"Yes, Lord Vader. I've reached the main power generator. The shield will be down in moments. You may start your landing."

What the hell is a "Planetary Protection Officer?"

Can anyone remember a Presidential administration that has had this many failures while it was in office? Honestly.

I was commenting on the idea of spinning the satellite for stability during reentry, not on the plan to catch it out of the air with a helicopter.

Befuddles

My impression was that you had disagreed with the mid-air recovery, which hasn't been done in 30 years. My bad.

I'm not sure how the spin stabilization played into this mission. It may have been a byproduct of the ejection process from the main spacecraft to make sure it hit the air at the right orientation or to keep it's trajectory more stable. I would've assumed that the center of gravity would be offset to prefer one orientation over another. That tumbling was apparent almost as soon as the camera caught it, I think above 400,000 feet.

A lot of satellites and probes are spin stabilized after being ejected from their main boosters, including the Mars rovers during cruise from Earth. I'm not sure how many enter the atmosphere that way though. I'd have to check on other American probes, but I'm pretty sure the Beagle lander was spinning when it was ejected from Mars Express. Of course, Beagle wiped out too. And, unlike the rovers, it didn't have a status beacon blaring the whole way down.

Perhaps they should have made it a $270 million craft instead of only $260 million. Then perhaps they could have spent some money on figuring out how to GET THE FRICKING THING ON THE GROUND. Jeebus. A bit of shortsightedness there?

"Yep, we spent a quarter billion dollars to get this thing working and up there, boss. It should work great."
"How's it getting down?"
"Awww, CRAP."

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HA

That is funny.
Now how will they ever figure out how the solar system evolved from sun beams.

I'm sure these hacks will come up with some new fairytale for how it all happened.

Ekthesy: perfect, just the thing I thought when I read the article.

To: All the people on Fark hating on NASA

"You are the ball lickers" and "You f*ck your mothers while you watch"


From: NASA

Can anyone remember a Presidential administration that has had this many failures while it was in office? Honestly.

Please explain to me exactly how George Bush could have.......ah never mind, yer right. Once Kerry gets elected King, we can look forward to all future space exploration courtesy of our new overlords, the French.

I hope Major Tom survived.

Wait a sec. Who else died on the launch pad beside the Apollo 1 crew?

They died during the plugs out test. They weren't even on the pad.

there was a time when NASA employed not just young punk fresh outta college engineers. They used to develop their own stuff in-house and build it in-house. They had fabricators and techs, as well as "seasoned" engrs. to oversee the projects. Now they piece-meal all the projects out to the lowest bidders. I'll wager they had no less than 5 different contract companies on this spacecraft alone. JFK is spinning right now seeing what a joke our space program has become.

EVERY SINGLE PIECE of the Mars Rovers were made in-house. I think there's a NOVA documentary of the Rovers you can watch on the PBS website.

ah yes...reminds of MST3000:

"Mike broke the hubble....mike broke the hubble!"

hmmm....I guess nobody else in North America saw Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

pontechango "Very interesting. So was that the big national security debacle that Al Gore was responsible for? Allowing the Iridium payloads to go up?"

It wasn't that the administration at the time allowed the launch of the Iridium constellation, but that they cut deals with foreign governments for launch contracts in order to open the market there for the phone service. I'm sure that Iridium was mentioned in more than passing conversation during the many visits that Al Gore had with Chinese "businessmen" at Bhuddist temples, or Clinton had over coffee in the white house. Motorola and Boeing had major stakes in not only the satellites and boosters, but in the actual business of selling Iridium service. Why they though that your common Chinese citizen would be rich enough to use the phones is beyond me, but the numbers based on population alone have to be tempting. Gore and Clinton didn't actually hand the Chinese the technolgy, but they didn't do anything to prevent the exchange.

One other note is that NONE of the payloads (satellites) that China launched functioned once in space, and the general concensus among the aerospace community is that as soon as the satellites arrived in China they were "cracked" open and researched for reverse-engineering. We had no control of the security of the payloads once delivered to them.

