Category: space exploration

Mars Rover “Perseverance” lands tomorrow

February 17, 2021 • 11:00 am

Tomorrow the Mars Rover “Perseverance” will land on the Red Planet at 3:55 p.m. Eastern U.S. time (2:55 Chicago time, 8:55 pm London time). You’ll want to be awake then, for the landing will be filmed live with several cameras! NASA has a countdown page here, which links to all kinds of information about the Rover and the mission. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll post some links where you can watch the landing, assuming that all goes well.

The landing sequence of this gizmo in Jezero Crater is known as “The Seven Minutes of Terror” because the slowing down of the spacecraft from 12,100 miles per hour to just 1.7 mpg right before landing takes seven minutes and a ton of complicated technology. All of that was recently programmed into the spacecraft and rover: since there’s an 11-minute delay between Earth and Mars communication, we won’t know whether the Rover has landed until it’s all over.  And there’s nothing anybody can do to help at Mission Control.

Here’s a NASA animation showing how damn complicated this landing will be! It involves separation of the module containing the rover, deployment of a parachute, jettisoning of a heat shield, jets helping navigate over the surface to find a good landing spot, and most amazing, a “sky crane” that gently lowers the rover to the planet’s surface and then flies away.

It’s stunning that a mammalian species can pull off something like this. Don’t miss the live feed tomorrow!

This is a SCIENCE mission, and the rover will be landing in a crater that harbors an ancient delta. As Space.com reports,

Perseverance, or “Percy” for short, will explore the Martian terrain and conduct a number of science investigations. Among its objectives, Percy will collect samples, deploy the first helicopter beyond Earth, and search for signs of ancient life on the fourth planet from the sun.

And from the USA Today link above courtesy of NASA, a timeline of the landing:

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

I guess there will be sound, too, as there is an array of cameras and a microphone:

h/t: Tom

SpaceX to try again with the Starship rocket at 5:30 Eastern time today

December 9, 2020 • 2:30 pm

Yesterday, as I noted in a post, SpaceX had scheduled a trial launch of its Starship rocket, designed to host long-distance space travel to the Moon, or to Mars. Unfortunately, the liftoff, originally scheduled for yesterday morning, was aborted at the last second.

Update December 8th, 5:45PM ET: SpaceX counted all the way down to launch on Tuesday afternoon, but at 1.3 seconds to liftoff, the Raptor engines initiated an abort and the Starship prototype didn’t take flight. The company will provide updates about its next launch opportunity on its Twitter account.

There’s no update on the Twitter account, but the first video below now says the liftoff is scheduled for 4:30 CST, which is 5:30 Eastern time. The launching pad is in south Texas, so 4:30 pm is local time. They don’t have much of a window:

If this issue can be diagnosed and addressed, SpaceX has a back-up opportunity on Wednesday, during the daylight hours in Texas, to try again. The window runs from 8am CT (14:00 UTC) to 5pm (23:00 UTC). Fortunately, weather appears to be exceptional on Wednesday.

I’ll post this note if the launch is rescheduled. If so, you can watch it at two places:

SpaceX site:

Or this site, which has commentary (it may move later):

SpaceX plans launch today of Starship rocket designed for long-distance space travel; watch live here

December 8, 2020 • 12:45 pm

I forgot about an email I got earlier from reader Jon about SpaceX’s planned launch today of its “Starship”, the rocket that Elon Musk has planned will take humans to Mars. The launch was scheduled for 10 a.m. Chicago time, and it’s past that, but now I see they company has delayed the launch, as they’re “working through additional test preparations.”

Some explanation from Vox’s “The Verge”:

Sometime today, SpaceX hopes to conduct a pivotal test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, flying a prototype of the vehicle to its highest altitude yet. The company plans to launch the massive rocket to a height of nearly 8 miles, or 12.5 kilometers, up above SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, before landing the vehicle back down on the ground again.

The test is meant to prove out Starship’s capability of launching and landing upright, something the spacecraft will be expected to do both on Earth and on other worlds. SpaceX aims to use Starship to send cargo and people to deep-space destinations like the Moon and Mars. A test like this will help demonstrate Starship’s ability to perform a controlled flight and see if the rocket’s hardware — particularly the three main Raptor engines — functions as expected.

