Smoking hole found on Mars where Schiaparelli lander, er, 'landed' The European Space Agency has spotted what it assumes is what's left of its Schiaparelli lander that smashed into the Martian surface this week. NASA has been helping its European cousin out with use of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO): the satellite's low-resolution CTX camera has picked up two new objects on the surface …
I remember my brother and I played that during a work open house when my mom worked at Control Data. We couldn't figure out how to land cleanly, so after several failed landing attempts resulting in small craters, we started competing to see who could intentionally make the biggest crater.
I remember a game like that back in the day with a 3 colour display - played on a teletype terminal that displayed black ASCII text on green and white fanfold paper.
Shoot 'em up of some kind. If you gave the gun coordinates that aimed it below horizontal and fired the computer helpfully informed you that there were quicker ways to get to Australia than tunnelling.
Happy days.
"Good Evening, Gentlebeings.
"As we are all aware, the Earthlings have attacked us, bombarding us from space without any warning or provocation on our part. I have ordered our military forces to prepare a massive counter-strike. I now ask you to declare that a state of war has existed between Mars and Earth since the time of the Earthlings' nefarious attack."
"EARTHMEN, WE ARE PEACEFUL BEINGS AND YOU HAVE TRIED TO DESTROY US, BUT YOU CANNOT SUCCEED. YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR THIS ACT OF AGGRESSION. THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE MYSTERONS. WE KNOW THAT YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTHMEN. OUR REVENGE WILL BE SLOW BUT NONETHELESS EFFECTIVE. IT WILL MEAN THE ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION OF LIFE ON EARTH. IT WILL BE USELESS FOR YOU TO RESIST, FOR WE HAVE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF REVERSING MATTER, AS YOU HAVE JUST WITNESSED. ONE OF YOU WILL BE UNDER OUR CONTROL. YOU WILL BE INSTRUMENTAL IN AVENGING THE MYSTERONS. OUR FIRST ACT OF RETALIATION WILL BE TO ASSASSINATE YOUR WORLD PRESIDENT."
Europeans call it a "scientific mission"
The Europeans were just envious that Beagle 2 had been a glorious, glorious British failure, and wanted to show that they could do that too.
Of course, being a pan-European pork project, the €230m cost of the Schiaparelli lander is about double the (rebased) £66m that Beagle 2 cost, proving that the Europeans can do anything anybody else can, just twenty years later and at double the cost.
"The Europeans were just envious that Beagle 2 had been a glorious, glorious British failure, and wanted to show that they could do that too."
I read on the Guardian (so it may well have been a misprint) that Beagle 2 actually landed okay, but then failed to deploy its solar panels
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/16/lost-beagle-2-spacecraft-found-mars
I wonder if someone got their metres per second confused with their kilometres per hour again.
Direct from NASA's Some Famous Unit Conversion Errors doc
"I wonder if someone got their metres per second confused with their kilometres per hour again."
After ESA's rather scathing criticism of the management of the Beagle 2 project, I can almost hear Colin Pillinger's gentle chuckle at the thought that at least his lander made it to the surface of Mars in one piece without making a bloody great crater in a Martian hillside.
In all seriousness though, not having a go at ESA. This stuff has to be tried, failure can gain more knowledge for future missions than success if enough telemetry is recorded.
At the end of the day, rocket science isn't easy, rocket engineering is hard, and interplanetary rocket engineering is really, really ******* difficult...
"interplanetary rocket engineering is really, really ******* difficult..."
I was just watching a documentary about the Voyager probes last night (recorded, not sure when it was broadcast) and it's still amazing to me that not only is it in our lifetime (well, some of us here anyway, youngsters need not apply) that the three body problem was solved but the guy was still around to be interviewed. Closely followed by an interview with the guy who then used that solution to come up with the trajectories and launch dates for The Grand Tour (amongst 100's of other possible planetary missions.
Ah here it is, Voyager: To the Final Frontier
JBnb "...three body problem was solved..."
That statement implies that the three-body problem has been "solved".
You got my attention with that. Did I miss the memo?
History: Bruns and Poincaré showed in 1887 that there is no general analytical solution for the three-body problem. Sundman proved the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in 1906-1909, but they're impractical due to slow convergence.
Since then, some specific exceptions to the three-body problem have been found, up to 16 of them in 2013. But these are mathematical curiosities that have nothing to do with gravity assists.
Nothing general has been 'solved' in the maths sense. Presently only (very accurate) numerical approximations are possible.
The concept of a gravity assist is a two-body problem, but getting it lined-up precisely in our solar system is an n-body problem.
If gravity assist were performed around a lonely isolated body in deep space, then it's clear that the maneuver itself could be, in theory, isolated to just two bodies.
"That statement implies that the three-body problem has been "solved".
You got my attention with that. Did I miss the memo?"
I'm sure you are correct. It may be the documentary got it wrong or, more likely, I was distracted by other stuff and didn't hear it correctly. Maths is not my strong point.
You've got me interested enough to dig further. Thank you for that.
I found an excerpt of the video, and yes, they do use the phrase 'solved the three-body problem'.
But it's obvious that the meaning of the word 'solved' has drifted a bit since 1887.
