FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
2004
2004-01 - 0026.PDF
SPACEFLIGHT A view to the north from Spirit's panoramic camera shows a dust-coated airbag in the foreground. Below, an enhanced top-down view of the lander LANDING GRAHAM WARWICK / WASHINGTON DC & TIM FURNISS / LONDON NASA rejoices but Beagle 2 sulks Space agency picks targets in search for past water activity on Mars, with second rover due to land on 24 January While NASA basks in the successful landing of its first Mars expedition rover, Spirit, the European Space Agency's efforts to establish contact with the missing Beagle 2 lander have met with failure. ESA's first attempt to contact Beagle 2 from the orbiting Mars Express on 7 January failed. Further attempts were planned for subsequent passes over the landing site, but certainty is growing that the lander is lost. NASA, meanwhile, met a hitch in the otherwise smooth start-up of the Spirit when it was determined that two sections of the airbags that cushioned its 3 January touchdown partially blocked the ramp the rover was to use to leave its lander. This delayed plans to roll the six-wheeled rover off the lander by three days, to 14 January at the earliest. Engineers planned to lift a lan der petal then further retract the now-deflated airbags under the platform. If this "lift and tuck" operation, planned for 8 January, was unsuccessful, the robotic rover will have to pirouette round on the lander platform to use one of the other two ramps. An intermittent current spike in one of two motors driving the rover's high-gain antenna has been resolved. While Spirit remained on its lan der, NASA began using its high-res olution panoramic camera (Pancam) and miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-TES) to pick likely targets for its search for signs of past water activity on Mars. Colour stereo images from the mast-mounted Pancam have a resolution three times that of pic tures returned by the Mars Pathfinder rover in 1997. The first images have both excited and puzzled mission spe cialists. Spirit's landing site in the Gusev Crater was selected because Spirit (artist's impression, inset) is transmitting high resolution images scientists believe it could once have contained a lake, but instead of the relatively smooth and wind-blown dry lakebed they expected, the view is surprisingly un dulating and rock- strewn. Lakebed deposits may still be present, but more diffi cult to find, says NASA. The sec ond of the twin Mars ex pedition rovers in the $820 million mission, Opportunity, is due to land on 24 January. It is tar geted at Meridiani Planum, on the opposite side of Mars, a region con taining exposed deposits of hematite, a material that usually forms under watery conditions. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) orbiter is profiling the atmosphere over the landing zone in the wake of a dust storm in the region. The twin rovers are designed to trek up to 100m across the planet's surface each Martian day. The sun will only provide enough solar power for driving during a 4h win dow around noon, NASA says. The 185kg rover will navigate from target to target using the mast-mounted Pancam, a stereo pair of navigation cameras, inertial measurement unit and two sets of stereo hazard identification cam eras. The six wheels, with individual motors and suspension systems, will let the rover make a 360° turn in place and tilt up to 45° in any direction without overturning. Close-up inspections of surface sam ples will be performed using a robot arm carrying a microscopic imager, mag nets for collect ing dust particles, two spectrometers and a rock abrasion tool capable of creating a 45mm (1.8in)- diameter, 5mm-deep hole in a rock to provide samples. Each rover is expected to complete 90 days of operations before power levels fall as dust accumulates on the solar panels, the batteries lose capacity and the sun moves north. ESA hoped to establish commu nications with the Beagle 2 during Mars Express orbits on 8, 9, 10, 12 and 14 January. Other attempts will be made by radio telescope on 2 February, when the 34kg lander is to switch to a back-up communica tions mode. ESA cites three possibil ities for Beagle's silence: a software glitch; a receiver or transmitter problem; or the probe was destroyed on landing on 25 December. 24 13-19 JANUARY 2004 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL www.fliqhtinternational.com
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
