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Mission(s) to Mars

Fuzzydog

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Does anyone one know how many missions to Mars have launched or will launch this month?.....anyone...anyone.....Bueller?

Three. There were 4 planned but the Euro/Russia venture got pushed back to 2022.
Now to be fair there is a launch window for trips to Mars that only opens up every 26 months so it makes sense that everyone would be leaving around the same time. But 4 independent space agencies all going with their own program? Damn! Maybe Mars has the Covid cure?

The UAE just launched and their craft is going to set up orbit around Mars
China just launched and they are deploying both an orbiter and a rover
The US is launching Jul 30 with a big rover and a helicopter

And of course SpaceX is moving full steam ahead on Starship with the stated ambition of colonizing Mars. They are on prototype 5 and already have the next 3 or 4 in various stages of construction.


I was a kid when the space shuttle program started and I still remember that every single launch was a big event (I guess it was the same for the Apollo era folks). Now, rockets are launching all the time from different places on the planet and it hardly makes the news (cuz corona, BLM, politics, etc are sooooo much more important)

With all the crazy shit and fighting over petty stuff (egos) that is going on in the world, these guys are looking way down the line in the future. Just makes me wonder what we could have accomplished by now if we could all work together
 
do you think theyll broadcast the mars robot wars online??

s8oKGQ.gif
 
Ya know the stupid thing is I remember praise for the previous admins on doing more space work, it seems the orange man has continued and expanded that and zero discussions.

And I miss robot wars. :(
 
Ya know the stupid thing is I remember praise for the previous admins on doing more space work, it seems the orange man has continued and expanded that and zero discussions.

And I miss robot wars. :(

sumo wrestling robots are pretty neat, no idea if this is still a thing :laughing:

giphy.gif



what was this thread about? :laughing::laughing: god damn robits!
 
Tin foil hat time

I think the 2032 asteroid "they" (the man) say not to worry about may be a bigger problem than they say. At first it was a planet killer, then it was gonna be a near miss. Next thing we know everyone is scrambling to get to mars.
 
I was thinking it might end up like on the sitcom"Space Force" With the Chinese damaging what we already have up there.

:snip:

:laughing: i thought of the same thing, the china rover comes over to the curiosity rover with a pair a scissors, snips one wire then drives away
 
Tin foil hat time

I think the 2032 asteroid "they" (the man) say not to worry about may be a bigger problem than they say. At first it was a planet killer, then it was gonna be a near miss. Next thing we know everyone is scrambling to get to mars.

Maybe we can wear helmets out of t-shirts to protect us.
 
Tin foil hat time

I think the 2032 asteroid "they" (the man) say not to worry about may be a bigger problem than they say. At first it was a planet killer, then it was gonna be a near miss. Next thing we know everyone is scrambling to get to mars.

is there any way we can speed that thing up and just end the madness, say like next week? :laughing:

edit: preferably before manbearpig shows up, but not until after hillary blatantly suicides one more person. k thanx
 
The US rover is funny, because it has a core drill on it for taking rock samples. BUT, it has no means to really package or return those samples, so it's going to drill holes all over the place and just shit the pieces of core out and leave them lying around, like some sort of super drunk mining exploration project. :lmao:

The hope is they will get them with something else later. I'm sure the Chinese will steal them.
 
I get notifications for all the launches. My kids and I watch them all. The space walks get kind of boring because they move so slow, but they are fun to have on when there is nothing else going on.
 
The US rover is funny, because it has a core drill on it for taking rock samples. BUT, it has no means to really package or return those samples, so it's going to drill holes all over the place and just shit the pieces of core out and leave them lying around, like some sort of super drunk mining exploration project. :lmao:

The hope is they will get them with something else later. I'm sure the Chinese will steal them.

I thought it has some sort of Mass Spectrometer on board. There have been some analyses of what it has dug up IIRC.
 
I thought it has some sort of Mass Spectrometer on board. There have been some analyses of what it has dug up IIRC.

This is correct.

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft...ments/summary/

Spectrometers
  • 636

    APXS (Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer) ›
    Ralf Gellert, Principal Investigator
    University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada


    The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer is called APXS for short. When it is placed right next to a rock or soil surface, it uses two kinds of radiation to measure the amounts and types of chemical elements that are present.
  • 637

    ChemCam (Chemistry and Camera) ›
    Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator
    Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA


    The Chemistry and Camera tool is known as ChemCam. ChemCam's laser, camera and spectrograph work together to identify the chemical and mineral composition of rocks and soils.
  • 638

    CheMin (Chemical and Mineralogy) ›
    Thomas Bristow, Principal Investigator
    NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA


    The Chemical and Mineralogy instrument, or CheMin for short, performs chemical analysis of powdered rock samples to identify the types and amounts of different minerals that are present.
  • 639

    SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) ›
    Paul Mahaffy, Principal Investigator
    NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA


    The Sample Analysis at Mars tool is called SAM. SAM is made up of three different instruments that search for and measure organic chemicals and light elements that are important ingredients potentially associated with life.
 
