Next time you think sci-fi, think again

[denoir 0]

Rosetta probe ready for lift-off (BBC)

Quote[/b] ]

European space scientists are counting down to the launch of Rosetta, the mission to put a lander on a comet.

The Å600m, 12-year space expedition is scheduled to launch from French Guiana's Kourou spaceport on 26 February aboard an Ariane-5 G+ rocket.

But the high-risk mission will need to overcome major technical challenges.

"Rosetta will be the first ever spacecraft to perform a soft landing on a comet's nucleus," UK science minister Lord Sainsbury told a news conference.

"This will allow Rosetta to carry out more in-depth study (of a comet) than has ever been done before."

Staking claim

The Rosetta spacecraft will despatch a lander, named Philae, to touch down on the icy nucleus of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Staking claim

The Rosetta spacecraft will despatch a lander, named Philae, to touch down on the icy nucleus of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The mission continues a long association between the European Space Agency (Esa) and comet exploration that was cemented when the Giotto probe obtained close-up images of Comet Halley's nucleus in 1986.

"Rosetta is psychologically very important for us in Europe, because we did get closest to Halley (with Giotto). So comets are ours," Prof David Southwood, director of science at Esa told BBC News Online.

"The best part of 20 years ago, we could have chosen to go to Mars, but it was interesting that we staked our claim with comets.

"I don't think I regret that because in the last three years there has been a flurry of comet missions. I think that's a sign of how important Rosetta is."

The probe will study the comet's materials, which are thought to have remained relatively unchanged since the formation of the solar system.

History lesson

"We will (effectively) go back 4.6bn years, to when the solar system was in its infant stages and the planets were forming out of a cloud of dust and gas," said project scientist Dr Gerhard Schwehm.

By summer 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around the comet and begin edging towards its nucleus. The orbiter's cameras will then map the nucleus in detail to help scientists choose a suitable landing site.

Once this has been chosen, the lander Philae will be released from a distance of one kilometre. Approaching the comet nucleus at about one metre per second, Philae will fire two harpoons to anchor itself to the surface.

Mission scientists are under no illusions about the task they face.

Soft landing

"The main merit of Churyumov-Gerasimenko is that it's something you can land on. That may seem like a funny thing to say but the last thing you want to do is bounce off or break up," Prof Southwood explained.

"So we are really flying blind, it's tricky."

Scientists need to land the washing machine-sized lander Philae on a surface roughly the area of Heathrow airport.

"Rosetta will have been ten years and several hundreds of millions of miles and then have to land on something like that - it's an audacious mission," said mission scientist Dr Ian Wright of the Open University.

The launch will go ahead despite the last minute detection of mechanical problems in January.

The probe should have launched a year ago but was grounded after another Ariane 5 vehicle exploded four minutes into a flight from Kourou.

Rosetta's original quarry, Comet Wirtanen, had to be abandoned and the mission re-designed following the delay caused by the investigation.

Å600 million? That's more than the mars rovers put together cost. I certainly hope that the Ariane doesn't blow up this time

[Pipski 0]

Do we know how long it's supposed to transmit for once it's landed?

[ralphwiggum 6]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/02/23/space.mars.reut/index.html

Quote[/b] ]LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- NASA scientists are excitedly speculating that discoveries made by a Mars rover over the weekend will help them finally unravel whether water played a role in the red planet's geologic history, a science team member said on Monday.

Scientists were poring over data and microscopic images returned to Earth by the rover Opportunity, which spent the weekend examining a multilayered rock nicknamed El Capitan embedded in the side of the small crater where Opportunity landed on January 24.

The rover has yet to climb out of the small crater onto the flat Meridiani Planum to examine a large deposit of what may be water-formed hematite.

The science team planned to command the rover to use a rock scraping tool to clear away dust so that its spectrometers can get clearer readings of El Capitan, which lies in an outcrop of bedrock that scientists believe holds the key to the planet's past.

"There are high expectations that we will understand the extent to which the outcrop has been modified chemically and whether water was involved," said Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator.

[Balschoiw 0]

Llauma just told me that NASA will hold a press conference tonight 20.00 pm. They have something sigificant to report.

Press briefing on mars rover mission

What could it be ?

Water ? ESA already found that out.

Maybe they found G.W´s brain ?!? Nah, that´s impossible

Some spaceship wreck ? With "made in the USA" on it

I´m curiouse.

[Gollum1 0]

Sounds very interesting. Maybe a rover has found bacteria or somesuch?

[Pipski 0]

Don't think those rovers have any kit to identify or test for life though. Maybe they saw a big rock covered in algae or something!

[denoir 0]

Bleh, they found some rocks that that were most likely formed in water. I don't see the big drama as the ESA Mars Express already in January made direct measurements of water in the polar caps

(NASA TV)

[Commander-598 0]

Am I the only one who thinks landing on a comet is kind of pointless.

Aren't there much bigger and nearer fish to fry.

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

Am I the only one who thinks landing on a comet is kind of pointless.

Aren't there much bigger and nearer fish to fry.

Yes.

Yes but that doesn't mean we can't do both.

[miles teg 1]

Am I the only one who thinks landing on a comet is kind of pointless.

Aren't there much bigger and nearer fish to fry.

No it's far from pointless. If the comet orginated from an early time in the formation of the solar system, it can provide alot of insight into how the solar system was formed. So it's definitely not a waste of time or money. It may not be as exciting as landing on other planets, but it definitely is good science otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.

Chris G.

aka-Miles Teg<GD>

[denoir 0]

Interplanetary internet tested

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Beyond WWW lies Interplanetary International Internet

By Robert Roy Britt, SPACE.com

In a sign of cosmic communications to come, last week mission controllers sent signals to a Mars-orbiting European spacecraft, which relayed the instructions to NASA's Spirit rover on the surface, and a signal was returned to Earth back along the same path.

