[DesautocaD]

I enjoy a bit of Space as much as the next bloke or blokette, but keeping track of it all can be tricky so I thought having it all in the one thread might make that easier for everyone.
(There currently being about four threads on the Mars lander right now ...... why?)

First question - When are we going to start seeing the hi-res full-colour photos from Curiosity?

[Jourgenz]

Tell 'im he's dreamin.

[draigenia]

First question - When are we going to start seeing the hi-res full-colour photos from Curiosity?

How long did it take last time? Do they need to perform fancy processing on it first?

Tell 'im he's dreamin.

Whilst I commend him for the idea, I have to agree with you...

[Johnny]

How long did it take last time? Do they need to perform fancy processing on it first?

I'm not sure. I think I remember reading somewhere it'd be close to a week before we get the good photos but I thought someone here would know better.

[AlexanderDrew]

[Nglvayhp]

Do they have a 3D camera onboard?

[MadMark]

It seems like they dropped into a very large, flat-ish area.
Very safe, but it also means quite a drive to get to any big rocks. Luckily it's got a lot of power.

[Rurcextedutty]

It seems like they dropped into a very large, flat-ish area.
Very safe, but it also means quite a drive to get to any big rocks. Luckily it's got a lot of power.

The MSL was dropped purposely into "Gale crater"...

[orgagsUpsepsy]

The MSL was dropped purposely into "Gale crater"...

It was also an area probably had an Ocean/sea in eons past according to data received from one of the orbiter crafts.

[MarlboroCig]

Russian rocket fails to reach target orbit (Update 2)
August 7, 2012 by VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV



(AP) — Russia's space pride suffered another blow Tuesday when a booster rocket failed to place two communications satellites into target orbits, a mishap that came a day after NASA successfully landed a robotic vehicle on Mars.





Russia's Roscosmos space agency said the Proton-M rocket was launched just before midnight Monday from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The booster's first stages worked fine, but the upper stage intended to give the final push to the satellites switched off prematurely.

The agency said that the engine's malfunction stranded the Russian Express MD-2 and Indonesia's Telkom-3 satellites in a low orbit where they can't be recovered.

"The satellites can be considered lost," Roscosmos spokeswoman Anna Vedishcheva said on Rossiya television.

The failure comes a day after NASA managed to land a roving laboratory the size of a compact car on Mars after an eight-month, 352-million-mile (566-million-kilometer) journey.

A Russian robotic probe designed to study a moon of Mars got stranded in Earth orbit after its launch in November and eventually came crashing down in January.

A few months before, a Soyuz booster rocket similar to those ferrying crews and cargo to the International Space Station failed, prompting officials to consider leaving the space outpost unmanned. Russian space officials eventually tracked down the reason, saying it was caused by "accidental" manufacturing flaws and the Soyuz launches resumed.


Those mishaps followed other failures. Russia lost three navigation satellites in December 2010, then a military satellite in February 2011 and a telecommunications satellite in August of that year.


Officials blamed the botched launches on the post-Soviet industrial meltdown that stymied modernization of a once-proud space program, which put the first satellite in orbit and sent the first human into space. Despite a steady increase of funding thanks to oil revenues, Russia's space industries continue to rely on obsolete equipment and an aging workforce, and production standards have degraded.


"It's very difficult to get out of the pit the Russian space industries have fallen into," said Igor Marinin, the editor of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki monthly magazine that covers space industry news.


Russia's space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin has ordered the establishment of quality inspection teams at plants that produce rocket parts. The inspectors have the authority to halt production if they see that a plant is struggling to maintain quality standards.


Marinin said that Popovkin's move was a step in the right direction. "It has already yielded some immediate results, making the Bulava (intercontinental ballistic) missile capable of flying. But it appears that it hasn't been properly organized at every plant and is not working everywhere yet."


Popovkin's predecessor, Anatoly Perminov, who lost his job after previous launch failures, also said that the latest failure had likely been rooted in a manufacturing flaw.


Marinin said that despite Tuesday's failure, the Proton rocket, capable of launching massive satellites into high orbits, will remain popular among global customers. The rocket manufactured by the Moscow-based Khrunichev company has been the main cash-cow for the space industry since its darkest days in the 1990s.



"Proton is a very good and solid design," Marinin said.

NASA has also experienced an array of launch failures, including those of two high-profile climate research satellites. The Glory satellite, which was to collect long-term climate data, crashed in 2011 after the rocket's nose cone failed to separate. In 2009, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide, crashed off Antarctica after payload fairing failed to separate from the rocket.

