anticapitalist catra!!! 70 days until the mars rover launches !!!
I will never be over the absurd complexity of the descent stage
"oh yeah crashing into the surface of mars with giant airbags doesn't work when our rover is the size of a car"
"okay we'll just give it rockets and a crane"
"yeah sure that sounds reasonable"
"okay we'll just give it rockets and a crane"
"yeah sure that sounds reasonable"
humanity put a nuclear-powered autonomous robot with a laser on mars and I can't believe everyone just forgets about it
there was a story from one of the engineers on curiosity that they spent *months* planning out one very particular scenario:
what happens if the rover gets stuck in earth orbit, and can't make it to mars.
the problem: they have a nice big chunk of plutonium-238 in that thing. and you don't want that landing on any continent, much less breaking up in the atmosphere
so they had a plan for exactly how to safely deorbit it so it landed in the pacific ocean -- just in case that one particular situation were to ever come up.
what happens if the rover gets stuck in earth orbit, and can't make it to mars.
the problem: they have a nice big chunk of plutonium-238 in that thing. and you don't want that landing on any continent, much less breaking up in the atmosphere
so they had a plan for exactly how to safely deorbit it so it landed in the pacific ocean -- just in case that one particular situation were to ever come up.
in a similar vein of story, there was another engineer who spent months (or even years?) of their life perfecting the rover's landing radar -- the thing that figures out how far the rover is from the ground, and how fast it's coming in to land
which is really important, because if it's wrong, you slam into the surface and lose several billion dollars of rover
but, of course, that means years of work go into one tiny thing that's going to be used for less than a minute. which is a hilarious ratio of creation time to use time.
which is really important, because if it's wrong, you slam into the surface and lose several billion dollars of rover
but, of course, that means years of work go into one tiny thing that's going to be used for less than a minute. which is a hilarious ratio of creation time to use time.