
New Reg unit?
> The circular device, shaped like a hamburger,
Is that a hamburger in a vacuum? As it was a moon probe, did it contain cheese or plan to get the cheese on arrival?
The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, the farthest lander to ever make it in the outer solar system, spun wildly in the opposite direction as expected as it descended onto one of Saturn’s moons. Now, scientists have finally figured out what went wrong, 15 years after the probe’s landing. The circular device, shaped like a …
It is not usual to eat Lorne Sausage (proper name of the square variety) in place of hamburger buns and don't know anywhere that does this. Even though it might be offered in a bun for convenience of consumption that doesn't make it a hamburger.
As a maker of sausages and black pudding I have a recipe for Lorne sausage but haven't ventured there, yet. Thinking of trying wind dried sausages for a change. if I had more people to feed I would make a haggis for next Saturday. But it's been bought, gluten free. Why I make my own, to ensure they're GF and very tasty.
I make my own GF sausage meat (finer grind than most sausage fillings) and have some GF large sausage rolls with home made genuinely flaky pastry cases. I did 8 turns on the pastry. They are rather good if I say so myself. Pork and fresh sage sausage meat. I have a sage bush.
But they left out the key to the new unit - the assumed poundage of the beef.
Now since a McDonalds Quarter Pounder (Hamburger Royal to the euros) is 4" in diameter its area is about 12.5 sq in and its weight is about 0.02 lb per sq in.
The hamburger shaped probe was about 106" in diameter, thus about 8825 sq in, thus about 176 pounds.
The unit should read "shaped like a 176 Pound Hamburger Royal."
With or without mayo'?
If it's got cheese, to function fully it must have bacon as a catalyst for the cheese. In the event that cheese collection on arrival was part of the mission would bacon have been included in the mission load or was it assumed that bacon would be naturally occurring with the cheese?
"The investigation conducted by students and interns at the Polytech Orléans and the French research laboratories LPC2E and PRISME by sending a simulation of the Huygens probe through a windtunnel."
Did nobody bother doing aerodynamic stability testing before sending it on it's way? Seems like a basic test to perform and something that SHOULD have been caught.
> why the European space program is going so slow
Do you really think the European space program is "going slow"? Even if it was true, the limiting factor would be (as always) money, not the better working conditions of Europeans. You can procrastinate just as well in an US/Chinese working environment.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. It happened in the past, it wasn't catastrophic, it wasn't a problem that needed to be solved before another mission... it was an unexpected and interesting observation of minor significance and thus a project ideal to give to someone who is still a bit wet behind the ears and who could learn a lot from undertaking it.
It happens a lot.
A fictional example:
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were well understood. It is said that such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sorts of parties.
The physicists encountered repeated failures while trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the farthest stars and they eventually announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up after a particularly unsuccessful party, found themselves reasoning this way: If, they thought, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, it must logically be a finite improbability. So all they had to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into a finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!
They did this and managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. Unfortunately, after they were awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness, they were lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realised that the one thing that they really couldn't stand was "a smart arse."
Doing the "impossible" is often a case of really understanding the underlying constraints and seeing the tweak by lateral thinking. Or just being lucky by falling over the right answer when following the wrong path.
"The impossible we can do today - miracles take a little longer"
I always look forward to the comments from people who know better than the people who actually designed and built a probe that spend 7 years in space then landed on a moon of another planet.
I guess climate science is also anathema to them, all those know it all scientists, giving it large.
You know you're in trouble when you have to measure the warming of your oceans using zettajoules as units. Not to mention having probes that are sampling single measurements in areas of ocean roughly the size of Portugal and you don't actually have full coverage of the oceans.
Science? We've heard of it...
Attempts to recover ESA's stricken Sentinel-1B satellite are continuing and one of the failure scenarios engineers are considering will be familiar to some of us: possible leakage of a ceramic capacitor.
The satellite, launched in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Arianespace facility at Kourou in French Guiana, remains under control. However, power problems have rendered its C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR) instrument pretty much useless, thus defeating the point of the spacecraft.
