[Space] NASA - Mars Science Laboratory

[GioFX]

Thread ufficiale della missione spaziale scientifica


NASA Mars Exploration Program

California Institute of Technology - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Mars Science Laboratory




LANCIO
26 Novembre 2011
ore 10:02 AM EST - 11:45 AM EST (16:02 - 17:45 CET)


Dati Missione

Agenzia

NASA

Programma

NASA Science Directorate - Mars Exploration Program

Missione

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)

Tipo missione

Esplorazione scientifica robotica - Rover automatizzato con laboratorio per analisi geologiche e chimiche integrato.
Propulsione: Generatore Termoelettrico a Radioisotopi (RTG)

Progetto e operazioni missione

California Institute of Technology - Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech/JPL)

Progettazione e costruzione

Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS)
Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company

Lanciatore

Atlas V 541 (AV-028) - United Launch Alliance (ULA)

Costo missione

2,3 miliardi di dollari

Profilo ingresso-discesa-atterraggio (EDL)

Lancio: 26 Novembre 2011 - ore 10:02 AM EST - 11:45 AM EST (16:02 - 17:45 CET)

Arrivo: 15 Agosto 2012

Destinazione: Cratere di Gale, Elysium Planitia - Marte. Coordinate: 4°36'0'' S, 137°12'0'' E (previsto)

Dati Rover Curiosity

Peso: 900 kg

Propulsione: 1x Boeing MMRTG (Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator) Pu-238, fornito dal Dipartimento dell'Energia americano.

Principali strumenti di bordo:

• MastCam - Camera multispettro true-color 1600x1200 pixels, 10FPS e video 720p
• Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI)
• MSL Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)
• ChemCam - Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)
• Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS) - Spettrometro di massa a raggi X con irradiazione di particelle alfa.
• Sample analysis at Mars (SAM) - Suite di strumenti che comprendono QMS (spettrometro di massa quadripolare), GC (cromatografo a gas), TLS (spettrometro laser a intensità variabile)

Link utili

Programma e missione: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

Video arrivo e missione: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o

MSL Launch Press Kit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/MSLLaunch.pdf (pdf)

MSL Fact Sheet http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sh...laboratory.pdf (pdf)

[GioFX]

Ora che è arrivato il tanto atteso momento del lancio è il caso di aprire uno thread ufficiale per questa nuova importante missione scientifica su marte, la prima ad utilizzare un nuovo sistema di atterraggio e con il più avanzato laboratorio mobile di analisi geologica e chimica mai installato su un rover.

SFN.com:

Mobile science laboratory heading for Mars on Saturday
BY WILLIAM HARWOOD
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION
Posted: November 24, 2011



KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL--NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory rover, the most complex and scientifically powerful robotic spacecraft ever built to explore the surface of another world, is poised for launch Saturday on a high-stakes mission to look for organic compounds and signs of past or present habitability.

If all goes well, the nuclear-powered rover will reach the red planet next August, slamming into the thin martian atmosphere at some 13,200 mph for a nail-biting descent to the floor of 100-mile-wide crater dominated by a towering 3-mile-high central peak stacked with rocky layers of martian history.

The final stages of the entry, descent and landing sequence will be especially tense as the rover, dubbed Curiosity in a student naming contest, is gently lowered to the surface on cables suspended from a rocket-powered "sky crane" making its debut flight.

Too large to use airbags like those that cushioned NASA's Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Curiosity will rely instead on landing rockets positioned above the rover, avoiding the challenge of coming up with a reliable way to get a one-ton vehicle off of an elevated, possibly tilted lander. Instead, Curiosity will be set down on its six 20-inch-wide wheels, ready to roll.

If it works.

An end-to-end flight test was not possible in Earth's gravity, forcing engineers to rely instead on exhaustive component testing, thousands of computer simulations and repeated in-house and independent reviews. Even so, engineers jokingly refer to the computer-controlled entry, descent and landing phase as "six minutes of terror."

"We have done a tremendous amount of entry, descent and landing reviews and tests," Peter Theisinger, the MSL project manager, told reporters earlier this month. "You can't do an end-to-end test because you can't land on Mars on the Earth. But you can do the tests in a piece-wise sense.

"So we have done deployments of the sky crane with test equipment and we have done surface contact testing. We have done radar testing on helicopters and F-18 jets ... to basically test all the components of the sky crane system. So we're confident we've done our due diligence."

Even so, Adam Steltzner, a senior EDL engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was only half joking in an earlier interview when he said "if you think about the number of lines of code, the number of circuit elements, number of mechanical fixtures and devices, it actually is completely terrifying."

Getting to Mars has never been easy. The United States has launched 18 missions to the red planet, chalking up 13 successes and five failures, including back-to-back disasters in 1999. The Russians have fared worse, launching nearly 20 missions with only two partial successes to date.

The Russians' latest effort, a $163 million mission designed to land on the martian moon Phobos and send a soil sample back to Earth for analysis, is stranded in low-Earth orbit because of a propulsion system malfunction shortly after launch Nov. 8.

