Gut feeling... Options

[climber]

I've been trying to figure this out for myself. I decided that Phoenix has a better chance than Lewis Hamilton has of not winning the Monaco Grand Prix.
Doug

Both would be happy to get the Pole position

[climber]

I will be in the Operations Center in Tucson. You will recognize me in the corner of the televised images as the guy not jumping up an down when we get signal from the surface.

What about wearing a Polar Cap?

[nprev]

Both would be happy to get the Pole position

Okay, Climber gets the "Phoenix Pre-Landing Worst Pun Award"...

[tedstryk]

Mars 6 and 7 had microchip flaws.

Actually, transistor flaws. Because of its effect on Mars 6, it hadn't been able to receive ground commands for six months when it entered the atmosphere, so it is amazing it came as close to succeeding as it did. It left Mars-7 unable to correct its trajectory, so it missed. Incidentally, Mars-7 did some interesting particle and fields stuff while in the asteroid belt, as well as studies of Jupiter's decametric radiation. Since Mars-6 couldn't be commanded, its bus was useless after the flyby.

[climber]

Okay, Climber gets the "Phoenix Pre-Landing Worst Pun Award"...

I was so frustated not to win SpacEurope's
(actualy I didn't send any entry since I'm far from mastering Photoshop or whatever)

[Alex Chapman]

From what I know, Beagle 2 had a lot of problems economically speaking as well as problems in management.
But how they managed to cram so many instruments int a 78kg cylinder is beyond me
That achievement merits a hats off. We can thank ESA for that

It may have packed a lot of instruments in its 78kg but it might as well have been carrying 78kg of bricks. If they had sacrificed a few of the instruments for more EDL margin and EDL communication we would have got something out of it and what a boost it would have been to UK space science.

[Juramike]

What about wearing a Polar Cap?

Okay, Climber gets the "Phoenix Pre-Landing Worst Pun Award"...

He gets both Gold and Silver medals.

[imipak]

If they had sacrificed a few of the instruments for more EDL margin...

ker-BOOM! Splosh!!! Whoo-hoo, I got another one. More ammo, please, I'm going for the carp next. 8)

Happily, Phoenix is probably going to be the single most monitored arrival at Mars ever. I doubt the fate of Beagle had a huge impact on this planning, but it's had some value... it's all good, isn't it?

> Phoenix is: 29 hours, 52:44 from EDL interface (spacecraft event time)

[Nice Guy]

I would like to point out that we try to learn from our failures.
When we lost a mission due to parts failures we improved our parts
screening procedures. Navigation failures have lead to more precise
nav techniques. Even the silly mistake that caused the MCO failure
("What d'ya mean there were no units in the file?!?") has lead to
increased rigor in interface definitions.

That being said, I have every confidence that if we do have a problem
on Sunday evening, it will be something new and completely unexpected.
The devils you know can be held at bay. It is the devil you don't know
is the one that will bite you.

The greatest threat to safe landing IMHO is uneven terrain. We are
designed to accommodate a 16-degree slope. But we are still coming in
without any obstacle avoidance. That risk is mitigated by careful site
selection. The boulder distribution analysis puts the probability of
an un-safe lander tilt on landing somewhere around 1%.

Here is an interesting factoid. MCO lead to basically one lesson
learned; Keep your units straight (sounds like we re-learned a
high-school physics lesson, but let's not go there...). But MPL, by
virtue of not revealing true root cause, has yielded more than a
dozen lessons. And chief among them is; Leave the radio on all the way
down (plasma black-out not withstanding). I find it strange that lack
of root cause would make MPL a far better teaching tool.

[edstrick]

There is one point of concern regarding hearing the signal during EDL.

There's only one transmitter and frequency.

MER rovers transmitted S-band "tones" during descent, flagging milestones achieved during EDL.

The actual datastream was received by Odyssey (I presume not Mars Surveryor Orbiter) and recorded, the only near-real time info there was the total amount of megabytes recorded (way more than in a case of loss of signal at landing)

Phoenix only has the UHF signal. Everybody, including Green Bank on Earth, are listening to that. If (arbitrary example) some wire in the transmitter breaks at parachute deploy, they won't have any idea what happened till a perfectly OK lander turns on the alternate UHF (I do presume thay have one.. have not read the press kit yet).

[Stu]

If (arbitrary example) some wire in the transmitter breaks at parachute deploy, they won't have any idea what happened till a perfectly OK lander turns on the alternate UHF (I do presume thay have one.. have not read the press kit yet).

Funnily enough I was just catching up with yesterday's media briefing, and this very subject came up. It is conceivable that we might not know if Phoenix has landed safely or not for up to 5 DAYS if there's a comms problem during EDL. Jeez, we'll all be climbing the walls by then... it'll be The Wait For Beagle all over again...

[Shaka]

I've got a gut feeling I ate too many peanuts.
I'm switching to smokehouse almonds.

[marsbug]

I'm still on my first bag, good luck and godspeed phoenix, congratulations to all who have worked so hard to bring her this far!

[ElkGroveDan]

Let's take it over to the EDL discussion

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5157