MRO Examines ExoMars Impact Site
Schiaparelli Impact Site on Mars Viewed From Orbit
“This Oct. 25, 2016, image shows the area where the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli test lander reached the surface of Mars, with magnified insets of three sites where components of the spacecraft hit the ground. It is the first view of the site from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter taken after the Oct. 19, 2016, landing event. The Schiaparelli test lander was one component of ESA’s ExoMars 2016 project, which placed the Trace Gas Orbiter into orbit around Mars on the same arrival date.”
To bad… another splat. Interplanetary trips are still hard. Please need to understand that it gets exponentially more complicated than going to the moon.
I don’t know. It looks like all the uniquely planetary aspects (cruise to Mars, atmospheric entry and the parachute) worked. What they seem to gotten wrong was when to start the final descent on retrorockets and when to terminate the retrorocket burn. Those are similar problems at Mars and the Moon.
This really makes me wish that Curiosity had gone (albeit a bit out of its way) to take some pictures of the skycrane impact site, or its parachute, for some “ground truth” to compare to what we’re seeing in these orbital pictures.
That might have been nice, but I can’t find any orbital images of the sky crane impact site. The MRO that caught MSL in the air also showed the heat shield, but the interpretation was that it was also still in the air.
In any case, there is a lot of pressure for missions to focus exclusively on work which is directly traceable to their official goals, at least during the prime missions.
I do hope MRO reimages the ExoMars crash site after a few weeks or months. How the feature changes would be an interesting study in dust transport and deposition.
Here:
http://static.uahirise.org/…
Even better:
http://www.uahirise.org/ESP…
Skycrane impact site has been reimaged several times, it has been fading over time.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spa…
I specifically asked someone from JPL if Curiosity would visit the skycrane impact site, and was told that the mission rules specifically prohibited Curiosity from going anywhere near the skycrane because of contamination issues from the fuel that it carried.
I am aware they didn’t do it due to the possibility of contamination. Curiosity wouldn’t have needed to go very close to the remains of the skycrane, just close enough to get images of it.
It’s parachute / backshell were even closer, and have no contamination issue.
Oh well, maybe next rover.
Experience shows EDL (or even Mars orbit insertion) is the toughest part of any Mars mission, no matter where the spacecraft comes from. Once it’s in orbit or on the ground (intact!), the worst is over.
But NASA used its lunar experience to make hard look easy, starting with the Viking landers.
Scariest thing about the Viking landers? Nobody today would ever send a lander to a site with as many big rocks as either Viking site had. And Pathfinder’s Ares Valles site was just about as bad.
Luck, I tell you. Sheer, cussed luck that they made it down safely.
The worst part about Schiaparelli is that ESA picked just about the flattest, smoothest, and best-studied flat & smooth place on the entire planet — and the !!#@@##$ computer screwed up and — BANG.
Just a shame.
Fortune favors the Bold. Look at Apollo 11.
Moon landing experience does not really translate into Mars landing know-how, due to the Moon’s lack of an atmosphere.
That is a belief the current generation of Mars obsessed engineers have today.
However if you do your research you will see that the Apollo era NASA engineers leveraged well their experience from Surveyor in developing the Viking Landers.
Unlike today’s generation which see differences in everything that generation looked for what was common and used it as a strength to build on. Its was one reason they were able to go from no experience in building space capsules to the Apollo CSM in a decade while its taken today’s NASA since 2004 to design the equivalent – Orion.
And no, I don’t think more money would have sped up the process since somehow engineers just seem to spend more time overthinking problems today. Look at classic aircraft like the P-51and P-80 that went from contract signing to flight test in a period of only a few months. Today it would take twice as long for the designers to just produce the animations for the MS Power Point Slides. The F-35 is a good example with development having started in the 1990s.
So true.
and get off my lawn.