduled to reach Mars’ orbit in February 2021 and will spend one Mars year — equivalent to 687 days on Earth — studying and gathering data on the red planet’s atmosphere. The year 2021 is also significant: it will mark 50 years of the UAE’s existence.

“It is a weather satellite, and that’s one objective of the mission,” Sarah al-Amiri, the Mars mission’s lead scientist and UAE minister of state for advanced sciences told Spaceflight Now. “We also look at what role Mars’ weather plays in atmospheric loss. That’s the other part of the mission.”

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:32 am Hope theres no strong wind when she decides to land.

Here's to all the plucky machines that have tangled with Mars and ultimately lost. Goodbye, Opportunity. Godspeed, Beagle 2. We hardly knew you, Schiaparelli. And now we must bid farewell to the "mole" part of NASA's InSight lander mission.

The lander itself is fine and healthy and still studying marsquakes, but the mole's efforts to dig into the red planet have been stymied every step of the way. On Thursday, NASA announced the end of the mole's journey.

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:43 am Mars is about to get crowded with ambitious missions from China, the US, and the UAE. China's first Mars mission includes an orbiter, a lander, and a rover -- the same mission configuration as the Chang'E program, but much much farther away. The UAE's orbiter is significant because the UAE isn't notorious for its space program, and it will provide useful data regarding Mars' loss of atmosphere -- if they can just establish orbit with a healthy spacecraft, that's a win. And while the US Perseverance mission is superficially a replay of Curiosity, the obstacles and potential science payoff are dialed up to 11.

We're still 10 days away from Perseverance's seven minutes of terror, but the Arabs and Chinese are biting their nails now.

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:43 am Mars is about to get crowded with ambitious missions from China, the US, and the UAE. China's first Mars mission includes an orbiter, a lander, and a rover -- the same mission configuration as the Chang'E program, but much much farther away. The UAE's orbiter is significant because the UAE isn't notorious for its space program, and it will provide useful data regarding Mars' loss of atmosphere -- if they can just establish orbit with a healthy spacecraft, that's a win. And while the US Perseverance mission is superficially a replay of Curiosity, the obstacles and potential science payoff are dialed up to 11.

We're still 10 days away from Perseverance's seven minutes of terror, but the Arabs and Chinese are biting their nails now.

AWS260 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 12:12 pm I don't think they sent a camera crew ahead to set up in the landing zone.

raydude wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 10:35 am Skycrane is the least crazy way to solve an engineering problem. Which is: how do you land something as big as Curiosity or Perseverance on Mars?

Hrdina wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 1:52 pm

raydude wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 10:35 am Skycrane is the least crazy way to solve an engineering problem. Which is: how do you land something as big as Curiosity or Perseverance on Mars?

While maybe not quite as pessimistic as Kraken, I was a bit concerned by both the novelty and the technical complexity involved in the Curiosity lander. Watching the Seven Minutes of Terror videos back then, followed by learning that Curiosity was wheels-down, and it had happened just like the video, was one of the coolest space things ever (right up there with watching the two Falcon Heavy boosters land side-by-side).

The fact that we don't learn the result until several minutes after it's happened has always weirdly added to the tension. The InSight landing was another example of that. I can't help getting a little emotional when I watch things like this.

Failure could take on many forms next week when NASA’s next-gen rover, Perseverance, reaches the surface of the Red Planet. Here’s what needs to go right—and how things could quickly go sideways—when Perseverance tries to make its much-anticipated landing.

For NASA, the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) of Perseverance on Thursday, February 18 presents numerous potential points of failure. NASA has said that “hundreds of things have to go just right” for the rover to survive the seven minutes of terror. We can’t take a safe landing for granted: As NASA points out, only “about 40 percent of the missions ever sent to Mars—by any space agency—have been successful.” Which, yikes.

In a nutshell, Perseverance will have to transition from speeds reaching 12,500 miles per hour (20,000 km/hr) to a walking pace over the course of several minutes. What’s more, it’ll have to perform this autonomously, as it takes nearly 11 minutes for radio signals to reach Earth. To complicate matters, NASA is debuting two new technologies for the mission, both relating to the EDL phase and both unproven.

All three phases—entry, descent, and landing—present their own unique challenges.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 4:14 pm I still like the air bag landing. But Im still not sure how it rights itself if its not sitting right.

https://www.space.com/16889-mars-rover-curiosity-sky-crane-landing.html wrote: Again, however, Curiosity's heft nixed this idea. It weighs about five times as much as either Spirit or Opportunity.

"Unfortunately, we don't have fabric here on Earth strong enough to build airbags that would work for a rover the size of Curiosity," Steltzner said. "The bags would shred, not giving Curiosity any protection."