ExoMars parachutes just about good enough to land rover safely on the Red Planet The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover has successfully completed a high-altitude drop test. The mission has been beset by delays. A launch over the July-August window was scrubbed as mission managers faced up to problems including torn parachutes. In earlier tests, drops from a helicopter appeared …
Not sure anthropomorphism is stupid. I know really my lovely guitar is not a person. But it has many characteristics which belong only to it: it does not think but it does have a personality. It is just wood, metal and bone, but somehow it is useful to think of it as if it was a person for reasons I do not really understand but they are not stupid reasons.
Do not see why a robot probe should also not be usefully thought of as a bit like a person. Is it wrong to feel sad for the LEM when you leave it to die slowly in space? I think it is not.
Also this is not the most lovely xkcd ... but close.
This is where science gets stupid. NASA have now had what - 3 successful landers using the sky crane method. It begs the question why they dont standardise on that for the next N missions. I get the instrument packages are constantly changing and improving - but why cant they use a standard lander and rover package with just incremental upgrades?
This appears to be another area begging for the SpaceX treatment. Semi-Mass production from the get go - under the assumption that dozens or hundreds of landers and rovers would be needed. ESA and the UK dont have a great record when going it alone.
I can see the point though. You don't want just one system from one supplier. Taken to the extreme, the Russians got to space first so why didn't everyone else just give up and buy rides on their hardware?
Without NASA doing the first sky-crane landing, would ESA be trying to develop their own in-house skills and experience or would they still be going with smaller rovers and the bouncy balls solution?
>why didn't everyone else just give up and buy rides on their hardware
That's what effectively happened for manned spaceflight between the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the appearance of SpaceX. The Americans bought a bunch of Russian rockets and re-branded them for their ULA efforts.
Everyone seems to want to avoid mentioning the Chinese. I know that by law NASA isn't allowed to work with the Chinese (seriously...) but there's nothing stopping the Europeans from talking to them. I believe the Chinese also used the sky-crane landing method.
They did not use a sky crane. They used parachute followed by powered descent for final stage. Unlike with sky crane the rover sat on top of the engines, which thus made fairly big mess of the surface (you can see the mess in MRO images of landing site), Rover then has to drive down ramp from lander. All this is feasible for relatively small, light rover like Zhurong (240kgs) but not for Curiosity (899kgs) or Perseverance (1025kgs).
Again, sky crane's purpose is to land very heavy rovers on Mars, where landing via parachute/cushions is not feasible and where landing by straightforward powered descent could result in excavation of large amount of material which could both cover rover in crud and/or leave excavated trenches which it falls into. Sky crane solves this by keeping engines far from surface. You don't need or want sky crane for relatively small and light rovers.
"why didn't everyone else just give up and buy rides on their hardware?" - That is what happened after the US Congress decided that NASA systems were proven to be extremely unsafe and everyone from then on flew with Soyuz rockets. So far, the US space program sadly killed about twice as many people as the Russian space program.
The problem was the Space Shuttle. Having invested heavily in the concept and promoted it at a national level it was impossible to back off from it even though it rapidly became obvious that it was an accident waiting to happen.
There's a lesson for us all in there if we could only find it....
Like all of the subsystems, and indeed like all ESA projects, the parachute contract wasn’t given to the company whose parachute design was the best.The contract was allocated purely on the basis of which country had to get that particular contract, and split illogically between multiple companies, such that no single entity has any responsibility.
In this case, parachute system design TAS France, parachute design Vorticity (U.K.), one parachute manufacture Airborne Systems France, one by Arescosmo Italy. The ownership of testing is done by ARCA Space (Romania), and then overtaken / micromanaged by European Space Agency using Swedish Space Corp facilities. If the parachute doesn’t work, the manufacturer takes no responsibility. And nor does the designer. And the tester has no responsibility (or ability) to figure out what the problem is.
Can you see the problem?
That’s partly true. But the US has a different procurement philosophy since the Apollo program, which while hugely wasteful does produce final outcome, by sheer force of spending.
Know how many *completely independent* Apollo spacesuit procurements there were? Five. Five individual billion dollar programs. Only two of those produced anything functional. How many completely independent Shuttle programs? Three. That we know of.
How many completely independent military satcoms constellations? *Each* arm of the military currently has at least three separate systems - that don’t talk to each other, bought by different people. We aren’t talking new generations/successors, this is a total of *eleven* independent leading-edge constellation programs. That I know of. Presumably there are more.
The original space program took a conscious decision that they would simply commission 5x parallel design and manufacture every single procurement ever. Four out of five *entire procurements* the US builds produce nothing functional at all. But one does, and that’s enough. They throw spaghetti at the wall, and they can afford to throw enough that some of it sticks.
The EU and ESA parrot everything the US does. If the US builds a Mars Rover, they have to as well. If the US builds a GPS constellation, so do they. Whether it makes any sense or not. But they do it without any conception of basic purpose, or how much it will cost and whether they can still do it.
So NASA has an annual budget of $23bn, whereas ESA has an annual budget of $5bn. But NASAs budget doesn’t include any of those *eleven* satcoms constellations, nor it’s GPS constellation. Nor the development required for new launchers. That’s all US and security military budget. The bit we *know* about it is over $40bn annually for space, on top of $23bn.
It would be perfectly *possible* to have a viable European space program on the budget we have. SpaceX has shown how to do it. But what you can’t do, is pork-barrel like the US on the budget of a third-world power. Doesn’t produce anything except palaces in the desert.
Oh well, I tried to help. Is sad to think of you, ridden by whatever demon it is (do you have this expression in English, perhaps it means something different) that rides you, trying to spread what is no doubt your misery to everyone else in every article about Mars exploration. Just a relentless, grey, negative force which has eaten you and which you now wish to inflict on everyone else. Sad.
Stop being beastly to someone who is entitled to his opinion just as much as you.
TBH the guy is right there's nothing there just a bottomless pit on Mars waiting to be filled with flawed experiments and thousand dollar bills.
Maybe you best slither on Small Snake, I hear your mummy shouting you in for a venom to-up. You appear to have run out having wasted it on attacking Zanzibar Rastapopulous.
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