The adventures of the British Space Agency

[TheFactory]

Today the BSA is proud to announce their first ever rover landed safely on Duna, the first success of the newly created agency.

T minus 5 minutes and final checks are made to the launch stage

T + 28 seconds and all systems are performing to expectations

T+ 1:41 - The Booster rockets are jettisoned

T 2:24 - the final part of the booster stage is jettisoned leaving the circulisation stage to do its job

T 9:21 - just before a full orbit is established the last large booster is dropped leaving the transfer stage to push us out to Duna

32 days later the Duna transfer window opens, unfortunatly our mission planners left the time acceleration key on for too long meaning we had to burn alot more fuel than we should of.

95 days from launch we perform an aerobrake around duna, the British designed and manufactured payload fairings doing a great job of protecting the rover

Once round at the new Apoapsis the fairings are removed so they will burn up on re-entry into Duna

Now to rover returns round to the light side of the planet and a landing course is plotted

Coming in low over the surface at 700m/s didn't cause any re entry effects but we kept the shield for as long as possible just in case.....

.... but we jettisoned it as soon as our nerves couldn't take anymore! it was at this stage the parachute was also deployed

at 500 meters above the surface the parachute was cut and the skycrane engines fired to bring the rover down gently. at 2 meters above the surface the rover was dropped and the skycrane boosted out the way

We are happy to report the rover sprung to life once the startup codes were transmitted to it and it has made its way to its first target, we hope to have data returning from it within the next few hours

Edited February 17, 2014 by TheFactory

[panzerknoef]

Nice mission!

[TheFactory]

Unfortunately we have not yet got our funding to Launch a spy satellite into orbit so we can keep a close eye on proceedings in Krussia, however we managed to persuade the Kamericans to feed us live pictures of a Krussian launch yesterday. Here are the details

Launched under cover of darkness and surrounded by a strong soviet looking box structure is a secret Krussian mission.

These pictures showed that they have managed to acquire the Nuclear rocket meaning they can explore the solar system at will - quite disconcerting.

We managed to track them out to minimus

We couldn't help wonder what the Krussians were up to, with their big weird box so we watched closely as they dropped it and then landed the skycrane on its engines.

An hour after take off they activated an explosive charge that blew the front door off revealing an object inside

on closer inspection it was clearly a rover

which was driven out of its box

and it set about using some peculiar apparatus for inspecting the surface

we are monitoring the situation and will report back.