One Mars Robot Watches For Another At Wharton Ridge
Looking for Schiaparelli At Wharton Ridge
“On Wednesday 19 October the ExoMars Schiaparelli module will land on Mars at 10:48 am EDT. There is a chance that Opportunity may see it on the horizon as it descends. The name of this location on the rim of Endeavour crater was initially announced a week or so ago. “Wharton Ridge” is named after Robert A. Wharton.”
Taking In The View From Wharton Ridge, earlier post
I hope it got some good images of the descent!
Can it still be called a descent if it results in an impact?
Yes. It would only be seen on the descent phase, perhaps during powered landing phase, but the actual touchdown / impact will not be visible due to the Opportunity rover’s location within Endeavour Crater.
An impact would involve both a descent and a touch-down. Even if it doesn’t end with a soft or survivable landing. But if something went wrong, the timing of the events would be off, and the Opportunity images may not have been taken at the right instant.
I would assume Opportunity would be looking for the parachute assuming it deployed and inflated properly. It sounds like the lander only transmitted data upon a successful landing so it’s hard to tell where it failed if the landing was unsuccessful.
After the Mars Observer failure where NASA had turned off the transmitter during the burn preventing more details of the failure, they try to transmit at least a signal that changes frequency at different stages of descent.
Just read that it did transmit during the descent and stopped about 50 seconds prior to the predicted landing. That could have been because of impact with the surface. If they have frequency info on the signal they should be able to determine if the parachute worked. Hopefully they have enough info to zero in on the problem. I suspect if Opportunity saw it, it would just be a small dot.
Doppler shift is an interesting question. I think they were using JPL’s Electra ULF relay hardware. That can be set up for range and rate tracking. But a given system may or may not be set up that way, and I don’t know what ExoMars did.
The BBC story this morning said they were getting full telemetry during descent. It was nominal to about 20 seconds before loss of signal, and then showed an early parachute release followed by an early and short retrorocket burn.
Status tones are a common practice for science missions. But this was very specifically an engineering test of the entry, descent and landing system. The whole point was to get extensive telemetry on how EDL worked (or didn’t work.)
Later note: I’m sorry, I wrote that before I saw your subsequent post.
As it stands right now, it DOES NOT look good for Schiaparelli.
it will be interesting to see how far from Opportunity it landed. Does anyone know if it would be in range of Opportunity to visit the site?
I really doubt it. Opportunity has traversed something like 45 km in the entire time it’s been on Mars. That’s about the size of a typical error ellipse. From the press release about possibly seeing Schiaparelli on the way down, the planned landing site is over the horizon from Opportunity. Overall, I’d say it would take years for Opportunity to get to the landing site, and I don’t think Opportunity has years of lifetime left.
If you haven’t seen it, there is a really nice animation from 2006, “Springtime on Mars”,
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
It’s funny, but we aren’t actually landing that many vehicles that close together.