The European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket, used for launches from the cosmodrome in French Guiana, has not experienced a launch failure since 2003.






http://phys.org/news/2012-08-russian-rocket-orbit.html
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>



Ahh well, back to the drawing boards for the Ruskies, and of course the best of luck with any further ventures.

[Muesrasrs]

Why Mars again? A look at NASA's latest venture
August 6, 2012




NASA's new robot rover named Curiosity landed safely late Sunday in a huge crater near the equator of Mars and will soon begin its scientific studies. This marks NASA's seventh landing on the red planet and is its 19th Mars mission, including those by orbiters and other spacecraft.




WHY MARS AGAIN?


The big unknown remains. Scientists want to know if any form of life ever existed there, and that means microscopic organisms. Curiosity is the most ambitious effort ever to burrow into that question, though it is not equipped to look for actual microbes. During its two-year exploration, it will try to answer whether the giant crater had the right conditions to support that type of life.



WHAT WILL CURIOSITY DO?


Curiosity carries a toolbox of 10 instruments, including a rock-zapping laser and a mobile organic chemistry lab. It also has a long robotic arm that can jackhammer into rocks and soil. It will hunt for the basic ingredients of life, including carbon-based compounds, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and oxygen, as well as minerals that might provide clues about possible energy sources.



HOW MUCH DID THIS COST?


$2.5 billion. Development took longer than planned, delaying the mission for two years and costing $1 billion more than the original budget. But that extra time is credited in part with the safe landing of the one-ton rover which required new technologies and highly complicated maneuvers.



WHEN WILL WE SEND ASTRONAUTS TO MARS?


President Barack Obama has set a goal for astronauts to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s followed by a landing. Before that can happen, the plan is to send astronauts to an asteroid first.








http://phys.org/news/2012-08-mars-na...t-venture.html

[Creva4k]

Why Mars again?
Answered in the last question of course.
Because one day man will set foot on the red planet, and we need to know all there is to know.

From memory another lander is to go there again at the end of 2013/2014, this being a soil/rock return mission.

[BILBONDER]

Russian rocket fails to reach target orbit (Update 2)
August 7, 2012 by VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV




(AP) — Russia's space pride suffered another blow Tuesday when a booster rocket failed to place two communications satellites into target orbits, a mishap that came a day after NASA successfully landed a robotic vehicle on Mars.



Russia's Roscosmos space agency said the Proton-M rocket was launched just before midnight Monday from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The booster's first stages worked fine, but the upper stage intended to give the final push to the satellites switched off prematurely.

The agency said that the engine's malfunction stranded the Russian Express MD-2 and Indonesia's Telkom-3 satellites in a low orbit where they can't be recovered.


"The satellites can be considered lost," Roscosmos spokeswoman Anna Vedishcheva said on Rossiya television.


The failure comes a day after NASA managed to land a roving laboratory the size of a compact car on Mars after an eight-month, 352-million-mile (566-million-kilometer) journey.


A Russian robotic probe designed to study a moon of Mars got stranded in Earth orbit after its launch in November and eventually came crashing down in January.


A few months before, a Soyuz booster rocket similar to those ferrying crews and cargo to the International Space Station failed, prompting officials to consider leaving the space outpost unmanned. Russian space officials eventually tracked down the reason, saying it was caused by "accidental" manufacturing flaws and the Soyuz launches resumed.



Those mishaps followed other failures. Russia lost three navigation satellites in December 2010, then a military satellite in February 2011 and a telecommunications satellite in August of that year.



Officials blamed the botched launches on the post-Soviet industrial meltdown that stymied modernization of a once-proud space program, which put the first satellite in orbit and sent the first human into space. Despite a steady increase of funding thanks to oil revenues, Russia's space industries continue to rely on obsolete equipment and an aging workforce, and production standards have degraded.


"It's very difficult to get out of the pit the Russian space industries have fallen into," said Igor Marinin, the editor of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki monthly magazine that covers space industry news.



Russia's space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin has ordered the establishment of quality inspection teams at plants that produce rocket parts. The inspectors have the authority to halt production if they see that a plant is struggling to maintain quality standards.


Marinin said that Popovkin's move was a step in the right direction. "It has already yielded some immediate results, making the Bulava (intercontinental ballistic) missile capable of flying. But it appears that it hasn't been properly organized at every plant and is not working everywhere yet


." Popovkin's predecessor, Anatoly Perminov, who lost his job after previous launch failures, also said that the latest failure had likely been rooted in a manufacturing flaw.


Marinin said that despite Tuesday's failure, the Proton rocket, capable of launching massive satellites into high orbits, will remain popular among global customers. The rocket manufactured by the Moscow-based Khrunichev company has been the main cash-cow for the space industry since its darkest days in the 1990s.