I think this calls for an image of John Carpenters: The Thing.

Joshua
Thank you for making my point for me. The rovers worked great!

doccm9
nice fifth element ref.

Yes I'm American and yes it's my tax dollars that could have gone to something worthwhile like helping people or aiding the infrastructure of my country. It's still farking funny. If you can't laugh at stuff go to CNN.com's messageboard or some shiat.

I'm laughing because my country can "underfund" our space program and still go six-wheeling on Mars and zipping through the rings of Saturn while other resource rich nations blow money on palaces, hijack food aid to use as weapons against political opponents, then cry that America is wasting money on useless projects that don't benefit people right this minute.

OK, listen up, all you idiots who are blathering on about how they should have used airbags, whine, whine, blah blah:

Think back to when you watched the Mars probes landing on the Mars surface. Those had AIRBAGS which worked just fine, allowing the probes to set up a landing pad and then roll off into the Martian landscape. Which was pretty darn cool.
Now, think reeeeeal hard about watching that on TV. Remember when the AIRBAGS deployed, and the Mars probes BOUNCED across the Martian surface for a while, the first bounce carrying it quite a ways as it slowly settled onto the surface? Hmmm? Figure it out yet?

OK, so if you haven't made the correlation in your minds yet, folks, here it is laid out for you - AIRBAGS would not have worked for this, as EARTH has way too much gravity to make an airbag landing feasible. The probe wouldn't have bounced gently along the surface and settled in. It would have splatted much the same as it did here, crushing the airbags and giving us the same end result, due to GRAVITY.
Try THINKING about something before you shoot your mouths off. There is a reason they didn't go with airbags and if you have half a brain that conclusion would have come to you immediately.

Toasted_Ghost

By your answer I assume you cannot name one. Thanks.

Climbing up on Salisbury Hill
I could see the city lights
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night

He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing, stretching every nerve
I had to listen had no choice

I did not believe the information
Just had to trust imagination
My heart going boom boom boom
Son, he said, grab your things Ive come to take you home

/ex-Genesis

I love my GD Tempurpedic !

boylston

Did they not have parachutes attached before the little cord thingies were cut to drop the airbagged rovers to the surface?

Uh oh....

xlsport

I had always wondered about that incident. Thanks for explaining it so succinctly.

Great headline.

eggrolls

Nice!! Wasn't there a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode where radio contact was made with aliens, then their saucer accidently gets stepped on after landing because it was really, really tiny?

boylston
OK, so if you haven't made the correlation in your minds yet, folks, here it is laid out for you - AIRBAGS would not have worked for this, as EARTH has way too much gravity to make an airbag landing feasible. The probe wouldn't have bounced gently along the surface and settled in. It would have splatted much the same as it did here, crushing the airbags and giving us the same end result, due to GRAVITY.
Try THINKING about something before you shoot your mouths off. There is a reason they didn't go with airbags and if you have half a brain that conclusion would have come to you immediately.

You are funny. Those rovers would have splattered onto the surface of Mars if it weren't for the parachute. So you either need reverse thrust or parachutes to make a safe landing.

Maybe you boylston should use your brain and get your facts straight before you start the name calling - idiot.

Video of cRash. Be gentle, Farkers.

I.E. someone mirror this.

http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-global/genesis/genesis.mov

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Those rovers would have splattered onto the surface of Mars if it weren't for the parachute. So you either need reverse thrust or parachutes to make a safe landing.

WayneKerr

Actually, the rovers used rockets, parachutes and airbags - much more complicated than Genesis. If any of the three had failed, the rovers would've gone splat. The rovers did have a few things to take the guesswork out:

- A descent imager and radar altimeter to figure out when to fire the rockets

- Enough onboard computing power to make a decision about rocket firing and cutting from the drop pod in real time

- A radio status beacon that changed tones after each critical step in descent

The last item is what Beagle should've had above everything else. The Brits still have no clue why it wiped out because they had no contact with it after it was cut loose from the mothership. They could make the same mistakes again and never know it.