Too many rovers! Maybe they should start naming them after cars so we can keep track. Pinto, Corvair, Yugo...:grinpimp:

If the new one doesn't have a Mass spec maybe it will pass the samples to the one that does?

Oh no, it has one.

The point was they fully intend to collect these core samples. They're larger than makes sense to use otherwise. However they don't actually have a means to do it, so it's going to take core samples, look at them, put them in a little tube and shit them out everywhere. It can't store them or return them, so it's just going to leave a trail of them as it travels.

They have some ideas of how they will recover them, but nothing officially in the works... So it won't be any time soon.
 
A single quad mass spec? Come on guys you can do better than that. Or maybe I'm just an instrumentation snob. Still, keeping a single quad in once piece during launch and reentry is pretty impressive.

That's what I still find amazing it that any of this stuff works after it lands. Move a x-ray unit 2mm here and it's out of wack and needs to be certified but this can travel millions of space miles and still works fine.
 
Oh no, it has one.

The point was they fully intend to collect these core samples. They're larger than makes sense to use otherwise. However they don't actually have a means to do it, so it's going to take core samples, look at them, put them in a little tube and shit them out everywhere. It can't store them or return them, so it's just going to leave a trail of them as it travels.

They have some ideas of how they will recover them, but nothing officially in the works... So it won't be any time soon.

What do you expect them to do with the samples after analyzing them? FedEx them back to earth? Sending shit home is a whole order of magnitude different than looking around and squirting a radio report.
 
What do you expect them to do with the samples after analyzing them? FedEx them back to earth? Sending shit home is a whole order of magnitude different than looking around and squirting a radio report.

Lots of probes have been proposed with sample return systems. It is not anything that isn't possible, and there is probes with sample return capability out in the wild right now (just not on Mars).

I find it amusing that they would intentionally seal the core samples for return without any means to do it. Sorry I offended all of America again. :flipoff2:
 
What do you expect them to do with the samples after analyzing them? FedEx them back to earth? Sending shit home is a whole order of magnitude different than looking around and squirting a radio report.

At this very moment the Japanese have a spacecraft that is on its way back to earth after a 6? year mission with samples from an asteroid. It will arrive at earth in Dec, jettison the sample package which will enter the atmosphere and deploy a parachute to land in Australia. The spacecraft itself will then alter course and send itself out of the solar system.
oh, and this is round 2 - the first mission returned some samples in 2010. Maybe that's where Covid came from? It just took a few years to culture :laughing:
I'm pretty sure NASA is going to figure out a way to get those Mars samples back to earth.
 
Tin foil hat time

I think the 2032 asteroid "they" (the man) say not to worry about may be a bigger problem than they say. At first it was a planet killer, then it was gonna be a near miss. Next thing we know everyone is scrambling to get to mars.

Not a problem just wear a mask.

Fastest way to Mars is when we find out it has oil. We can start another war and start drilling that red sombitch
 
Harbor Freight is sending a rover to Mars... Why not?

China has launched its first rover mission to Mars.

The six-wheeled robot, encapsulated in a protective probe, was lifted off Earth by a Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island at 12:40 local time (04:40 GMT).

It should arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in February.

Called Tianwen-1, or "Questions to Heaven", the rover won't actually try to land on the surface for a further two to three months.

This wait-and-see strategy was used successfully by the American Viking landers in the 1970s. It will allow engineers to assess the atmospheric conditions on Mars before attempting what will be a hazardous descent.


https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53504797
 
Time flies. All 3 are arriving at Mars this month. The UAE's Hope orbiter will be first on Feb 9th, then the Chinese Tianwen arrives Feb 10th, and the US Perseverance lands on Feb 18th.
and Spacex continues testing Starships to destruction. SN9 climbed to 10kms yesterday but crashed on landing, right beside SN10 which is ready to go for the next test flight. They also announced that they expect to do the first all-civillian flight into orbit by the end of the year. Granted, one of those civilians is a billionaire jet fighter pilot, but not an astronaut.
good times, man. Good times
Watching the launch and crash yesterday I kept thinking " why would they try to land so close to SN10? If it goes really bad they will lose both ships." Then I realized that if SN9 had successfully landed that would have made an absolutely epic visual and I bet that is what they were going for. A video of a huge rocket landing vertically beside a sister ship totally shows where this company is going.
Too bad it didn't work out and it was epically visual for the wrong reason.
Stay tuned folks!
 
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