"Proton is a very good and solid design," Marinin said.

NASA has also experienced an array of launch failures, including those of two high-profile climate research satellites. The Glory satellite, which was to collect long-term climate data, crashed in 2011 after the rocket's nose cone failed to separate. In 2009, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide, crashed off Antarctica after payload fairing failed to separate from the rocket.


The European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket, used for launches from the cosmodrome in French Guiana, has not experienced a launch failure since 2003.






http://phys.org/news/2012-08-russian-rocket-orbit.html

[usaguedriedax]

The first public data release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
August 8, 2012




The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars, plus new information about objects in previous Sloan surveys (SDSS-I and II).



"This is just the first of three data releases from BOSS," says David Schlegel of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), an astrophysicist in the Lab's Physics Division and BOSS's principal investigator. "By the time BOSS is complete, we will have surveyed more of the sky, out to a distance twice as deep, for a volume more than five times greater than SDSS has surveyed before – a larger volume of the universe than all previous spectroscopic surveys combined."


Spectroscopy yields a wealth of information about astronomical objects including their motion (called redshift and written "z"), their composition, and sometimes also the density of the gas and other material that lies between them and observers on Earth. The BOSS spectra are now freely available at http://sdss3.org to a public that includes amateur astronomers, astronomy professionals who are not members of the SDSS-III collaboration, and high-school science teachers and their students.


The new release lists spectra for galaxies with redshifts up to z = 0.8 (roughly 7 billion light years away) and quasars with redshifts between z = 2.1 and 3.5 (from 10 to 11.5 billion light years away). When BOSS is complete it will have measured 1.5 million galaxies and at least 150,000 quasars, as well as many thousands of stars and other "ancillary" objects for scientific projects other than BOSS's main goal.


The key to the history of the universe:


BOSS is designed to measure baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO), the large-scale clustering of matter in the universe. BAO began as rippling fluctuations ("sound waves") in the hot, dense soup of matter and radiation that made up the early universe. As the universe expanded it cooled. Finally atoms formed and radiation went its own way; the density ripples left their marks as temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), where they can be detected today.





The CMB came into being 380,000 years after the big bang, over 13.6 billion years ago, and continues to stretch across the entire sky as the universe expands. Peaks in CMB temperature variation occur about half a billion light years apart, at the same angle, viewed from Earth, as peaks in the large-scale galactic structure that evolved billions of years later. The regions of higher density in the CMB were in fact the sources of galaxy formation; they correspond to regions where galaxies cluster, along with intergalactic gas and concentrations of much more massive underlying dark matter. The natural "standard ruler" marking peaks in clustering can be applied not only across the sky but in all three dimensions, backward in time to the CMB.


Distant quasars provide another way of measuring BAO and the distribution of matter in the universe. Quasars are the brightest objects in the distant universe, whose spectra bristle with individually shifted absorption lines, a "Lyman-alpha forest" unique to each that reveals the clumping of intergalactic gas and underlying dark matter between the quasar and Earth.



Marks on the cosmic ruler:


Schlegel has called BAO "an inconveniently sized ruler," requiring "a huge volume of the universe just to fit the ruler inside," but it's a precision tool for tracking the universe's expansion history, and for probing the nature of gravity and the mysterious dark energy that's causing expansion to accelerate.



To fill the huge volume, BOSS had to find more and fainter objects in the sky at greater distances than SDSS had attempted before. The camera system and spectrographs of the 2.5-meter Sloan Foundation Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico had to be completely rebuilt.


SDSS uses "plug plates" at the telescope's focal plane, aluminum disks with holes drilled to match the precise position of previously imaged target objects. SDSS-I and II plug plates had only 640 holes apiece, each covering three arcseconds; BOSS is using 2,000 plug plates with 1,000 holes apiece, each covering a tight two arcseconds to reduce light that's not from the target.



Optical fibers are plugged into the holes every day by hand, to guide the light from each target to a spectrograph. While weather conditions vary night to night, observations on the best nights use up to nine plug plates. For BOSS, the spectrographs were rebuilt with new optics and new CCD detectors designed and fabricated at Berkeley Lab.



"Light from distant galaxies arrives at Earth redshifted into the infrared," says Natalie Roe, director of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division and BOSS's instrument scientist, who led construction of the spectrographs. "We optimized the BOSS spectrographs for mapping exactly these galaxies."


