ExoMars 2016: on its way to Mars!

[Darnok]

1 hour ago, Diche Bach said:

Imagine how much worse it would be if there were 100 "colonists" on that thing.

Nope, it wouldn't be much worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

In US in single year died 34,064 people in car accidents, it would be 341 SpaceX ITS sent to Mars... and nobody is in panic.
Nobody is talking to stop using cars, because they are dangerous. There is no discussion about making driving license harder to get, so only good drivers would be allowed to drive. People just don't care about deaths, they care about profit.

Edited October 20, 2016 by Darnok

[J.Random]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

A "storm" on Mars is a light breeze on Earth. I doubt that the weather had anything to with it.

No one said otherwise. But there's also a matter of static buildup and discharges.

[Diche Bach]

53 minutes ago, Darnok said:

Nope, it wouldn't be much worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

In US in single year died 34,064 people in car accidents, it would be 341 SpaceX ITS sent to Mars... and nobody is in panic.
Nobody is talking to stop using cars, because they are dangerous. There is no discussion about making driving license harder to get, so only good drives would be allowed to drive. People just don't care about deaths, they care about profit.

Its a good point. But there are two sort of "sub-responses" that deserve consideration.

1. The term "epidemic," while vague, does have a reasonable conceptual structure. An "epidemic" is a rate of suffering that exceeds that which is expected. We might like to imagine that modern societies with hundreds of millions of citizens, billions of miles of roadways, hundreds of millions of licensed vehicles, and trillions of dollars of roadway commerce could be expected to have "ZERO" roadway casualty rates; but if we stop and consider that rationally, it is obvious that makes no sense. As the saying goes "excrements happpens."

No matter how perfect the vehicles, the roads, and everything else involved, you've got humans (or computers, which are really just extensions of human analysis and decision-making) involved and we all know there is no accounting for all the variability there. In sum, some rate of automobile casualties is unavoidable, inevitable you might say, given that: "we" have no choice but to make use of the infrastructure.

This does not apply to Martian colonists. There is no imperative to expose people to that sort of risk, and thus, the safety and caution standards that a Martian mission will inevitably be subjected to (especially in any second-guessing analysis that would follow on a catastrophe) will be much higher than those of the roadways. This leads into point number two . . .

2. At this point in history, "space" stuff is not mundane. Despite decades of stated desire by various entities to make space stuff mundane (with the shuttle being one example where this selling point was touted, and Elon's stuff being just one of the latest examples) it still is not mundane at all. SpaceX seems to have worked marvels at making cargo deliveries inexpensive and that is one small step toward making space stuff mundane, but there is a lot more to it than that. Minimizing risk is also a big thing.

Because space stuff is "not a mundane thing" any aspirations to expand space stuff are automatically vulnerable to detractors--in contrast to say, automobile, or highway stuff. Nobody can argue we should "outlaw automobiles" even if at some objective level the annual carnage suggests that we _SHOULD_ outlaw automobiles: modern society would grind to a screeching halt. Consider, the sum total of all U.S. service personnel deaths during the U.S. entire involvement in the various wars in Indochina following WWII are around 58,000. The first U.S. casualty in "The Vietnam War" was an OSS officer killed in the late 1940s, and the last was in 1975 if memory serves. So (leaving aside the moment the non-fatal casualties as well as the much higher casualty rates among Vietnamese and Chinese participants in those conflicts) the U.S. suffered 58,000 deaths over a 30 year time frame as a result of its involvement in Vietnam, an historical period which is the subject of an enormous amount of dialogue.

Contrast this with the ongoing death toll on North American roads: at present rates, it takes only about two years to accumulate the same number of deaths on North American roadways as were suffered by the nation in 30 years of involvement in war in Southeast Asia. At the peak of roadway deaths in the 1980s, it was more like two-thirds of one year to accumulate as many.

The point of all this being: while the term "epidemic" does have a reasonable conceptual structure, it is also vague.

This is something Elon needs to understand and it is the message that the former astronauts were trying to convey to him when they testified before Congress to express skepticism and caution about SpaceX: in order not to "doom" space stuff, it is necessary to strive for extraordinary standards of safety and quality, because the loss of one life, or one probe in the high-profile frame of space stuff can have the same kind of negative PR effect as if 10,000,000 were lost in more "mundane" frames of reference.

