Quicksand Fans

Sadly, it looks like the Schiaparelli Lander didn't make it (insert The Martian snark if you will...) from the sounds of the latest releases, it jettisoned it's chute way too early. This , would what you call , a Bad Thing
And if that wasn't bad enough, the retro rockets fired for too short a time. BBC has some stuff here

The Mars Recce Orbiter likely imaged the crash site here; the chute is the smaller dot near the centre - the lander crater the other at upper right. They suspect the lander actually EXPLODED on impact, since it would have had close to 90% of its fuel remaining....

8 months of babying the thing through space and then splat......exploration can be a bitch.

There's not much data to go on yet, but ditching the chute, then burning the engines for only 10% of the time specified, then free-falling 3-4 km to impact, smells* like software-related. Clearly, it lived through aerobraking and jettisoned the heatshield, but then things really went pear-shaped. It's not a complete disaster, in the sense the Trace Gas Orbiter is safely in orbit. But that's small comfort to the team. They may have better imagery next week when the Recce Orbiter can make a pass with it's High Resolution camera

Unbelievable. All that time, money, and material- SPLAT.

One of my tinfoil-hat-wearing friends insists that there are Russian saboteurs working in NASA, the ESA, and the private space companies. The goal would be to make Russian rockets the only safe, reliable launch vehicles available, thus keeping the current Russian monopoly on manned launches (and building up their share of the satellite launch business.

Yep, ever since the moose and the squirrel retired there is nothing to stop them.

nachtjaeger wrote:Unbelievable. All that time, money, and material- SPLAT.

One of my tinfoil-hat-wearing friends insists that there are Russian saboteurs working in NASA, the ESA, and the private space companies. The goal would be to make Russian rockets the only safe, reliable launch vehicles available, thus keeping the current Russian monopoly on manned launches (and building up their share of the satellite launch business.

Safe and reliable... well, it's all relative. Flying into space is never going to be driving to Macs Milk. But basing EVERYTHING on a rocket based on 60-year old R-7 ICBMs??? Nuh-UH

Remember the Mars Explorer? It smacked into Mars too, because the scientists screwed up the conversion from feet to meters, or was that vice versa?
Anyway, scratch one billion dollar space probe.

The delta-V input was supposed to have been in m/s; they input the numbers as ft/s. Thus were low by a factor in excess of 3. Thus the vehicle went ker fucking boom on the surface. Well done, JPL. That burn needs to be branded on their fucking foreheads

kham wrote:The delta-V input was supposed to have been in m/s; they input the numbers as ft/s. Thus were low by a factor in excess of 3. Thus the vehicle went ker fucking boom on the surface. Well done, JPL. That burn needs to be branded on their fucking foreheads

Shades of the Gimli glider... except getting mixed up with liters and gallons with aviation fuel is not the recipe for flying the friendly skies....

Reminds me of when the Federal Government made all the State transportation agencies let jobs to bid in metric units if they wanted Federal funds. Never mind that it might be a bridge rehabilitation job where the record plans are in US units. The contractors had to convert all the plans into US units before their crews could do the work- no chance for error there.

kham wrote:The delta-V input was supposed to have been in m/s; they input the numbers as ft/s. Thus were low by a factor in excess of 3. Thus the vehicle went ker fucking boom on the surface. Well done, JPL. That burn needs to be branded on their fucking foreheads