A very good ref (being a summary of the same video) is here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-20033940
Minovitch used "...the IBM 7090 computer to home in on a solution using a method of iteration." In other words, he was (obviously, as stated, and based on the computer time required) doing a numerical solution or simulation.
It's all very wonderful, but it reminds of when I couldn't 'solve' an exercise problem in calculus, so I banged up a quick BASIC program to estimate the answer numerically. That 'solved' the exercise, but I certainly didn't 'solve' the equation.
Under the Wiki entry for the 'Three-Body Problem' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem), the name Michael Minovitch is listed under 'See Also'.
If Minovitch had 'solved' it, he would be mentioned more prominently on the page.
It all gets back to the meaning of 'solved'.
Nitpicking. I hope I don't come across as too negative. :-)
Minovitch certainly deserves full credit and honours for his excellent work.
"I was just watching a documentary about the Voyager probes last night (recorded, not sure when it was broadcast) and it's still amazing to me that not only is it in our lifetime (well, some of us here anyway, youngsters need not apply) that the three body problem was solved but the guy was still around to be interviewed."
In what sense has the three-body problem been solved? In the 19th century it was shown that there is no general solution to the three-body problem.
Since you are talking about the Grand Tour, Wikipedia suggests you mean Gary Flandro, who satisfies two conditions for being the person you are talking about: 1) he is alive, and 2) he noticed the alignment that allowed the Grand Tour to take place. But of course, since Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930, it would be difficult to know this until after that date.
Edit: Having seen other comments now, it appears people are talking about Michael Minovitch. His Wikipedia page is full of incorrect statements about the three-body problem, but because of that inaccurate BBC documentary, they are referenced, so the fact they are false is not that important...
"I wonder if someone got their metres per second confused with their kilometres per hour again."
If I recall correctly (too lazy to look it up), the probe was supposed to drop the last 30 metres and let the crushable bit adsorb the force.
So falling from about 3* kilometres does sound like someone misplaced a decimal point.
*They keep tap dancing around that number by stating 2-4 kilometres. Guilty conscience?
How about I buy you a couple of pints which should be ample compensation for your share of 'taxpayer's money' that went into this mission, and you just shut up?
Perhaps unintentionally, you make yourself sound like a thin-skinned millennial, unable to deal with views contradicting your own narrow personal view.
How about I offer you a skinny soya latte and a goatee trim, and you accept that I'm entitled to observe that I don't agree with ESA concept "oh well, shit happens on Mars, can we have another quarter of a billion euro please?"
After sneering at Beagle 2, and having seen the previous problems that NASA have had to address on Mars, the ESA have no excuse for it not working.
Space exploration is one of the few things a government can spend money on that is strongly, arguably, of benefit to the entire human species. Going to the moon, for example, was far more than a stunt- even the most rational critics would have to concede that there was real economic benefit from the surge in science and technology far greater than the monetary cost of the programs themselves.
To put it in perspective: In 2016 NASA had a budget of $19.3 billion, of which I will personally pay $60-70 out of my income, which is paying for a few minutes of a fellow scientist's time or a few little parts that are going to end up exploring another planet. The 2008 AIG bailout of $180 billion cost me personally about $300, which for all I know went directly into some billionaire's overseas nontaxable bank account.
And 50% of your 2016 space money will have gone up into the ISS and manned missions, not very much at all ends up in interplanetary unmanned missions like this - or space telescopes and observation satellites - where the real science is happening. After looking it up, I am actually surprised only half goes to manned missions nowadays, I guess they are reprioritizing - guess junking the Shuttle freed up $$$ ;-).
Don't take this as anti-space - I am just annoyed we haven't done much real innovation with things like ion drives, solar sails or asteroid mining. If it wasn't for SpaceX and its ilk, we're still mostly using Saturn-era tech, funding Skylab2 and aiming to waste massive $$$$$$ on one-time manned Mars trips .
Leave the Americans with the pounds of thrust, even though "officially" NASA is working only metric. More to do with the fact that everything is build by contractors and subcontractors for them.
In Europe it's metric. Why would you use a unit of mass (pounds, bah) for a measure of thrust anyways? If you'd be talking about kg of thrust in Europe, I don't think many people would take you serious anymore. Not in the scientific community anyways.
I do hope they find out what happened here. Shame it failed, but I'm sure it'll be another lesson learned.
You kinda wonder, even with contractors, why imperial measures would get mixed into engineering.
Once you get into the of cross-unit stuff like distance over time squared (aka acceleration) times mass (thrust) then imperials gets you into weird things like slugs - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(mass). At that point non-10 factors make it so that things start getting very confusing, even for people who grew up with feet and pounds (let alone stones). Imperial is just not very coherent for engineering though I am sure you can get used to it.
This is from personal experience doing engineering studies in the States - we had 2 obligatory weeks of do-it-in-imperial and _everyone_ hated it, even the merkins.
You kinda wonder, even with contractors, why imperial measures would get mixed into engineering.
Improper definition in the spec. There should be a *BIG* section at the front that says "This document uses the following terms and convention as described". And one of those is "All units are in metric unless otherwise explicitly defined".
Of course, that presupposes that all the subcontractors get the whole document and actually read it..
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