Humans had never seen a spacecraft land on another planet:
Never before, in all of our millions of years, have humans directly observed a spacecraft landing on another planet. Until now.
On Monday, NASA released a video (embedded below) that included several viewpoints from the descent of Mars Perseverance to the surface of the red planet last week. A camera on the back shell captured a view of the parachute deploying, and cameras on the descent stage and rover itself captured the final seconds of the landing.
"I can, and have, watched those videos for hours," said NASA's Al Chen, the lead for the entry, descent, and landing for Perseverance. "I find new stuff every time. I invite you to do so as well."
[...] Capturing this visceral footage was not mission critical, but it was a bonus. The space agency used ruggedized, off-the-shelf hardware to take this imagery. All told, about 30GB of data was captured during the descent, totaling 23,000 images. Now that NASA has this information, it will be used to sharpen knowledge about future entry, descent, and landing technology on Mars and other worlds in the Solar System.
One landing issue brought into sharp focus in the new footage is the dust kicked up by the descent stage as it nears the surface of Mars and drops off the lander. It entirely shrouds Perseverance in a thick cloud. This will be an important issue as NASA contemplates landing larger spacecraft, and eventually human missions, on the red planet.
Descending into a rocket-induced dust and sand storm. And look at the large flying rock in the last frame! #PerseveranceRoverpic.twitter.com/7MEnqRhLj3
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) February 22, 2021
[...] There were more than just visual treats released on Monday during the Perseverance news conference. For the first time, a rover recorded audio and transmitted it back to Earth, capturing what sounded like a wind gust. "Who is going to compose the first piece of music with actual Mars sound?" asked Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's chief of science. Who, indeed.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:06PM (18 children)
Increasing the length of the "string" between the sky-crane and the lander should help alleviate those dust problems... though I'm sure it will introduce more problems like "wobble".
Please feel free to insert more technical terms if you prefer.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:24PM (16 children)
Solutions that add weight will not be looked upon kindly. Every gram of rope means a gram less science.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:49PM (12 children)
Woah, is gram an SI unit for science?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:04PM (2 children)
Yes, a gram is about 1/5000 of a pork.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:14PM
1/5000th of a pork -- Is that before cooking or after? I'm always forgetting my science units... In the meantime I think I'll work on those 4 bacons of science this morning around breakfast time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:42PM
True, dat. But a Lyndsey Gram is larger, more like a bullock, or a mallard.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:05PM (7 children)
Indirectly yes... Have you never heard scientists talk in terms of "We'll be able to do a _ton_ of science there"? 1 ton == 1000 Kg == 1000000 grams of science
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @05:16PM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @05:19PM (5 children)
I stand corrected, thank you AC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:58PM (4 children)
Your welcome AC. Oh look at us behaving like the posers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:00PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:22PM
We are Legion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @10:16AM (1 child)
I'm not that AC, so I want to know what was so special about his welcome?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2021, @11:54AM
My welcome is so much better than your welcome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:49PM
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:50PM (2 children)
It depends. Of course, I'm making reference to science fiction.
The book, not the movie: 2010: The Year We Make Contact
The sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
While contemplating the aerobraking maneuver around Jupiter, I think the main character IIRC, ponders, some engineer somewhere who calculated exactly how much mass they would burn off of the ballute [wikipedia.org] during aerobraking. The character aboard the spacecraft was thinking: "better a ton too much mass than one milligram too little".
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:27PM (1 child)
Is this... a reverse spoiler warning?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:46PM
What I describe doesn't spoil anything in the book. And it isn't even present in the movie. It is a minor detail that could be omitted -- which the movie did omit.
Wait, uh, . . . isn't that how you're supposed to use the spoiler tag?
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 24 2021, @02:46PM
>Increasing the length of the "string" between the sky-crane and the lander should help alleviate those dust problems... though I'm sure it will introduce more problems like "wobble".
You're making a potentially unjustified assumption that the dust is a problem. They've now successfully used this method repeatedly, previously without even knowing it was occurring.
And I mean, think about it - you've already chosen your landing site before getting close enough to stir up dust, and as you're landing you have to rely on touch anyway, since the ground might shift underneath you as it's subjected to your weight. Even an airplane pilot on a clear day can't actually see their landing gear approaching the runway, and have to rely on touch for positive confirmation of touchdown. And all the more so if it's a bush-plane or barnstormer landing in a grassy field where the ground is hidden by plants.