Sister spacecraft, Sentinel-1A, has continued to collect data despite recently having to dodge some debris.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has pulled back from yet more "cooperative activities" with Russia as the agency continues to adjust to life without its former partner.
It said yesterday that a "fundamental change of circumstances... make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation."
ESA's ExoMars project was already put on hold last month as bosses ponder how to get the completed rover to the red planet without the Proton rocket they had expected to launch it on in September.
Feature The European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft has kicked off electromagnetic testing in the Airbus Defence and Space cleanrooms in Toulouse.
The JUICE mission, which is due to launch on the very last Ariane 5 from French Guiana in April 2023, will spend nearly eight years cruising to Jupiter and a further three and a half years observing the Jupiter system. In 2034 it will become the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than Earth's own satellite as it drops into orbit around Ganymede for some close-up science.
The Register visited Airbus's facility while the spacecraft was undergoing testing in the "quiet" room of the Toulouse site, the purpose being to check out any interference from the payload components. Visitors were therefore politely asked to surrender phones and anything that might interfere with the environment. We also had to wear protective gear to keep the spacecraft as squeaky clean as possible, although the end of the mission will see JUICE sent crashing into the surface of Ganymede to avoid any contamination reaching Europa.
There was a sigh of relief from ESA controllers over the weekend as the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite successfully dodged a decades-old rocket fragment.
The debris' closing speed was over 50,000 km/h (∼31,068 mph) and it was expected to come close enough that controllers opted to perform a pair of thruster burns in order to lift the satellite 100 meters (∼328ft) above the predicted point of closest approach.
One of the engineers responsible for flying the spacecraft, Thomas Ormston, summed things up with the inevitable meme.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has slammed the brakes on its ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin.
According to an ESA insider, the agency today agreed to suspend the mission at its ruling council meeting in Paris.
The joint ESA-Roscosmos Mars rover Rosalind Franklin is "very unlikely" to launch this year after Russia was hit with fresh economic sanctions for invading Ukraine.
Following a meeting with its 22 member states, the European Space Agency confirmed on Monday it was "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia."
"We deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the war in Ukraine. We are giving absolute priority to taking proper decisions, not only for the sake of our workforce involved in the programmes, but in full respect of our European values, which have always fundamentally shaped our approach to international cooperation," ESA said. "Regarding the ExoMars programme continuation, the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely."
A double helping of plastic playtime this Monday as we honour the achievements of the James Webb Space Telescope by building one out of Lego and an ESA astronaut takes some Playmobil on a tour of the ISS.
Having constructed many examples of spacecraft and their infrastructure, the unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its successful insertion into L2 orbit seemed as good an excuse as any to raid the boxes of plastic bricks once more in tribute to the observatory and the brains behind it.
NASA has picked Lockheed Martin Space as the developer of the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), one of the vehicles that will retrieve samples collected by the Perseverance rover on the Red Planet.
Perseverance is equipped with a drill and 43 sample tubes. Its mission plan calls for those tubes to be filled, then left on the Martian surface so that they can be retrieved and returned to Earth. The rover has collected six samples to date.
While the rover has merrily gone about its sample-collection business, much of the hardware for the Mars Sample Return Program remains on the drawing board. Until today, no contractor had even been appointed to build the rocket to lift the samples from Mars.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is inviting applications from attackers who fancy having a crack at its OPS-SAT spacecraft.
It's all in the name of ethical hacking, of course. The plan is to improve the resilience and security of space assets by understanding the threats dreamed up by security professionals and members of the public alike.
OPS-SAT has, according to ESA, "a flight computer 10 times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft" and the CubeSat has been in orbit since 2019, providing a test bed for software experiments.
The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter followed up its whizz past Earth as 2021 drew to a close by passing through the tail of a comet. Again.
While eyes were turned to French Guiana and the impending launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, for a few days around 17 December the spacecraft flew through the tail of Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard.
It's not the first time; the spacecraft also passed through the tail of the fragmenting comet C/2019 Y4 ATLAS in May and June 2020, a few short months after its launch.
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