There’s only one news story today …
Ok. There’s another couple for big sporting events but I’ve talked way too much about that last week already !
The Martian Space Defences have been doing pretty well lately. Apart from the two mini rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, they’ve shot down pretty much everything we’ve sent their way over the past few years including our poor homegrown Beagle II.
I think the success this time is through using decoy tactics. This landing was setting down something rather bigger than what they’ve tried before (Team America Science Crew “NASA Lands Car Sized Rover on Martian Surface”), so instead of using parachutes or big bouncy balls the technique this time was :
Aerobrake with a heat shield like usual (friction like in your car brakes is an excellent way of dumping kinetic speed energy)
Slow down more with a parachute
And then come in for a soft landing via skycrane
Before, objects we’ve fired at Mars have looked at parachuting all the way or using big inflatable balls to absorb the energy of the landing. This time, with a skycrane to slow the rover to zero vertical speed, it’s apparently led to a perfect landing. That skycrane also appears to have been the perfect decoy for those Martian Space Defences …
I didn’t get up in time to see the live coverage this morning :-(, I’d got myself caught in Borderlands, where the difficulty in the mission I was attempting ramped up to a ridiculous amount. I succeeded … but at about 1.00 am on the night before first time back at work for a while. Didn’t want to sleep in. Also wanted to be fairly fresh, so doing a 4 hour sleep wasn’t an option.
I’ve been eagerly reading the summaries on The Register today – they’re amusing. They love it that the team has achieved the landing 🙂 But they’re wondering what the Martians think of us landing a nuclear powered, laser armed tank on their soil.
More info from the boys & girls at NASA : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
Wanted to include a picture but copyright regs seem to be getting more and more nasty. I’d have loved to borrow one from a website I won’t name (or link) but after reading their terms ? Hell no. I’m not going to dignify them with any mention at all. Even though their Yankee Go Home (they probably nicked it off Reddit) sign was funny.
That’s a good aside to end on actually. Copyright is going nuts. As well as me shying away from borrowing pictures in return for linkbacks, I’ve been seeing people say that their Youtube videos have been threatened with takedowns because they’ve included other people’s trailers (with credit) in their videos. Trailers are adverts. It serves the copyright owner to have the trailer displayed as much as possible. Yet people repeating those trailers are being hit by copyright breach nastiness.
It’s a silly world out there folks when we can’t tell people about good stuff. I don’t think NASA will mind the link above though !
Awesome to see this latest space mission get through its second most dangerous (after launch) phase intact, hopefully there will be some good information coming from it that will increase the weight behind “We Must Go To MARS”. Can’t stay on this planet forever, someone will blow it up sooner or later …
PS There will be no such luck with penetrating the Venus Space Defences – they’ve made their’s incredibly hostile …