That said - it could introduce some challenges, particularly for more powerful rockets like Starship. Not because of the dust itself, but in the fact that the dust and smaller particles are blasted away from the landing site, converting the solid ground to a less stable pile of rubble without the gap-stabilizing "filler" between it.
Perhaps we want some semi-autonomous robots to construct a solid landing pad before attempting to land the first passenger Starship on Mars. It'd be a real shame to spend months traveling hundreds of millions of miles between planets, only to have the rocket tip over on unstable ground and kill everyone onboard. Potentially you could just saturate an area of ground with some sort of thin, slow-setting liquid binding agent that doesn't mind the cold and vacuum - there's probably several kinds of epoxy that would fit the bill, the soil chemistry is probably the bigger challenge. I'm thinking something that could soak a foot (or several) into into the ground before setting to create a stabilized foundation, possibly with a less penetrating formula then added to the top several inches to completely fill the gaps and produce a stronger, more blast-resistant surface.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:20PM (20 children)
The statement that now people have directly observed the landing on another planet is obviously false. There were no humans in the vicinity to directly eyeball the landing. Saying “well, we got a video of it 8 minutes after the fact” is what actually happened.
If you weren’t there, you couldn’t have directly witnessed it, any more than if you were in another country watching the twin towers fall during 9/11 you couldn’t have directly witnessed that either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:23PM (4 children)
Another first: no human has ever seen the following characters written in this order "qwkf880v9ksjdj..jehw24!/dj"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:27PM
Are you sure? Back in the days when I was debugging binary transfer over serial lines, ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:12PM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure I saw the SHA256 hash of exactly that string show up several years ago in the bitcoin blockchain... 92f7870b4967dd4e6c273bf100741decda996c39e53701ce193ec11e68e5b78f
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:28PM
So miserly with the entropy. May bore readers who crave novelty.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:10PM
I've got the same combination on my luggage!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:45PM (6 children)
I think the point is most landings were done blindly and completely unobserved. Anything that went wrong just left everyone scratching their heads at a blank screen wondering what happened. (They've gone back to metric without telling us! :P)
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:55PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:25PM (1 child)
Duh, but this time if something went wrong we could have had a LOT of information after the fact about what went wrong.
Although TFA does not say how or if this information would have been transmitted back if the entire thing had gone splat.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:17PM
All the descent videos, including the videos taken by cameras in the descent stage, were stored in a dedicated computer system within the rover. These were then transmitted from the rover back to Earth well after the landing was finished.
This is why you can see in the video as soon as the rover lands, the down-look videos from the descent stage immediately stop (as once the cables are severed, the rover no longer receives video from the descent stage).
If the entire thing had gone splat then there would simply be no videos to look at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:30PM
That sounds like my sex life.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:42PM (1 child)
This landing was also done blindly. There was nobody working the bloody controls at the other end. The bloody landing was already over 8 minutes before earth received the first bloody images. Nobody directly observed any bloody thing, nobody directly contributed anything, nobody could abort it once the bloody thing was started. If the images showed it was heading towards a bloody Martian, the bloody Martian would already be a bloody splat before we even saw the bloody thing.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:03PM
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:11PM
Das raciss! Some under-educated under-privileged equal-opportunity bubble-headed gender-confused minority wrote a perfectly good story, and all you can do is find fault! Take your white male hetero christian bigotry elsewhere! Your facts offend our feelz!
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:38PM (2 children)
Not actually, I don't think.
We got telemetry, which was being announced by voice in the recording.
On the landing day I heard that they wouldn't be getting pictures and videos back until Monday (eg, yesterday, when I'm posting this).
Later, someone combined the voice from landing day with the received video. Edited for runtime because that "seven minutes of terror" was only 3:26 on YouTube. (See TFA for video)
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:13PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 24 2021, @03:02PM
Mars is currently a bit over 11 light minutes away - transmission time is not included in the seven minutes of terror.
The seven minutes are from when the lander begins reentry and loses communication with Earth, until it's safely on the surface and reestablishes communication.
The video is only 3:30 long because it starts just before the parachute deploys - after the most violent several minutes of reentry are already over. Even if the camera were exposed for that, mostly all you'd see would be a patch of black sky slowly brightening towards blue within a ring of hot plasma wake generated by the re-entry bow wave.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday February 23 2021, @08:51PM (2 children)
You’re being pedantic. The structure of the sentence is for drama. 99.9% of the readers knew exactly what was meant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:05PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @04:26AM
pretty sure those talking heads make up exactly 0% of soylentnews readers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 24 2021, @10:34AM
Firstly, equivocation and straw man: you are selecting one specific meaning of "seen" that wasn't the one intended, and then arguing against your own choice.
