Author Topic: Mars 2020 rover receives upgraded eyesight for tricky skycrane landing  (Read 11468 times)

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Offline redliox

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The upgrades with the cameras and wheels somewhat expected, but nonetheless good they wanted to improve upon Curiosity (especially the wheels).  The 2 items I'm the most curious on (3 if you count MOXIE I suppose) are the helicopter drone and landing site selection, I want to hear more on them although I expect the landing sites will be mentioned another day.
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Offline Dalhousie

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The upgrades with the cameras and wheels somewhat expected, but nonetheless good they wanted to improve upon Curiosity (especially the wheels).  The 2 items I'm the most curious on (3 if you count MOXIE I suppose) are the helicopter drone and landing site selection, I want to hear more on them although I expect the landing sites will be mentioned another day.

The 3rd workshop is in February.  I expect they will narrow the candidates down to 2-4 sites. The final selection will probably be made on the 4th workshop.

http://marsnext.jpl.nasa.gov/workshops/wkshp_2017_02.cfm
Apologies in advance for any lack of civility - it's unintended

Online FutureSpaceTourist

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Just a spacecraft under construction, bound for Mars, that I get to see in person now and then.

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Offline plutogno

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NASA's Mars 2020 Mission Performs First Supersonic Parachute Test
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-294

Offline Blackstar

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NASA's Mars 2020 Mission Performs First Supersonic Parachute Test
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-294

There is a really interesting story about this. Curiosity's parachute was tested. Curiosity's parachute worked successfully on Mars. Then NASA did some other big parachute tests near Hawaii, and both failed. Those were NOT Curiosity parachutes. However, the same computer model predicted that the Curiosity chute would be successful and those other two chutes would be successful. Now NASA had a dilemma: did they simply get LUCKY with Curiosity's chute? If they put that same chute on Mars 2020, could it drop a $2.4 billion rover onto Mars hard? So they had to do more tests.


Offline plutogno

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in fact, I don't remember JPL test flying Curiosity's parachute. they only did wind tunnel tests, IIRC

Offline catdlr

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in fact, I don't remember JPL test flying Curiosity's parachute. they only did wind tunnel tests, IIRC

correct: 

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Offline Blackstar

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in fact, I don't remember JPL test flying Curiosity's parachute. they only did wind tunnel tests, IIRC

Yes. But they also had computer simulations. I heard an interesting explanation about this months ago and it was actually both interesting and sorta chilling, because they thought that they had a good computer design tool, and now it seemed unreliable.

I suspect that this test of the parachute was not only to test the parachute design, but also to help validate the computer model. So the data is going to multiple applications and the end result could be a change to the software they use. I remember a decade or so ago hearing some aerodynamics expert say that modeling parachute behavior is really difficult and there's no good substitute for testing.

Online FutureSpaceTourist

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Current status of the Mars2020 sky crane assembly at @NASAJPL

https://twitter.com/kevinmgill/status/936108868341346305

Offline Star One

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Is there some reason we now have two threads for the 2020 rover updates, why was this thread even started when there was an existing thread for updates?
« Last Edit: 12/01/2017 04:44 pm by Star One »

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