Mars INSIGHT Landing Heads-Up

[day_trippr]

For your inner nerd, the INSIGHT lander should touch down on Mars in the next couple of hours. Hopefully gently
NASA is running a live Youtube channel that just got started...

Cheers!

 

[day_trippr]

Sticking the landing from millions of miles away never gets old

 

[Murphys_Law]

They can land a rover on Mars but can’t make a strand of Christmas lights that work for a darn!

[emoji1]

 

[day_trippr]

lol! I hear you - the whole tree lighting thing is my yearly albatross. It actually got more intense when we finally caved and bought a fancy "pre-lit" plastic tree about a decade ago. Jamming a tree full of lights back into its original shipping carton turns out to induce a low probability of everything working the next year

But...68 bulbs and four fuses later the &%#$@! tree is up. And I survived, again...

Cheers! (And Happy Holidays )

 

[passedpawn]

lol! I hear you - the whole tree lighting thing is my yearly albatross. It actually got more intense when we finally caved and bought a fancy "pre-lit" plastic tree about a decade ago. Jamming a tree full of lights back into its original shipping carton turns out to induce a low probability of everything working the next year

But...68 bulbs and four fuses later the &%#$@! tree is up. And I survived, again...

View attachment 599683

Cheers! (And Happy Holidays )

 

[passedpawn]

I get a warm feeling when I think of little RC devices rolling around on Mars. I grew up reading some old sci fi books (Tom Swift?), and the stuff we can do today is right out of those. My kids have cell phones on their wrists. Jeez

 

[MaxStout]

I was thrilled the lander made it OK. Aside from a few minor trajectory corrections prior to de-orbit, I believe the ascent was all software, programmed earlier. Not much you can do from earth to control it, with the several minutes signal lag time.

Now we can look forward to images and data coming back. Drill, baby, drill!

 

[day_trippr]

All quite cool - and indeed the final descent was totally autonomous.
I confess to not having known about the Mar-CO cubesat twins that accompanied the Insight cruise vehicle. An added coolness factor.

Reading about the instrument deployment being months out it'll be some time before mission science is conducted...

Cheers!

 

[SEndorf]

Fascinating to follow.
It's a long way from the 1969 Apollo 11 Columbia command module I had the opportunity to see at the Smithsonian - archaic computer system with mechanical switches, well before the digital age. It's amazing they made it back.
Looking forward to the data.

 

[myndflyte]

Fascinating to follow.
It's a long way from the 1969 Apollo 11 Columbia command module I had the opportunity to see at the Smithsonian - archaic computer system with mechanical switches, well before the digital age. It's amazing they made it back.
Looking forward to the data.

That has always boggled my mind. There are probably graphing calculators that have more computing power than the computers they used to get people to and from the moon.

 

[Murphys_Law]

I loved reading some of the comments:

Hollywood! Fools for believing! Never happened! Fake news!

 

[day_trippr]

Go stand in a corner for awhile...

 

[bob1852]

That has always boggled my mind. There are probably graphing calculators that have more computing power than the computers they used to get people to and from the moon.

Physics is pretty simple when you eliminate air resistance and gravity.

 

[Smellyglove]

We can bump into something trivial at home, and it breaks, rendering it useless. Some of us is still trying to dial in our temp-probes or can't wait for FG, while these guys just launch a fancy gadget into space and just wait for six months and see it land on another planet, and it still works.

 

[day_trippr]

Patience has its rewards

This mission did not involve a single Mars orbit - the lander went straight at the planet. That seems extra hard, but apparently getting three bodies synced up in an acceptable orbit is even harder, so that was the only way the MarCO twins would have been of any use during the EDL phases...

Welcome to Mars!

 

[Pkrd]

What's the water chemistry like on mars.

Hmmm, Mars beer.... red ale, low carbonation, little head, slight rust taste.

 

[Smellyglove]

Patience has its rewards

This mission did not involve a single Mars orbit - the lander went straight at the planet. That seems extra hard, but apparently getting three bodies synced up in an acceptable orbit is even harder, so that was the only way the MarCO twins would have been of any use during the EDL phases...

Welcome to Mars!

That pic is crazy. It sort of could just been taken in a radom desert on earth, but it's from Mars.

 

[myndflyte]

Physics is pretty simple when you eliminate air resistance and gravity.

That's true, but they still hit something 240,000 miles away using an abacus (probably not but still).

 

[Rodent]

and to think the NASA engineers didn't have advanced technology to conduct their engineering work during the 60's. hi-tech gadgets like the one (image below) were still several years away

Texas Instruments SR-10 'Scientific' calculator from 1973

 

[day_trippr]

 

[MaxStout]

and to think the NASA engineers didn't have advanced technology to conduct their engineering work during the 60's. hi-tech gadgets like the one (image below) were still several years away

View attachment 599810

Texas Instruments SR-10 'Scientific' calculator from 1973

My 9th grade algebra teacher had one of those in '73, and brought it to class one day. IIRC, he said he paid close to $200 for it. A couple years later, the basic TI calcs were were much cheaper, around $20 or so (I got one for Xmas).

 

[Rodent]

I remember my dad doing taxes with one of those, and how each button 'clicked' when you pressed it

 

[MaxStout]

And it burned through 9V batteries like nobody's business.

 

[MaxStout]

OK, back to what's happening on Mars...

 

[SEndorf]

Those are way too fancy...
I presume this is what the engineers used for the 1969 lunar landing.
In college, I could always spot the engineering students since they all wore these on their belts.

 

[Bigdaddyale]

My 9th grade algebra teacher had one of those in '73, and brought it to class one day. IIRC, he said he paid close to $200 for it. A couple years later, the basic TI calcs were were much cheaper, around $20 or so (I got one for Xmas).

8008135

 

[day_trippr]

[Wish I'd created a more generic thread]

Unusual ending to the Falcon 9 block 5 Dragon launch today...



To me, that is so effin' cool behavior.

Great video though!

"There's a hole...there's a hole...there's a hole in the bottom of the sea!"

Cheers!

 

[Bigdaddyale]

[Wish I'd created a more generic thread]

Unusual ending to the Falcon 9 block 5 Dragon launch today...



To me, that is so effin' cool behavior.

Great video though!

"There's a hole...there's a hole...there's a hole in the bottom of the sea!"

Cheers!

It's so cool living on the west coast watching the rocket launches out of Vandenburg from my backyard. We get to watch another launch this Friday. Takes me back to when I was a kid living in Florida and watching the Apollo program launches.

 

[day_trippr]

I've only eyeballed one significant rocket launch and that was a shuttle launch. Effin' awesome and brighter than the sun.

As a late boomer I grew up with "The Space Age" and as a techno dweeb I've loved every bit of it and can't wait 'til the next event. I can remember listening to a radio broadcast of the first manned Mercury launch from the Cannon Mountain ski lodge - it was that significant.

I watched the launch today "live" and a half-minute before SpaceX killed the feed of the booster landing attempt it was pretty clear there was some serious "anomalous behavior" happening. Somewhat incongruously, a minute later there was the audio feed of the SpaceX employees kinda/sortof cheering as the booster soft-landed on the ocean. I guess I get that, looking at the video - look how long that rocket tried to stay on top of the ocean!

Cheers!

 

[day_trippr]

Watching The Martian for the countless-th time...