General > General Technical Chat

One Day Until "Seven Minutes of Terror"

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Homer J Simpson:

Parachute decent imaged by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.



coppercone2:
those guys must be scared of paperwork if that is terrifying.. there is no one on board, the whole point of this unmanned thing is so you can take it easy

ajb:

--- Quote from: coppercone2 on February 20, 2021, 08:51:26 am ---those guys must be scared of paperwork if that is terrifying.. there is no one on board, the whole point of this unmanned thing is so you can take it easy

--- End quote ---
Not sure if serious, but a ridiculous take either way.  This mission cost a couple of billion dollars to develop and build, took seven years to prepare and seven months just to get to Mars where it had to autonomously execute a complicated series of aerodynamic maneuvers that have only been done *once* before.  If it had failed, there's no guarantee if or when another attempt would be made.  So OF COURSE the team was terrified! How could they not be?

I actually sort of relate, albeit at several orders of magnitude lower stakes.  I've done a number of jobs for live events and similar where you spend a bunch of time building a thing that you try very hard to make as reliable as possible within the constraints of limited time and budget, and try to anticipate any potential problems, but eventually you have to hand it off into a situation where you no longer have control over it and it has just ONE chance to work. If you're lucky, there's been time to rehearse it a few times, but that's not always possible, and you can never quite be sure that you've anticipated all of the possible scenarios.  So you just have to sit back and watch and hope that you and everyone else involved, ESPECIALLY anyone else you've entrusted to operate it, haven't missed anything.  My projects only ever cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, took a couple of weeks, and mostly only had hundreds of people watching and it was always nerve wracking as fuck to watch the first time they were used for real.  This was literally a million times bigger.

coppercone2:
i just save the word terror for situations with more consequence then equipment loss, maybe terror for the people in accounting. I would be most worried about the people doing the positioning of the rocket and fueling if its liquid fuel. once everyone is clear its just a write off at worse..

terror is a manned launch, you can't weld up more people

CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: MikeK on February 18, 2021, 09:55:34 pm ---
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on February 18, 2021, 09:50:10 pm ---JPL has kitted out the system with multiple cameras and microphones to record the landing. They seem very interested in footage and recordings. I gather anything to which helps you better understand what happened will improve the chances of future missions. We don't have a great understanding of atmospheric landings outside of our own atmosphere.

--- End quote ---

The instrumentation tells they way more than video.  And microphones are pretty pointless on a planet with almost no atmosphere (about 1% Earth's).  I'd bet on it being more of a PR thing, to get public interest.

--- End quote ---

I suppose helicopters are pointless too.  Oh, they have one.

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