Seems like the Sciaparelli
lander on Mars has been lost, probably due to an overly-hard landing.
Why were they expecting that the landing would be soft, anyway? Overly hard landings are a common theme among failed Mars missions, seems like.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynmantldr, rocket science is hard.
Seriously though, interplanetary missions are no joke. They've become somewhat routine (or at least, that's the public perception) for NASA, but that's more a testament to NASA's being straight up badasses than the technology advancing to the point where landing delicate scientific instruments on other planets (and comets, and asteroids, and whatever else) is easy.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.The descent mechanism largely depends on the mass of the payload involved. Parachutes don't work very well on Mars because Mars' atmosphere is extremely thin, so they're usually just a first step. Apparently
, the parachutes jettisoned early and the retrorockets that were supposed to take it the rest of the way to the surface didn't fire for as long as they were supposed to (by the original plan, much less the extra it would have needed to make up for ditching the chute early). The lander continued to transmit for another 19 seconds after the thrusters cut off, so the lander was almost certain destroyed on impact with the ground rather than the thrusters exploding or anything like that.
edited 20th Oct '16 3:55:16 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.SpaceX has announced it's figured out what blew up that Falcon 9 a few weeks ago. It wasn't a sniper, as early conspiracy theories had it, it was science.
Musk, confirming earlier discussion about the investigation, said the failure involved liquid helium being loaded into bottles made of carbon composite materials within the liquid oxygen tank in the rocket’s upper stage. This created solid oxygen, which Musk previously said could have ignited with the carbon composite materials. However, he did not go into that level of detail in his CNBC comments.
“It’s never happened before in history, so that’s why it took us a while to sort it out,” Musk said, adding that SpaceX has been working with NASA, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and commercial customers on the accident investigation. “This was the toughest puzzle to solve that we’ve ever had to solve.”
Solid oxygen. What the hell. (Based purely on what I remember from Things I Won't Work With, I'm going to guess some of that was compounds with far too many Os in a row, that proceeded to blow the hell up?
)
edited 7th Nov '16 7:29:38 PM by SabresEdge
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.Some early video footage had a spot of reflected light that the Internet decided could've been a laser dot, and to be entirely fair if I wanted to blow up a rocket like that I'd do so with an antimateriel rifle, as being the best way to be out of the blast radius.
That theory was dismissed very quickly though.
Charlie Stross's cheerful, optimistic predictions for 2017, part one of three.Forgive me for being a little NASA centric here;
I am really disappointed at General Bolden's
letter. He has done the exact same defeatist feat he done before with NASA's Muslim outreach and Chinese coorperation. I recognize that NASA and him are in a difficult position, especially when three of its facilities are in a state that indicated that they will turn against the federal government and subsequently lost federal support. However, General Bolden had essentially turned against NASA's status as the best place to work in the federal government, especially diversity, and too estranged from reality when there is a public panic over the status of SLS/Orion and internal panic to look for private/state alternatives to NASA's programs. I found his blind optimism and head in the sand disheartening. NASA needs to be "Stronger Together", but this letter shows disunity. I lost metric tonnes of respect for General Bolden.
Why not just link directly to the letter
, instead of to a page that has nothing but a link to the letter and a crapton of ads?
Anyway, I don't really see anything wrong with it. It's your standard content-free internal cheerleading, not a policy declaration. He's just trying to reassure people who are going "oh shit, Trump is going to cut all our funding!". The tldr version is "Keep Calm And Carry On".
Would you prefer that he rant and rave about how the sky is falling and all hope is lost?
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.I would perfer that he stands in solitary with the NASA workforce, but I know he doesn't have the leverage to do that unlike California. Hell, I would perfer that he doesn't say anything at all. All he is offering is false hope, and false hope isn't helpful when the reality is that the next administration posed to cut a significant part of NASA and cut federal support for a state where Ames, Armstrong, JPL, and globally acclaimed universities which NASA works with are located within the first 100 days, when there is an internal panic over continuation of NASA's programs even while all the polls indicated that Clinton would be the winner. Some, like Lori Garver and Space "X", is cheering over the potential defeat of the corrupted SLS/Orion. It means that more of duties of NASA is planned to be privatized, essentially shifting the burden of exploration to private sector, and some sees this as a good thing, but this panic also indicates that NASA is breaking down, which affects far more than just SLS/Orion. The reality is, while NASA is voted as the #1 for diversity in the federal government, a significant portion of voters, even though they did not reach a plurality majority, decided that they did not want that, and now they have taken over the federal government. NASA is not looking well in the future. All his babbling about cleaner air in the future is blind optimism, and blind optimism encourages complacency instead of solutions. His support for the next administration, despite all the harms they will do to NASA, signals defeat. It signals disunity. Yes, I would perfer if he had not said anything at all.
In before "the private sector will take over NASA and there is still ESA": I already said I am NASA centric.
Because your overwhelming negativity is clearly the more correct path, here. Look, a guy who's trying to cheer up his coworkers isn't doing a damn thing wrong, and NASA has kept ticking. Since he appears to be the boss here, keeping up morale is, in fact, a fairly responsible thing to do.
So yeah, it basically sounds like you're just bitching because someone is trying to keep up the spirits of their fellow employees and subordinates, which is kind of a childish way to respond to that letter.
I will argue the opposite. General Bolden throwing support behind someone that is endangering the minority workforce is implicitly telling them that their plight doesn't matter. He is telling people that the new administration will be alright, when in fact, to the workforce, it is not. When your house is burning and someone else came in and tells you that your house isn't burning and you should keep calm, how would you feel? Do you feel your morale boosted? You don't have to be negative to recognize that there is a problem and resolves to solve it. Compare his letter to the statement by the California state government.
They are also telling people to calm down, but at the same time, they recognized the problem and stated the intention to fight it. I recognized that NASA isn't at the same position as California, but how about a simple, "we will endure the future"? You can strip out all partisan references and simply said NASA will endure any future challenges. That's more effective than simply telling people that there is no problem at all.
Call me a sore loser all you want.
At the risk of being inflammatory, yeah, I'd call that being a sore loser.
It's very unfortunate that Trump won, but he did, and we're going to have to deal with it until he (hopefully) loses in four years. Until, it's better to keep people's spirits up for them to better endure what they have no choice what they'll have to deal with.
If anything, NASA stands to gain under Trump
(or not suffer), since he at least seems to like the idea of space exploration.

I love that amusing little tune.
Who watches the watchmen?