"Mars really is the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system," said Colleen Hartman, assistant associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate. "It's the 'death planet,' and the United States of America is the only nation in the world that has ever landed and driven robotic explorers on the surface of Mars. And now we're set to do it again."

By using sky crane technology and a new guidance system that allows the rover's flight computer to adjust the entry vehicle's flight path based on actual atmospheric conditions, mission planners were able to select the most scientifically interesting target -- Gale Crater -- from a list of four carefully considered candidates.

Starting on the floor of the vast crater and then slowly ascending the central peak through canyons and ravines visible in orbital photography, "we're basically reading the history of Mars' environmental evolution," said MSL project scientist John Grotzinger.

"We start at the bottom, where ... the clays are, we go up farther, there are the sulfates, and then we go to the top of the mound and we get rocks that we thing were formed ... in the drier, more recent phase of Mars," he said.

Climbing the central peak with its exposed layers will be "analogous to what you would see in the Grand Canyon," Grotzinger said. "So our rover is going to be like John Wesley Powell going down the Grand Canyon on Mars, looking at this thick stack of strata."

The promise of the mission, he said, is proving that Mars has harbored habitable environments at some point in its history, areas where the three necessities of life -- water, energy and carbon compounds -- existed in concert.

The first two are now well established, thanks to earlier Mars missions that showed Mars was once a much warmer, wetter world. But the search for carbon compounds is a much more challenging proposition.

"The promise of Mars Science Laboratory, assuming that all things behave nominally, is we can deliver to you a history of formerly, potentially habitable environments on Mars," Grotzinger said. "But the expectation that we're going to find organic carbon, that's the hope of Mars Science Laboratory. It's a long shot, but we're going to try."

NASA had hoped to launch the MSL mission in 2009, but the flight was delayed two years, at a cost of nearly $500 million, because of a tight schedule and a variety of technical and workmanship issues, including problems with the actuators used in multiple drive mechanisms.

But those issues have been resolved and after a day off for Thanksgiving, NASA and United Launch Alliance plan to haul the rover, packed origami-like into the nose cone of an Atlas 5 rocket, to launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Liftoff is targeted for 10:02 a.m. EST (GMT-5), the opening of a one-hour 43-minute launch window.

Going into the holiday break, there were no technical problems of any significance with the rocket or its costly payload and forecasters were predicting a 70 percent chance of good weather Saturday and Sunday.

"It feels tremendous to have completed all this work and to have the risk situation ... in very good shape," Theisinger said Wednesday. "Not perfect. Obviously, there is major risk to these things, but we're in pretty good shape."

Here is a timeline of major countdown milestones and ascent events (in EST; best viewed with fixed-width font):

T-HH:MM...EST...........COUNTDOWN

T-06:20...03:02:00 AM...Countdown begins
T-04:55...04:27:00 AM...Start clearing vehicle assembly building area
T-04:20...05:02:00 AM...C-band tracking beacon testing
T-03:40...05:42:00 AM...S-band telemetry link checks
T-02:55...06:27:00 AM...Establish blast danger area roadblocks
T-02:20...07:02:00 AM...Weather briefing
T-02:15...07:07:00 AM...Clear the pad

T-02:00...07:22:00 AM...T-minus 2 hour hold (30 min) (Launch-2:40)
T-02:00...07:30:00 AM...NASA TV coverage begins
T-02:00...07:47:00 AM...Launch conductor briefing to team (L-2:15)
T-02:00...07:49:00 AM...Readiness poll for fueling (L-2:13)
T-02:00...07:52:00 AM...Resume countdown

T-01:50...08:02:00 AM...Centaur liquid oxygen transfer line chilldown
T-01:43...08:09:00 AM...Begin Centaur liquid oxygen loading
T-01:30...08:22:00 AM...Begin Atlas first stage liquid oxygen loading
T-01:25...08:27:00 AM...Centaur liquid hydrogen transfer line chilldown
T-01:10...08:42:00 AM...Centaur RL10 engine chilldown
T-01:02...08:50:00 AM...Begin Centaur liquid hydrogen loading
T-00:40...09:12:00 AM...Flight termination system final test
T-00:16...09:36:00 AM...RD-180 engine fuel fill sequence begins
T-00:10...09:42:00 AM...Weather briefing

T-00:04...09:48:00 AM...T-minus 4 minute hold (10 min)
T-00:04...09:49:00 AM...NASA launch manager readiness poll
T-00:04...09:56:00 AM...Spacecraft to internal power
T-00:04...09:58:00 AM...Resume countdown