So yes, it would be "much worse" had their been 100 colonists on that thing. It would not only represent 100 lives lost unnecessarily it might also represent a set back for space stuff on the order of decades or generations.

Edited October 20, 2016 by Diche Bach
typos & clarity

[Diche Bach]

I'm not an aerospace scientist, nor engineer. But I do have quite a bit of experience with high-risk activities: long-distance cave surveying, including a good bit of high-angle vertical work and exposure to flooding risk.

Based on those experiences, I developed an hypothesis. In high-risk endeavours involving intricate technology and operations, there are two populations which are at heightened risk: novices, and experts.

Novices are frequently at risk because they simply do not understand what they are getting in to. Experts can suffer heightened risk precisely because of their increasing experience and familiarity with intricate high-risk activities. It is difficult to maintain the same sort of high-intensity attention and decision making, day-after-day, week-after-week and at the same level that one fully understood was REQUISITE at the moment you changed from novice to journeyman.

 

Ultimately, the "solutions" to these sorts of creeping problems are social, psychological, and cultural not technological.

[PB666]

20 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

The landing profile is a rather classic one. It's been used since Viking, and most other landers since.

There aren't really many other ways to land a probe on Mars than aerobrake, chutes, and propulsive landing.

There's always a way to do it wrong though.  Top two organizations with Mars curse, what is their relationship with exomars 2016?

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37715202

 

13 hours ago, insert_name said:

keep in mind, the success rate for mars is below 50%. so actually exomars 2016 increased the success rate if you count Schiaparelli and tog as separate missions

Ah yes, so we have yet another communication satellite for the fatigued NASA rovers to use?

Does anyone remember the Beagle.

Technically speaking with a relatively low grade ion drive and the ability to make Mars L1, which isnt that difficult even with an ion drive. Reaching mars orbit is hardly a novel technical feat anymore.

 

Edited October 20, 2016 by PB666

[Dr.Wolfram]

13 hours ago, Scotius said:

So, another Mars probe bit the dust? Ehh. So many years. So many missions. And we still can't achieve 100% success ratio.

Naaah, it didnt bit the dust... It lithobraked in kerbal style XD

[ElWanderer]

Sounds like it Areobraked. *Sad face*

Speaking of Kerbal-style, it reminds me of my first automated Mun lander probe using kOS. Killed its horizontal velocity beautifully, switched to the suicide burn piece of the code a few hundred metres up and... crashed. So it turned the throttle off, plummeted and properly crashed while I was furiously typing to correct the mistake in my code.

[Josh IN SPACE]

Schiaparelli!!! Ah man, that's gotta be rough for those that spent so much time and effort on it.

Is the team that oversees the lander the same as the one that oversees the orbiter? Or are they managed separately in this mission?

[YNM]

19 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

A "storm" on Mars is a light breeze on Earth. I doubt that the weather had anything to with it.

Dust is the problem here I guess. Telling distances using "flashlight" in a stormy, gusty night isn't a good idea (nor in daylight either).

12 hours ago, ElWanderer said:

Sounds like it Areobraked. *Sad face*

Speaking of Kerbal-style, it reminds me of my first automated Mun lander probe using kOS. Killed its horizontal velocity beautifully, switched to the suicide burn piece of the code a few hundred metres up and... crashed. So it turned the throttle off, plummeted and properly crashed while I was furiously typing to correct the mistake in my code.

Ah, I don't understand the codes, really, more so on incorporating smooth gravity turns to the code...

Though, I might try again...

Edited October 21, 2016 by YNM

[jwenting]

17 hours ago, Diche Bach said:

 

 

Nice clickbait. the image does NOT show the aircraft mentioned in the title (A German/US X-31), it shows a Ukrainian Sukhoi 27.

[Diche Bach]

3 hours ago, jwenting said:

Nice clickbait. the image does NOT show the aircraft mentioned in the title (A German/US X-31), it shows a Ukrainian Sukhoi 27.

