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NASA fixes Mars lander by telling it to hit itself with a shovel
- gundmc 7y agoGood to see even NASA makes use of percussive maintenance with their equipment.
- sixstringtheory 7y agoThis is definitely the highest-tech low-tech fix I’ve heard of!
- netsharc 7y agoPercussive? Persuasive? I've also seen it as "kinetic fix".
- jimmySixDOF 7y agoNASA pulls out the old 5 dollar wrench attack
- ASlave2Gravity 7y agoI always loved this video/music-video on percussive maintenance. It shows you how much it's in the culture—and how good a successful whack feels! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=insM7oUYNOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=insM7oUYNOE
- supdatecron 7y agoThat was clever, though I get the feeling someone spent 5+ years of their life watching movies just to clip all the percussive maintenance haha
- ars 7y agoIt's compiled from: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PercussiveMaintenance https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PercussiveMainte...
- spectramax 7y agoJust curious - why didn’t they test the probe in different types of soils here on earth to see if it would get stuck? Or may be the article is twisting the actual reason? The article just says “It got stuck because the soil was clumpier than expected”. That can’t be the reason otherwise NASA would have tested it.
- zaarn 7y agoIt might have been clumpier than all the mars emulation soil that NASA tested the equipment with.
- mjevans 7y agoSetting up an artificial Mars would involve different gravity, air pressure, atmosphere composition, and the weathering patterns of the material are probably difficult to predict. Most of the reason to send a probe somewhere is to learn more about it, so I assume the only knowledge was sparse and possibly inaccurate educated guesses based on other data. That's also probably a good reason to send up a wider tolerance, but less useful design first and follow up with a more targeted design that can do more as a revision on the product. Budgets are probably the reason to not do that.
- zaarn 7y agoThere is commercial soil available that mimics the conditions of martian soil fairly well. Gravity can be emulated by hanging the device from a spring (which you can optionally adjust to always take X newtons of force via a computer controller). Atmosphere and weathering can be simulated in a vacuum chamber. All those things can be put into a vacuum chamber to simulate low pressure. This is how NASA is developing their drone for the upcoming missions that will fly on mars and other celestial bodies.
- londons_explore 7y agoIts hard to properly test things with different gravity
- rjvs 7y agoSurprise, the clickbait headline misrepresents what the original article they were summarising said. They didn't hit it with a shovel, they used the shovel to add pressure: > In late February, the team moved on to what Spohn calls “plan C.” They positioned the scoop above the mole’s tail and pushed it straight down into the dirt.
- sebazzz 7y agoI never understood why they made this not a vehicle. Then they could have just driven to a different spot, right?
- THE_PUN_STOPS 7y agoYes, but by not being a vehicle you can allocate more schedule, weight, and money to the science type stuff on board instead of the locomotion type stuff. Engineering for space is all about brutal trade-offs.
- crooked-v 7y agoTo emphasize this point, the InSight lander is five feet across and 800 pounds. Make all of that mobile, and either you need a substantially larger and more expensive rocket, or you need to dump a bunch of the planned equipment to free up mass.
- pvaldes 7y agoI wonder if NASA machines could include small "3D printers" able to use sand and other local matherials so they could just print small glass objects in situ. That could improve some of the weight problems. You could make an "unlimited" suply of high quality lenses to replace broken ones, replace small pieces or even fix small cracks in space hatches. If you can make a glass table in situ you don't need to pack it. You can just pack a set of legs for a small table and made it extensible to fit a bigger surface later (Metallic spacial furniture should be printed as a mess of spongy filaments in any case to reduce weigth without losing resistence). And another important matherial that will be needed at some time is the optical fiber, of course. I assume that heating sand to 1400 degree would be expensive but possible in a combustion chamber with modified pressure and all rockets have some kind of this. The need to cool the melted glass fast to harden it should not be a problem in Mars. Just put it outside. And there is plenty of sand available.
- pengaru 7y agoCool that they managed to get it digging. The "mole" is actually an interesting bit of engineering, since they wanted to dig to a depth of something like 16 ft IIRC, and obviously needed to keep the weight down. It's a sort of self-hammering nail.