T+MM:SS.................ASCENT EVENTS

T-00:02.7.10:01:57 AM...RD-180 engine ignition
T+00:00...10:02:00 AM...T-0 (engine ready)
T+00:01...10:02:01 AM...Liftoff
T+00:02...10:02:02 AM...Full thrust
T+00:05...10:02:05 AM...Begin pitch/yaw/roll maneuver
T+00:34...10:02:34 AM...Mach 1
T+00:46...10:02:46 AM...Maximum dynamic pressure
T+00:50...10:02:50 AM...Launch vehicle impact point off shore
T+01:52...10:03:52 AM...Solid rocket booster jettison
T+03:24...10:05:24 AM...Payload fairing jettison
T+03:47...10:05:47 AM...Begin 4.6 g-limiting
T+04:21...10:06:21 AM...Atlas booster engine cutoff (BECO)
T+04:27...10:06:27 AM...Atlas booster/Centaur separation
T+04:37...10:06:37 AM...Centaur first main engine start (MES1)
T+11:29...10:13:29 AM...Centaur first main engine cutoff (MECO1)
T+31:04...10:33:04 AM...Centaur second main engine start (MES2)
T+39:05...10:41:05 AM...Centaur second main engine cutoff (MECO2)
T+42:47...10:44:47 AM...Spacecraft separation
T+43:47...10:45:47 AM...MSL X-band transmitter on/warm up
T+48:47...10:50:47 AM...MSL telemetry transmission begins

[...]

http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av028/preview/

[Phobos84]

Bellissima la fase di separazione del rover...sembra fantascienza.
Speriamo non abbiano problemi dato che pare molto complessa..

[microcip]

anche perchè è una tonnellata di roba, in senso letterale!
Cosa usano per stabilizzare il rover senza il paracadute fino a fargli toccare terra?
edit: razzi ok, ma quali?

[Phobos84]

Originariamente inviato da microcip

anche perchè è una tonnellata di roba, in senso letterale!
Cosa usano per stabilizzare il rover senza il paracadute fino a fargli toccare terra?
edit: razzi ok, ma quali?

Dopo il rallentamento esercitato dal paracadute, la sonda si troverà ad un'altezza di 1,8 km e ad una velocità di 100 m/s. La successiva fase di discesa prevede il distacco del rover e dello stadio di discesa dall'involucro. Lo stadio di discesa è una piattaforma situata sopra al rover che possiede dei razzi a spinta variabile mono-propellente (idrazina). Gli 8 razzi presenti producono circa 3,1 kN di spinta e sono stati progettati a partire da quelli impiegati dalle sonde Viking. Contemporaneamente il rover passerà nella configurazione di atterraggio.

da wikipedia

[GioFX]

Atlas 5 con MSL sul pad di lancio SLC-41:

http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av028/status.html

[gibi87]

Meno di un'ora al lancio!
Qui la diretta --> http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

[GioFX]

1447 GMT (9:47 a.m. EST)
T-minus 5 minutes. Standing by to go into the final built-in hold.

[GioFX]

1448 GMT (9:48 a.m. EST)
T-minus 4 minutes and holding. The countdown has entered the planned 10-minute hold to give the launch team a chance to review all systems before pressing ahead with liftoff.

[GioFX]

1502 GMT (10:02 a.m. EST)
LIFTOFF! Liftoff of Mars Science Laboratory, using Earth's

[GioFX]

1503 GMT (10:03 a.m. EST)
T+plus 1 minute, 57 seconds. All four of the Aerojet-made solid rocket motors have successfully separated from the Atlas 5, having completed their job of adding a powerful kick at liftoff.

[GioFX]

1505 GMT (10:05 a.m. EST)
T+plus 3 minutes, 35 seconds. The two-halves of the Atlas 5 rocket nose cone encapsulating the MSL spacecraft have separated, exposed the satellite to space. Also jettisoned was the Forward Load Reactor, a two-piece deck that rings the Centaur stage to support the bulbous fairing during launch.

[GioFX]

1513 GMT (10:13 a.m. EST)
T+plus 10 minutes, 33 seconds. MECO 1. Centaur's main engine has shut down following its first burn today, achieving a preliminary orbit around Earth. The rocket will coast in this orbit for about 20 minutes before the RL10 engine re-ignites.

[GioFX]

1534 GMT (10:34 a.m. EST)
T+plus 32 minutes, 40 seconds. Ignition! The Centaur's single RL10 engine has re-ignited to propel Mars Science Lab into its hyperbolic departure orbit.

[GioFX]

1546 GMT (10:46 a.m. EST)
T+plus 44 minutes, 12 seconds. SPACECRAFT SEPARATION! The Centaur upper stage has deployed NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft on its voyage to deliver the Curiosity rover onto the surface of the red planet next August.

[GioFX]

MSL sta bene ed è in corsa verso Marte!

1624 GMT (11:24 a.m. EST)
"The launch vehicle has given us a great injection into our trajectory, and we're on our way to Mars," said MSL Project Manager Peter Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The spacecraft is in communication, thermally stable and power positive."

[GioFX]

NasaSpaceFlight.com:

Atlas V launches NASA’s MSL Rover ahead of journey to Mars

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/...sl-rover-mars/

[Phobos84]

che palle dover aspettare tutti questi mesi

[+Benito+]

Incrociamo sessantaquattrodita perchè in questi anni di recessione stasi questa è la più importante missione spaziale, in qualche senso ce n'è bisogno, se no al jpl potevano anche chiudere baracca.

[Aviatore_Gilles]

In bocca al lupo alla missione
I precedenti rover erano andati oltre le più rosee aspettative.