InSight Surface Operations, 26 Nov 2018- 21 Dec 2022 |
InSight Surface Operations, 26 Nov 2018- 21 Dec 2022 |
Nov 26 2018, 08:20 PM
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#1
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8784 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Congratulations to the InSight team on a successful landing! We'll discuss the remainder of the mission here.
-------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Dec 1 2018, 08:15 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2520 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
The dust on the ICC lens makes me wonder how dusty the Phoenix MARDI would have been had we ever managed to get a post-landing image out of it. Unfortunately there was a sequence glitch in the one attempt that was made, and PHX died before we could try again.
-------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Dec 1 2018, 08:25 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Moment of well-meaning pedantry here: Weight and mass have been mentioned several times and there's that factor of 2.64 difference between Earth and Mars, as well as the distinction between weight (in, eg, Newtons) and mass (kg). For any given object, its mass, weight on Earth, and weight on Mars are three different numbers. I'm not sure that anyone has made any mistakes in the posts above, but there's a lot of potential confusion here.
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Dec 1 2018, 09:30 PM
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#4
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2520 Joined: 13-September 05 Member No.: 497 |
I'm not sure that anyone has made any mistakes in the posts above, but there's a lot of potential confusion here. If you say that something weighs X kilograms, you really mean that it has a mass of X kilograms. I've never heard anyone in aerospace try to use some other verb than weigh in this context. Using "mass" as a verb ala Heinlein has never caught on. Units of force are a different matter and in my experience that's where the confusion comes in. -------------------- Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Dec 3 2018, 03:03 AM
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#5
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
If you say that something weighs X kilograms, you really mean that it has a mass of X kilograms. I've never heard anyone in aerospace try to use some other verb than weigh in this context. Using "mass" as a verb ala Heinlein has never caught on. That's how I've interpreted it when hardware is discussed. The sentence that caught my eye was "InSight's robotic arm also has a bucket with a capacity of roughly 500 g of soil." Since soil isn't hardware, it seemed ambiguous to me whether that indicated soil that would weigh 500 g on Earth or whether the arm can lift 500 g of soil, which on Mars will be more like 1250 g (if it were weighed on Earth). [It's moreover ambiguous whether weight or volume is the actual bottleneck.] I guess to be consistent, the mass is what one should use for samples, too. |
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