Launch and landing are just part of today’s test. On its website, SpaceX claims the Starship prototype will actually perform “a landing flip maneuver, which would be a first for a vehicle of this size.” There aren’t many details about the maneuver publicly available, but it’s a risky test that could easily go wrong, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk only giving the flight a “1/3 chance” of success. SpaceX itself is also deemphasizing the possibility that the test will pull off a perfect launch and landing.

I don’t know if the launch will proceed today, but if it does you can watch it below. I’ll post this again if the launch preparations are resumed tomorrow.

A fantastic view of the surface of Mars

August 25, 2020 • 2:00 pm

Here’s a stunning ten-minute video of the surface of Mars composed of a series of images strung together (up to a thousand in one panorama), with the photos coming from three different rovers. The large panoramas are then scanned with a video camera, a technique made famous by Ken Burns in his documentaries.

I don’t know about you, but watching this, and seeing Mars in broad daylight, made me feel plenty weird. No human has set foot here, and perhaps, though the planet once had water, there was never life of any sort.  And yet we fly spacecraft there and plant fiendishly clever rovers that roam the surface and show us what it’s like.

Will humans ever make it there (a seven-month trip one way)? I’ll never know.

Off to get a haircut!

 

h/t: Paul

Mars Rover starts its mission today (launch 7:50 a.m. EDT); watch launch now

July 30, 2020 • 6:30 am

Reader Jon Mummaw alerted me, and I’m alerting you, that the new Mars rover is being launched today. In fact, in about 20 minutes from when this post goes up, the rocket will take off.  You can watch it live at the links below. Perseverance will not only collect soil samples from the bed of an ancient Martian lake, hoping to find evidence of any form of life (the samples will someday be returned to Earth, they say), but also has its own drone called Ingenuity.  CNN describes several of the technological features of the rover and drone. And below I’ve reproduced Jon’s words with links.

Perseverance, an updated version of the mars rover Curiosity, is scheduled for liftoff at 7:50 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 30, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Perseverance will be launched atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. Live coverage begins on NASA TV at 7:00 a.m. EDT.  You can watch the launch live on NASA’s YouTube Channel or on NASA TV. Although the weather forecast looks favorable for a Thursday launch, the launch window runs from 30 July to 15 August 2020. If the 30 July launch is successful, Perseverance is scheduled to land at Jezero crater on 18 February 2021. Entry, decent and landing (EDL) will be similar to Curiosity’s harrowing Seven Minutes of Terror, although Perseverance is equipped with HD video cameras to record the landing. The HD video, however, will take weeks to transmit to earth.

The Perseverance rover has improved wheels, carries 23 cameras, two microphones and will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock, soil, and drill core samples for possible return to Earth during a later mission. Perseverance also carries an experimental autonomous helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be deployed to take close up photographs of the surrounding Martian landscape.

“The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission’s disk-shaped cruise stage sits atop the bell-shaped back shell, which contains the powered descent stage and Perseverance rover. Below is the brass-colored heat shield that is about to be attached to the back shell.”

JAC: Here’s a photo of the rover. What an ingenioous species we are! Pity we keep hating and killing each other. . . .

Watch SpaceX’s Demo-2 launch live (if it isn’t scrubbed)

May 27, 2020 • 10:30 am

As you surely know, SpaceX is about to launch two “mature” astronauts up to the International Space Station today. The launch was set for earlier this morning, but apparently has been delayed. It’s still a “go” at this writing, though, with the liftoff scheduled for later this afternoon. The NASA broadcast begins in about an hour.

You can get the latest details at Space.com, which at the time of publication are given below. But check back later to be sure, as the weather can be dicey.

From Space.com:

The mission, called Demo-2, will launch NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into orbit on a Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff is set for 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Wednesday, May 2 (all times in EDT, GMT-4)

  • 12:15 p.m. – NASA TV launch coverage begins (continues through docking
  • 4:33 p.m. – Liftoff
  • 5:22 p.m. – Crew Dragon phase burn
  • 6:05 p.m. – Far-field manual flight test
  • 7:05 p.m. – Astronaut downlink event from Crew Dragon
  • 7:30 p.m. – Postlaunch news conference at Kennedy

One place to watch the show is at the link below (which has a continual “warmup” broadcast), or at the several sites listed at the bottom. Click on this one to watch:

Other places to watch (the first link goes to the NASA site above):