- gmueckl 7y agoAnd it almost turned into a highly engineered dud producing no scientific results for all the effort that went into it. I'm glad that they didn't give up on it easily.
- redis_mlc 7y agoFor you space fanbois ... After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian space program put on a "world tour" of their capsules and landers to raise cash. Museums could pay them to setup a major staffed exhibit. I had a chance to go when it was in SE Asia. I got to: - stick my head inside one of the capsules and see the "gyro globe" - operate their lunar lander via a remote control - learn about their numerous trips to Venus. One of the highlights of my life actually. Also got to see the Red Arrows do a full formation takeoff with 9 planes at high speed around the same time, and went to the Langkawi military air show. After takeoff, they levelled off at 200' and accelerated to about 500 mph. They were a blur against the trees just below them - totally awesome. (In Asia and S. America, jet airshows are still allowed to do low-altitude and supersonic flight over residential areas. Those are banned in Europe and N. America because of numerous previous accidents.)
- _-___________-_ 7y ago> Also got to see the Red Arrows do a full formation takeoff with 9 planes at high speed around the same time I saw Blue Impulse (Japan's military aerobatics team) last year. One of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Probably not too many airshows happening at the moment, but if anyone ever gets a chance to go to one, don't pass it up.
- Shivetya 7y agoThe article at https://www.popsci.com/story/space/mars-mole-plan-c/ https://www.popsci.com/story/space/mars-mole-plan-c/ is far much better and reference by the futurism article
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoThanks. I think Futurism's web design is the worst I've ever seen used by a seemingly serious outlet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- verytrivial 7y agoThey've previously coaxed the probe into the soil a few inches by applying pressure to the side, only to have it auto-reverse out when the internal hammer starts working after the pressure is released. I can't find a reference to the specific dynamic process but it reminded me of how larger stones 'float' to the top during vibration because smaller stones/sand tend to fill the cavities below. To be honest I never had a feel for how this was going to work and just assumed Martian soil has some distinguishing features they'd tested before that would allow it to work. Turns out, not so much ... Let's see what happens when the scoop is retracted. Perhaps if the probe can get entirely below the surface it will descend (at some funky angle now!)
- klyrs 7y ago> I can't find a reference to the specific dynamic process... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection
- verytrivial 7y agoThanks! I wasn't even close with my keywords.
- dirkc 7y ago> In astronomy, it is common in low density, or rubble pile asteroids, for example the asteroid 25143 Itokawa. and 101955 Bennu. Didn't they also expect Bennu to be a sandy desert? Seems like this is new knowledge to astronomy
- martythemaniak 7y agoI feel that people that think robots are the future of space exploration don't follow these missions too closely. Robots are terrible and not getting better very quickly at all. This thing has been trying to dig a small hole for more than a year, something any person can do in about 15 minutes. In 8 years Curiosity has covered the same distance as a long afternoon walk. We're not gonna be able to send people to places like Europa, but any meaningful Mars exploration will need people.
- balfirevic 7y agoThat's not clear at all. Part of the reason why these robots are not very capable are very small mass budget and inability to iterate often, both due to high cost of shipping stuff to Mars. Under those restrictions, humans are not getting to Mars at all. When those restrictions are relaxed enough to contemplate sending humans to Mars, the robots will become much more capable too. Disclaimer: I'd still love to see humans on Mars because it's exciting as hell!
- logicallee 7y ago> Part of the reason why these robots are not very capable are very small mass budget "The InSight lander weighs 794 pounds (360 kilograms)" https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/faq/ https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/faq/
- balfirevic 7y agoExactly?
- khafra 7y agoAre you implying that 794lbs is substantially heavier than a human, plus supplies for over a year, plus the extra delta-v to lift the human and half those supplies back up off Mars?
- DerekL 7y agoFor comparison, the Apollo Lunar Module had a launch mass of 15,200 kg.
- pvaldes 7y agoShovelnites will be pleased. Finally this shy creature introduced himself using the official salute.
- darkerside 7y agoI couldn't help posting this neural knee jerk: https://youtu.be/bifOI4MbHVU https://youtu.be/bifOI4MbHVU
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]