Yeah, I noticed that. However, that particular documentary channel seems exceptionally good.

[popeter45]

so russiaspaceweb is saying esa found the wreckage but no other sites are saying that

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/exomars2016-edm-landing.html#mro

[Shania_L]

As the lander itself was determining when to ditch heatshield, parachute and fire retros, how was it determining its altitude?

I would think a radar altimeter, but also laser range finder is possible, did it just mistake a thick patch of the dust storm for the surface?

[tater]

Edited October 21, 2016 by tater

[SuperFastJellyfish]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

How unfortunate.   

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, Shania_L said:

As the lander itself was determining when to ditch heatshield, parachute and fire retros, how was it determining its altitude?

I would think a radar altimeter, but also laser range finder is possible, did it just mistake a thick patch of the dust storm for the surface?

Think radar attitude meter would work during an sand storm, Artillery shells has them and it was used during an sandstorm during second gulf war and worked well.
Granted attitude here was lower but the radars on the recon planes discovered the tanks too during the same storm and that was long range. Storm was bad so the planes could not fly in it in an combat situation. 
Still lots of stuff can happen during an decent, Mars is hard on probes. 

[Kryten]

It was a radar altimeter, and from the telemetry we have it seems to have been working properly.

[NeverEnoughFuel!!]

On 10/20/2016 at 7:06 PM, Dr.Wolfram said:

Naaah, it didnt bit the dust... It lithobraked in kerbal style XD

SPLAT! I almost fell of the chair... LOL LOL ...I can bet its fuel froze or half of it's engines didn't start... btw how many engines it had... I think I counted nine exhausts... maybe I'm playing too much of KSP but why didn't they go with some glider sized drone with self deploying wings... almost any advanced military has such designes...   

[J.Random]

35 minutes ago, NeverEnoughFuel!! said:

SPLAT! I almost fell of the chair... LOL LOL ...I can bet its fuel froze or half of it's engines didn't start... btw how many engines it had... I think I counted nine exhausts... maybe I'm playing too much of KSP but why didn't they go with some glider sized drone with self deploying wings... almost any advanced military has such designes...   

Name one military which has a "glider sized drone with self deploying wings" able to fly at 45km altitude on Earth (about the same pressure as on Martian surface) or at least 30km (same for density, if I'm not mistaken). NASA Helios is the closest one, and it's a fixed wing with a HUGE wingspan.

[UnionPacific1983WP]

Rumor is that it ran into the EXACT same problem the Mars Climate Orbiter did. As quoted from someone else (not on this forum): 

Quote

The delta-V input was supposed to have been in m/s; they input the numbers as ft/s. Thus were low by a factor in excess of 3.

 

[tater]

Can't blame the US, at least...

[KAL 9000]

2 hours ago, UnionPacific1983WP said:

Rumor is that it ran into the EXACT same problem the Mars Climate Orbiter did. As quoted from someone else (not on this forum): 

 

How did they not learn their lesson and always use metric?

[Mitchz95]

5 hours ago, UnionPacific1983WP said:

Rumor is that it ran into the EXACT same problem the Mars Climate Orbiter did. As quoted from someone else (not on this forum): 

 

If that's true, that's both hilarious and sad. All that work...

At least it won't happen again!*

* probably

[DerekL1963]

6 hours ago, UnionPacific1983WP said:

Rumor is that it ran into the EXACT same problem the Mars Climate Orbiter did.

That's not possible.  The key problem for the Mars Climate Orbiter was they were on a shoestring budget, and so no navigational analysis was performed during the cruise phase.  By the time they assembled a team and began analysis prior to orbital injection, in was too late.

(Seriously, everybody hits on the image meme/soundbite part about the conversion error - but misses that the problem could have been caught and corrected.)

[Streetwind]

Schiaparelli was built, as evident by its name, principally under Italian oversight, and in Italy.

Nobody in Italy uses ft/sec, or any other imperial measurements. Nobody. You could potentially doubt the strict adherence to metric of a country like the UK, but Italy? Please.

So I'm going out on a limb here and call that rumor "blatantly made up" unless proven otherwise by an official source.

Edited October 24, 2016 by Streetwind