NASA Orbiter Arrives At Mars After Year

[Webster]

Washington Post: NASA Orbiter Arrives At Mars After Year

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is back at Mars.

The Maven spacecraft arrived on the Red Planet late Sunday after a 442 million-mile journey that began nearly a year ago.

NASA confirmed that the robotic explorer slipped into Martian orbit as planned.

Now the real work begins for the $671 million mission.

Flight controllers will spend the next six weeks adjusting Maven’s altitude and checking its science instruments. Then Maven will start probing the Martian upper atmosphere. It will conduct its observations from orbit; it’s not meant to land.

Scientists think the Martian atmosphere holds clues as to how Earth’s neighbor went from being warm and wet billions of years ago to cold and dry. That early moist world may have harbored microbial life, a tantalizing question yet to be answered.

 

[Webster]

interesting. Ive always wondered about the red planet

Let's hope it doesn't fall victim to the Curse of Mars now that Maven's arrived there...

 

[Webster]

interesting. Ive always wondered about the red planet

Let's hope it doesn't fall victim to the Curse of Mars now that Maven's arrived there...

well this is first time ive heard of mars curse..

Its' something that worries scientists every time a spacecraft is sent to Mars; for some reason, ever since the first spacecraft went there in the 60's, in about half of the missions, something seems to happen and causes a mission failure. Some of the more notorious examples:
-1999: NASA's Mars Global Orbiter crashes into Mars after arrival; post-failure investigation shows measurement errors made prior to launch and encoded into spacecraft computer systems
-1993: NASA's Mars Observer 2 suffers an engineering failure which caused one of its' propellant engines to fire uncontrollably after arrival

All told, of the 40+ missions sent to Mars by the U.S., Russia, Europe and Japan, the combined success rate has been 16 out of 43. Not good odds, mind you, but it means that when a mission succeeds (cases in point, the three NASA rovers currently roaming Mars atm) it gets even more news than when one fails.

 

[Webster]

Im thinking its like the bermuda triangle mystery. Eh?

Not so much...I chalk it up to just how difficult it is to send a spacecraft from one world to another; its' one thing to go from the earth to the moon...its' quite another to go from one world out towards another.