Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Since Curiosity is soon to make its necessarily complicated landing on the surface of Mars, I thought I’d share the lecture notes I made when I went with three of my work colleagues to the Royal Aeronautical Society (not to be confused with the Royal Astronomical Society) in London a couple of weeks ago. The lecture was given by Matt Wallace, Lead Systems Engineer for Curiosity at NASA-JPL. It was therefore tech-focused rather than science-focused. I imagine this is mostly information that can be found in various places on the interwebs, but it was fun hearing it put together from the engineering perspective. I enjoyed the lecture immensely.

He began briefly reminding us that rover-based exploration of Mars is pretty modern. 1997 saw the landing of Sojourner, which lasted for 90 days and carried about 5 lbs of science instrumentation. 2003 saw the landings of Spirit and Opportunity, which carried about 11 lbs. Curiosity is a big step forward, carrying 185 lbs of science instrumentation and weighing about a ton. Opportunity saw sedimentary rock near its landing crater, which indicated that surface water must have been on Mars. It’s hoped that Curiosity will be able to measure whether or not another key ingredient for the evolution of life as we know it, carbon, is present in sufficient quantities to have potentially existed on Mars.

Curiosity will land on the surface of Mars on 6 August 2012. It lies flat in its 4.5 metre diameter entry capsule, which looks a bit like it might contain an oversized Pokemon. Or a Mini Cooper. (A photo of the entry capsule sitting over a Mini Cooper may have been shown.) The landing process looks straightforward at first. The cruise stage releases the capsule, spinning at 2 rev/minute. The entry capsule, doing 17000 miles per hour during descent, deploys its parachute after firing thrusters to correct its trajectory. It splits in half and lets the bottom shell drift away as it slows to 200 miles per hour. Then the top half of the shell detaches to allow the descent stage and rover to slow to 2 miles per hour.

Now comes the weird bit. The descent stage - the SkyCrane - lowers the rover on a bridle (which is controlled by the rover) and ever so gently releases it onto the surface of Mars. It then expends its remaining fuel and flies off and crashes 150 to 200 metres away from the rover. [The animation linked below makes it look like it lands miles away, for some reason!] The SkyCrane is the really unique piece of kit involved in Curiosity. Such a large, heavy rover needed a very controlled delivery mechanism. The Doppler accuracy on the descent stage has to be accurate to within a few metres when it and the rover are still 11 km above the planet’s surface.

Mr Wallace showed several interesting touchdown testing clips on both rough and smooth terrain, as well as the deployment testing in a wind tunnel of the disk-gap band parachute. The parachute is the biggest of these NASA has built - capable of withstanding 6000 lbs of impulse. It was also field-tested with an F-18. Curiosity has 17 cameras. Some are for practical purposes, like hazard avoidance, and others for science.

Curiosity will not be all that much faster than Spirit and Opportunity. It will travel up to 6 cm/s (less than 0.1 mph), meaning it can go about 100 metres a day. However, it has one major advantage over them because it’s nuclear rather than solar powered. It uses radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). This is unusual for a non-outer-planetary mission, but it was deemed necessary to achieve the science objectives of the rover. It means it can be operational whenever it likes, instead of being restricted by its battery capacity and view of the Sun.

Thermal testing was pretty extreme. The 25-foot test chamber was raised to daytime temperatures (+20 degrees Celsius), then pumped out and flooded with liquid nitrogen to simulate night conditions (-130 degrees Celsius). Curiosity will be subjected to this thermal cycle on a daily basis, so the electronics needed to be very robust.

The landing site is at the base of Mount Sharp, near what looks like alluvial flow. The site combines a crater with a mountain in the middle of it, where the crater had filled in with sedimentary material that subsequently eroded away. All this makes it quite a rich science target. Curiosity will spend its two-year prime mission traversing up the lower slopes. The landing ellipse (19 km by 7 km) is much reduced from what Spirit and Opportunity had, since it’s quite a hazardous location.

Landing will be completely autonomous, as the landing phase takes 7 minutes, while communication time from Earth to Mars is about 13 minutes. That will be fun for the mission engineers after waiting through Curiosity’s eight-month journey.

Here’s hoping all goes well on 6 August!



JPL’s animation of descent and landing (first 4 minutes), and rover operations. Curiosity pootles along the edge of the crater, checks out several different rocks until it finds one that’s interesting enough to “taste” and then samples it. YouTube video, 11:20, no narration.

I'm sure my obsession with vintage-izing everything will pass at some point. Just not while it's helping me to stick to this project.

After miss_s_b posted hers, I had a look through the last five years' of entries made on or as near as possible to 15 May. I found it made for a fairly typical cross-section of my favourite journalling topics.

On 12 May 2007, I stood in the library of the Royal Geological Society after several glasses of wine and, er, shouted a random sweary thing. (This was a very confusing time in my life in many ways.)

On 15 May 2008, I recorded spectrograms of my voice while looking for a simple way for my first-year physics project students to record signals from their VLF receiver.

On 15 May 2009, I went to a whisky tasting at the Whisky Exchange with imyril and her boy. I went home clutching a bottle of 18 year old Hakushu.

On 16 May 2010, I was in Noordwijk, Holland, attending a science conference about the nascent NASA/ESA mission to Jupiter.

On 15 May 2011, I wrapped up my participation in the 3W4DW (Three Weeks for Dreamwidth) festival, which didn't really take off this year outside fandom, sadly. Especially since it was the way I met a lot of my non-fandom Circle.

I had one of those "Wow, I did that!" moments today.

My manager sent round a link to a beta version of a tool on the NASA-JPL web site called Eyes on the Solar System which, among other things, lets you visualize the movement of a spacecraft as it orbits a planet. Of course, I had to have a look at a Cassini manoeuvre. I picked one of the first calibration rolls that I ever designed, which took place on 4 December 2008.

Watching it made me go a bit teary-eyed. I helped make that happen, on a spacecraft orbiting a planet over a billion kilometres away. Wow.

Watch it here. The roll period starts at about 4 AM.

One of my work colleagues, whom I'll call Lab Mate 1 (LM1) decided to insert a probability puzzle into our lunchtime conversation earlier this week.

LM1: "Hey, have you guys heard of the Monty Hall problem?"

We shook our heads. LM1 then explained the Monty Hall problem to us, which runs like this (excerpt blatantly stolen from Wikipedia):

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Me: "Wait, what if you want to keep the goat? Can you do that?"
LM2: "Yes, what is market value for a goat? Cars depreciate really quickly. I bet goats don't."
LM3: "And what if you already have a car, but you happen to have an overgrown lawn? Then you'd want a goat."

LM1 looked at us in despair. "I don't feel you all are entering into the spirit of this game."

Remember the Year 6 students I ran an outreach workshop with a couple of weeks ago?

Last week, I posted the lithographs of Saturn images taken by Cassini to the class, care of IntoUniversity Haringey. Yesterday, I found a big envelope sitting on my chair at work. This is what it contained.



[Image of my big orange thank-you card, with lovingly hand-coloured rocket]

I love that I'm inside the rocket. I love that the rocket is rainbow-coloured. I love that they designed their own logo. In fact, there's nothing that I don't love about this card.

( Inside & back cover )

It tickles me that the stars are stars of David. Also that the second rocket looks like the product of an unholy alliance between a traffic signal and a billiard rack.

I got a bit emotional when I opened it, I must admit. I do hope this experience will help them to retain a positive impression of science and engineering in the face of the impending and inevitable adverse influences.