Secondly, equivocation again and ignorance of Special Relativity. There is no universal "now" with a universally agreed upon "8 minutes later", you are either presuming there is, or are chosing to give the words a different meaning from what was intended, and then arguing against that. The present tense is almost always used to refer to astronomical things that we observe, even though the things we observe are in out past. If it arrives here at the speed of light, when it finally arrives it's referred to as the present here. Everyone knows light has a finite speed, there's no cleverness in adding that distraction.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Funny) by EJ on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:27PM (3 children)
I have to admit that NASA has much better special effects this time around than what they tried on us for the "Moon landing" videos.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @03:59PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:07PM
NASA has finally realized their long-term vision [smbc-comics.com] when it comes to fake celestial body landings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @10:42PM
it was clearly the sahara. All they had to do was hand out a few fruit rollups to some goat herders to keep the site secret.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @04:29PM (2 children)
https://xkcd.com/2428/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 23 2021, @05:42PM (1 child)
Love the way worst and first rhyme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:01PM
Oh then you'll love this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPGepgWupTw [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:26PM (2 children)
> what sounded like a wind gust
If I wanted to hear an alien wind gust, I'd visit a diner near the Southern border.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:15PM
Maybe you could buy a joke there?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:08PM
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:34PM (2 children)
In the comments of the Ars article, someone says
(emphasis added)
A puzzle for who?
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:45PM (1 child)
Ask not for whom the chute puzzles, it puzzles for thee!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:48PM
Not a puzzle for the Martians that NASA is secretly hiding due to immigration issues?
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by notrandom on Tuesday February 23 2021, @06:53PM (10 children)
Here. Apollo 15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqlbb4grREM&feature=emb_title [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EvilSS on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:10PM (9 children)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @07:29PM (8 children)
It took Pluto's spot since it wasn't using it anymore.
...
Too soon?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @09:12PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday February 23 2021, @10:15PM (6 children)
How can it not be a planet when they call it a dwarf PLANET?!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:22PM (3 children)
Assholes who wanted to make a name for themselves made up a bogus definition that included, among other things, that a planet had to clear all other objects in it’s Brit. Problem is NO planet has done so. They also said that planets had to have near-circular orbits (eccentric orbits mean the planet can never clear its orbit), which means that according to them, exoplanets around binaries are not planets, planets not orbiting a star are not planets, binary planet pairs are not planets …
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @04:32AM (1 child)
Exoplanets were already not planets (regardless whether they orbited or binary, non-binary, or apache attack helicopter stars), simply because they do not orbit Sol.
(Score: 2) by Eratosthenes on Wednesday February 24 2021, @06:31AM
But they are, because they do "wander", or are ἀστήρ πλανήτης, even if around a different star. What is so difficult to grasp about this, for you?
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday February 24 2021, @01:15PM
The REAL definition of a planet is whether it can kill you [mentalfloss.com] - see item #15.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:26PM (1 child)
Oh no too late the retarts have arrived.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @07:43PM
Are those the women converted to christianity who realize religious dick is impotent and went back to their saucy ways?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday February 23 2021, @10:19PM (1 child)
"So congress, we've not only managed to remotely run a Mars rover for 15 years, we've landed on Mars again, captured footage of the landing, and brought it back. Over a 130 million mile gap."
"So? What's the big deal?"
"We're just saying, if you want to budget funds so you're pretty much guaranteed success under the most extreme conditions -- not like having to bail out banks that planned their investments poorly [thebalance.com] -- maybe send some NASA's way. I mean ... video of landing on Mars, right here."
"Can you guarantee that we can land people there?"
"Um ... sure! [youtu.be]"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 23 2021, @11:26PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24 2021, @05:13AM
Curiosity returned somewhat similar images, but the frame rate was slower.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DutchUncle on Wednesday February 24 2021, @08:25PM
Pointed out in 1969 and many times since: There had been plenty of science fiction written about landing on the Moon or other planets, but the assumption was always that people would be on their own, certainly with photos, but only maybe with radio. Then some clever engineers rigged a video camera to drop out of the side of the Lunar Lander. Live images from the Moon, even lightspeed delayed, were more than than most people had dared expect, especially with 1969 technology. Today every one of us is at a computer that would outperform a 1969 mainframe, most have another computer in their pocket that would do as well, and folks record their skateboard tricks in 4K video, so we expect more.