Working with Schlegel and Adam Bolton at the University of Utah, Berkeley Lab's Stephen Bailey is in charge of daily "extraction pipeline" operations that convert raw data from the telescope into useful spectra and quantities derived from them, ready for scientific analysis. Data storage and the extraction pipeline run on the Riemann Linux cluster of Berkeley Lab's High-Performance Computing Services Group; the data is copied from Riemann to the University of Utah, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. The Lab also hosts the SDSS-III website, http://sdss3.org, from which the data can be downloaded.


"Data releases are a proud tradition for SDSS, and the first BOSS data greatly increase the SDSS store of information," Bailey says. "Members of the SDSS-III collaboration get first crack at it – with barely enough time to write up their results – but three times as many papers based on the data are published by scientists outside the collaboration."



Says Schlegel, "SDSS-III is already the most used of all surveys from any telescope in the world, including the Keck telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. With DR9, BOSS contributes a huge information increase for all kinds of scientific investigations, from quasars to how stars evolve to really odd objects like galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses. Meanwhile the BOSS BAO survey is over two-thirds finished, and ahead of schedule – we're well on our way to the best measure of BAO that will be made for a long time. All the data BOSS collects will be available to anyone who can use it."


More information: "The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey," by Christopher Ahn et al, has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement and may be found on the arXiv preprint server at arxiv.org/abs/1207.7137.


"The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III," by Kyle Dawson, David Schlegel et al, has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal and may be found on the arXiv preprint server at arxiv.org/abs/1208.0022. "Spectral Classification and Redshift Measurement for the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey," by Adam Bolton et al, has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal and may be found on the arXiv preprint server at arxiv.org/abs/1207.7326


Journal reference:
Astrophysical Journal Supplement Provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory






http://phys.org/news/2012-08-boss-ba...ic-survey.html

[Patgaepx]

A pretty good Mars site.

http://mars.arounder.com

[Leczyslaw]

Bummer.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-1...-burns/4190494

NASA's experimental moon lander crashed and burst into flames seconds after take-off this morning, the US space agency said.

The low-cost Project Morpheus lander prototype, designed to carry cargo to the moon and other space destinations, lifted off the ground successfully but then failed its first autonomous free-flight test at the Kennedy Space Centre.

Fire crews rushed to extinguish the flames of Morpheus, large enough to carry 1,100 pounds of cargo to the moon, such as a humanoid robot, a small rover or a small laboratory to convert moon dust to oxygen.

"A hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight," was to blame, NASA said, noting that its engineers are examining test data to determine what caused the failure.

"Failures such as these were anticipated prior to the test, and are part of the development process for any complex spaceflight hardware," the space agency said in a statement.

"What we learn from these tests will help us build the best possible system in the future."

No-one was injured in the incident.

NASA has so far spent $US7 million on the project, which aims to provide an environmentally friendly vehicle to land on the moon, asteroids and other surfaces in outer space.

It features a new propulsion system with oxygen and methane, both considered green fuels that are better for the environment than the rocket fuels NASA usually uses. They could be manufactured on other planets as well, according to the space agency.

The incident took place just days after NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars with the goal of finding traces of life that may have once existed on the Red Planet.

[cheapphenonline]

NASA's experimental moon lander crashed and burst into flames seconds after take-off this morning, the US space agency said. Made me think of this:

------------------------------------------------------------------

MIKE: You saw the dummy run with did with a sack of potatoes.

NEIL: That wasn't a sack of potatoes, Mike. It was a packet of smash!

MIKE: And everyone knows that's better than real potatoes. That's exactly what I mean.

VYVYAN: And what's the problem, Neil? The dummy run was a complete success!

NEIL: What do you mean? The packet was smashed into 15 million pieces! And every single one of those pieces was smashed into 15 million pieces. And, although at that point I stopped counting, I wouldn't be surprised if...

VYVYAN: Exactly, Neil. And you are a totally different size and weight than a packet of smash, so we should be all right.

------------------------------------------------------------------

I guess you had to be there...

[beth]

It features a new propulsion system with oxygen and methane, both considered green fuels that are better for the environment than the rocket fuels NASA usually uses. They could be manufactured on other planets as well, according to the space agency. oxygen and methane are the fuels suggested by Zubrin that can be manufactured on mars for the return trip. sabatier reaction i think it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

yes.

[strongjannabiz]

You know, my uninformed opinion is that the first manned mission to Mars should be a landing; the time and effort spent getting there should dictate a landing attempt.

Prior unmanned missions can deliver orbital supply stations, as well as ground based cargo.

[jeargefef]

you've been reading zubrin erb.

i agree, pointless to spend at that time getting there and back and not landing. plus i wouldn't do an asteroid landing first either. go straight to mars.