It was the initial transmission across what could be called the first-generation Interplanetary International Internet.

"We have an international interplanetary communications network established at Mars," said Jennifer Trosper, Spirit mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Pioneering demonstration

NASA has used its own orbiters to communicate with surface probes at Mars before, but the Feb. 6 "pioneering demonstration," as officials called it, was the first to involve multiple nations.

The Mars Express orbiter, which relayed the signals, is a project of the 15-nation European Space Agency (ESA). It reached Mars late last month and has been returning photographs of the planet from above and recently added to the case for ancient rivers on Mars.

"This is the first time we have had an in-orbit communication between ESA and NASA spacecraft, and also the first working international communications network around another planet," said Rudolf Schmidt, ESA's project manager for Mars Express.

The planned demonstration is part of an ongoing effort between the two agencies to cooperate, including using joint communication assets, according to a NASA statement released today.

Someday, e-mail

Today's solar system network is crude and limited to what some envision. Other plans are underway for eventually creating a true Interplanetary Internet that is more like the one you're using to read this story.

The IPN, as it's been dubbed, might one day serve as a backbone connecting hubs at various planets to spaceships. If built — NASA is among the institutions researching the idea — it could overcome a drawback to the current system: Spacecraft can only communicate with Earth via line-of-sight. That means a craft on the far side of Mars can't send signals to Earth.

The IPN would behave more like e-mail. Data could be stored at any of various hubs around the solar system and transmitted to their destination via the best path at the moment.

The capability will be more important in the future when more spacecraft, with more complex tasks, reach the red planet, perhaps including human missions.

Great news

The terrestrial portion of the test communication last week was routed from JPL in Pasadena, Calif, to ESA's European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. Spirit returned basic telemetry data in the trial effort.

"This is excellent news," said JPL's Richard Horttor, project manager for NASA's role in Mars Express. "The communication sessions between Mars Express and Spirit were pristine. Not a single bit of data was missing or added, and there were no duplications."

Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, normally get communications support from NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters. Each rover can also communicate directly with Earth. All these signals originating on or near Mars are received by NASA's Deep Space Network of three radio receivers, in California, Spain and Australia.

Radio signals take several minutes, travelling at the speed of light, to traverse the void between the two planets. Most of the communications are made in what engineers call the X-band, high-frequency waves that are much higher than those received by an FM radio.

Care to upload something to Uranus?

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]Care to upload something to Uranus?

Players from Uranus have very bad ping

[theavonlady 2]

Quote[/b] ]Care to upload something to Uranus?

Players from Uranus have very bad ping  

That's still a 1000 times better than players on Sedna:

Quote[/b] ]Astronomers to Detail Aspects of Sedna

Mon Mar 15, 4:50 AM ET

LOS ANGELES - It is a frozen world more than 8 billion miles from Earth and believed to be the farthest known object within our solar system.

NASA planned a Monday press conference to offer more details about Sedna, a planetoid between 800 miles and 1,100 miles in diameter, or about three-quarters the size of Pluto.

Sedna - blah - what a yucky name! I was hoping after Pluto, they'd name the next one Goofy.

[Pipski 0]

Seems a bit of a shame to name the first 9 (well, except Earth I s`pose) after Roman gods and then get all Eskimo for the 10th. If it's going to be an official planet then they should rechristen it. They could name it after Nike (Roman goddess of victory) and get it sponsored!

[ralphwiggum 6]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/16/europe.mars.ap/index.html

Quote[/b] ]LONDON, England (AP) -- A public spending watchdog criticized scientists behind the doomed Beagle 2 mission to Mars Tuesday for neglecting to highlight the chances of mission failure when they applied for British government funding.

The government plowed more than $40 million into the British-built Mars lander, which has not been heard from since it was ejected from its mother ship in mid-December.

Beagle 2 -- Europe's first attempt to land a probe on the Red Planet -- was designed to search for clues of life on Mars. The tiny lander was due to spend six months probing and analyzing rocks and soil with its robotic arm, sending back data via the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

Mission controllers now believe it's likely that the lander crash-landed on the Red Planet on Christmas Day, probably because the atmosphere was less dense than expected.

The report by the National Audit Office found that the potential of Beagle 2's protective air bags failing at the point of impact had been identified early in the project and work was done to reduce the risk.

But when the British National Space Center Partnership made its bid for funding, it emphasized the potential benefits rather than the risk of failure, the audit office said.

[Pipski 0]

What a crock! As if there isn't an inherently high chance of mission failure when flinging a probe across millions of miles of empty space and down onto the surface of a different planet! Dickheads. All they needed to do was look at the history of Mars exploration to see how high the risks were.

Quote[/b] ]But when the British National Space Center Partnership made its bid for funding, it emphasized the potential benefits rather than the risk of failure, the audit office said.

Oh well, in that case hang the b***ards!

Quote[/b] ]the potential of Beagle 2's protective air bags failing at the point of impact had been identified early in the project and work was done to reduce the risk.

So what's their f**k*** problem?

[ralphwiggum 6]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/23/mars.sea/index.html

Quote[/b] ](CNN) -- Mars rocks robotically examined by the rover Opportunity were formed at the bottom of a salty sea, NASA scientists said Tuesday.

In a news conference at NASA's Washington headquarters titled "Opportunity hits the Beach," scientists said they don't know how long the water covered parts of the Martian surface or how many years ago it existed.

"Was the water up to your neck or to your ankles? There's no good answer yet," said Steve Squyres, principal science investigator for Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit.

"There is still a lot we don't know," he said. "We don't know how extensive it was, how long it was there or how common it was on other parts of Mars."

[denoir 0]

Too bad they don't have the equipment to look for fossilic evidence of life and things like that.