Well, at least not until an American rover stars in an episode of CSI: Mars.

The rovers also benefitted from redundancy. If the first wiped out, there'd be enough time to maybe keep the second from doing the same.

"Can anyone remember a Presidential administration that has had this many failures while it was in office? Honestly."

Genesis was launched in 2001, meaning it was conceived, designed and built years before that (Read: way pre-Bush admin.) Please STFU and stop trying to make every thread some indicment of Bush. Blame Isaac Newton if you must blame someone because gravity is the culprit that did this piece of shiat in.

BTW, though "Illegal Alien" is quite catchy, they were never the same after Peter Gabriel left anyway. Mike and the Mechanics rule.

Prussian-

"The last item is what Beagle should've had above everything else. The Brits still have no clue why it wiped out..."

As a Land Rover owner I can tell you why the Beagle didnt work: It was designed and built in the UK.

CNN reporting that George Bush packed the chute!


flame on

too bad I can't figure out the /i though.

I blame:

A) Bush
B) Cheney
C) Rumsfeld
D) All of the above

Why hasn't the Kerry campaign responded to this snafu? Paging Carville and Begalia!

/Bush did it

Philistine, a NASA Planetary Protection Officer is a dude who's supposed to ensure that none of the stuff that the space probes bring back from their journeys include any voodoo, hoodoo, or doodoo that's bad for our planet.

/this message brought to you encoded in double-secret-probation grade techspeak

they should have rushed John Edwards fat ass wife out to Utah so that her ample loins could cushion the landing. Kerry or Edwards hair and basically any part of Michael (could he be any) Moore (fat and digusting?)'s anatomy would also have done the trick.

Ok NASA, say it with me...

Arch
Look
Reach
PULL!

WayneKerr, I am well aware of the fact that the Rovers utilized parachutes. However, using the airbags for the Rovers was only feasible because of the smaller amount of gravity on Mars, which allowed for the Rovers to bounce along to a safe landing. This would not have worked on Earth - only the snag would have, which I didn't clarify in my last post.
I am just sick of all of the idiot Farkers who are like:

"Why didn't they use the airbags LOL??? Pwn3d!! LOL! They were to dumb - asshats! LOL! Haha, give me the $$ I'll do it better, ROTFLMAO!"

The gravity on earth made airbags unfeasible, along with the fragility of the items on board.
Too many people are thinking they knew a better way to do it even though they don't because they aren't rocket scientists who work for NASA or L-M.
I'm not either, but I'm not claiming to know a better way to do it - I'm only commenting on what wouldn't have worked, such as the airbags.
And I believe Prussian_Roulette already owns you, so I'll leave it at that.

Genesis would not have crashed if:

a). Peter Gabriel/Steve Hackett wouldn't have left the group

b). Phil Collins wouldn't have gotten a wild hair up his ass to take the group to a awlful pop sound after "Follow you, follow me" finally charted in the US.

C). If Phil Collins wouldn't have kept going solo then back to the group. However, Mike Rutherford did it...but with style!

D). If the album "Calling All stations" would have never been made and Ray wilson would go back to looking like a pretty-boy and trying to sound like peter gabriel.

BTW, Nice headline!

And BTW, Wayne, if you can't read the sarcasm in my last sentence there, sorry - I meant to put a smiley there. Prussian didn't "own" you, I was just being sarcastic. He pointed out quite a good bit of science there and is to be commended for it.
The only reason I was so mean in my Boobies is after reading some 300+ posts of crap, I get a little irritated when people talk like idiots. There are a lot of 12 year olds and trolls on these boards. Didn't mean to offend.

lemme see how many times i can skip this thing..
/mst3k: the movie

HAHA! I typed "previous post" and it says Boobies in my post! Oops!
Where it says Boobies it should say pre... post.
/doesn't know HTML well...

All of this is sounding to much like a once familiar cord --

Vanguard