One Day Until "Seven Minutes of Terror"

[Homer J Simpson]

Parachute decent imaged by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

[coppercone2]

those guys must be scared of paperwork if that is terrifying.. there is no one on board, the whole point of this unmanned thing is so you can take it easy

[ajb]

those guys must be scared of paperwork if that is terrifying.. there is no one on board, the whole point of this unmanned thing is so you can take it easy

Not sure if serious, but a ridiculous take either way.  This mission cost a couple of billion dollars to develop and build, took seven years to prepare and seven months just to get to Mars where it had to autonomously execute a complicated series of aerodynamic maneuvers that have only been done *once* before.  If it had failed, there's no guarantee if or when another attempt would be made.  So OF COURSE the team was terrified! How could they not be?

I actually sort of relate, albeit at several orders of magnitude lower stakes.  I've done a number of jobs for live events and similar where you spend a bunch of time building a thing that you try very hard to make as reliable as possible within the constraints of limited time and budget, and try to anticipate any potential problems, but eventually you have to hand it off into a situation where you no longer have control over it and it has just ONE chance to work. If you're lucky, there's been time to rehearse it a few times, but that's not always possible, and you can never quite be sure that you've anticipated all of the possible scenarios.  So you just have to sit back and watch and hope that you and everyone else involved, ESPECIALLY anyone else you've entrusted to operate it, haven't missed anything.  My projects only ever cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, took a couple of weeks, and mostly only had hundreds of people watching and it was always nerve wracking as fuck to watch the first time they were used for real.  This was literally a million times bigger.

[coppercone2]

i just save the word terror for situations with more consequence then equipment loss, maybe terror for the people in accounting. I would be most worried about the people doing the positioning of the rocket and fueling if its liquid fuel. once everyone is clear its just a write off at worse..

terror is a manned launch, you can't weld up more people

[CatalinaWOW]

JPL has kitted out the system with multiple cameras and microphones to record the landing. They seem very interested in footage and recordings. I gather anything to which helps you better understand what happened will improve the chances of future missions. We don't have a great understanding of atmospheric landings outside of our own atmosphere.

The instrumentation tells they way more than video.  And microphones are pretty pointless on a planet with almost no atmosphere (about 1% Earth's).  I'd bet on it being more of a PR thing, to get public interest.

I suppose helicopters are pointless too.  Oh, they have one.

[MikeK]

The instrumentation tells they way more than video.  And microphones are pretty pointless on a planet with almost no atmosphere (about 1% Earth's).  I'd bet on it being more of a PR thing, to get public interest.

I suppose helicopters are pointless too.  Oh, they have one.

Straw man arguments are pointless.

[CatalinaWOW]

Well let me rephrase it.  An atmosphere thick enough to carry a helicopter is thick enough to carry sound.  While it would be reasonable to question the value of an audio instrument, discrediting it on a physics basis is clearly incorrect.

It is possible that there is nothing to learn from a microphone.  But the cost is low, in weight, in bandwidth and elsewhere, so why not.  One use that seems possible is characterizing the surface based on the sounds the tires make.  I know that works for snow under certain conditions here on earth.  There are other known possibilities and best of all would be if we learned something new and unexpected.

[Larryc001]

A few years ago, my wife and I visited LA on an adult vacation. Yes we went to Disneyland  but also to Santa Anita Racetrack, Cal Tech and yes, JPL. So we toured those very areas where you watched on tv during the Mars landing. At that time, they were still working on getting data from the first rovers. We were most impressed by the engineers, scientists and workers who could develop a project which took years, and then shot it off into space. After a few months, the whole world watched you succeed, or not. No second chances and no place to hide. Personally, as a guy who can get lost in his own house, I have nothing but admiration for these people. Here in Canada we don’t make many mistakes. That’s because we really don’t do a whole hell of a lot. The Americans make a lot of mistakes, some of them huge. Maybe that’s because they do a lot. Also, I think Mars is looking more like Texas all the time.

[DrG]

I love seeing this stuff. It is inspirational because humans need to achieve. That hunk of material is actually up there futzin around, heh. For a species that can't decide whether to create or destroy, I say, celebrate the wins.

[iMo]

I wonder why we do not have a video from the landing - ie. video made off the skycrane sent to MRO..

NASA live on the video:

[Homer J Simpson]

[Homer J Simpson]

Decoding the binary message in the parachute starts at 10:15.

[Homer J Simpson]

Testing the Mars Helicopter Delivery System

[Sal Ammoniac]

Do the red and white color patterns on the parachute have any function?

[Homer J Simpson]

Do the red and white color patterns on the parachute have any function?

Function is to help study the video of the deployment process.


The message.......


It's a binary code explained in the video in the earlier post.

"DARE MIGHTY THINGS"

 Lattitude and longitude coordinates for JPL.

[Gyro]

JPL has kitted out the system with multiple cameras and microphones to record the landing. They seem very interested in footage and recordings. I gather anything to which helps you better understand what happened will improve the chances of future missions. We don't have a great understanding of atmospheric landings outside of our own atmosphere.

The instrumentation tells they way more than video.  And microphones are pretty pointless on a planet with almost no atmosphere (about 1% Earth's).  I'd bet on it being more of a PR thing, to get public interest.

Another scientifically relevant use of the microphone - listening to the sound of laser ablation of rocks to establish their hardness at a distance. Much more efficient than having to trundle up to each one...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56354383

[Stray Electron]

Do the red and white color patterns on the parachute have any function?

Function is to help study the video of the deployment process.


The message.......


It's a binary code explained in the video in the earlier post.

"DARE MIGHTY THINGS"

 Lattitude and longitude coordinates for JPL.

   Looking at the parachute color encoding, it's quite impressive how much thought has gone into even the most minor details of this mission. But that's the level of detail that needs to happen if you're going to launch an almost fully autonomous vehicle that is going to have to make a journey of seven months and then be able to land by itself under almost completely unknown conditions. My hat is off to the people at JPL and NASA that can accomplish things like that.