Perseverance Mars mission thread

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Perseverance rover landing was one of the best events in my life this year, even though I'm just a total amateur in astronomy and bear no relation to its creation. I was sooo excited :headspinning:when I found out that Percy made its first drive on Mars; you should have seen it. I can't wait till Percy finds traces of life on Mars. Btw, guys, do you believe that rover will find something or not?
 
They have recorded Perseverance’s sounds while driving.

probably previous rovers made the same sounds, we just never heard them before. Maybe we were better off NOT hearing them!

sounds like needs a tune up or a front end alignment or both!

jump ahead to 20 seconds.

 
NASA has announced that it plans to have Ingenuity do its' initial test flights the first week of April, tentatively.
Looking forward to that with anticipation.
 
Looks like a sunny day at the beach there.

While I understand that cameras can easily be tuned to look nice and bright under a huge range of light levels, and that if I were there it would look a lot dimmer to my eyes, probably, I'm always struck by how human the place looks.

Desolate, for sure, but so easy to relate to.
 
Our high school rocketry team was fortunate enough to get a tour at Aerojet-Rocketdyne in 2015 or 2016. I remember seeing a wire shelving rack with a bunch of nozzles on with a taped-on paper label: "Mars 2020" It's pretty cool to be in spitting distance (figuratively!) of something headed for another planet.
 
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it‘s probably just me, but there is something vaguely voyeuristic about this picture of Percy......

I personally prefer to drop my debris shield in private.
30 years from now the dust accumulated in the various pans and heatshields all over the Martian surface will make for a very interesting bit of science.
 
I sorta hate that we are trashing up another planet, but have no better ideas for what to do about it.
Hey, if an original Saturn V rocket kit goes on EBay for $450, just think how much this stuff is gonna sell for when we finally colonize Mars? And if humans never get there but some intelligence either develops there or visits there, these will be valuable artifacts.

I mean, look here

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Set-Of-3-C...4bccbba59cd3a2c546da|ampid:PL_CLK|clp:2334524
3 pieces of fossilized dinosaur poop for under $90 with shipping!

and if nobody ever gets to Mars, both practically and existentially what difference does it make? In 4.5 billion years (in the absence of divine intervention) the inner planets are going to be toast (or in the case of Mercury, Toastier!) anyway

https://www.space.com/solar-system-fate-when-sun-dies
 
Read yesterday that a site has been selected for the "helipad".
It will take a few days for Percy to travel there and drop off Ingenuity. (Injee?)
A few more days for the copter to unfold and configure itself and go through the necessary checks.
Waiting, waiting.
 
Dare Mighty Things
https://www.theguardian.com/science...en-message-found-on-nasa-mars-rover-parachute
"Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars last week. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code.

Reddit users and social media posters on Twitter noticed that the red-and-white pattern on the parachute looked deliberate, and arrived at the result by using the red to represent the figure one, and the white to represent zero.

Each of the concentric rings in the parachute’s pattern represents one of the words. The zeroes and ones need to be split up into chunks of 10 characters, and from that, adding 64 gives you the computer ASCII code representing a letter. For example, seven white stripes, a red stripe and then two more white stripes represents 0000000100, the binary for four. Adding 64 to that gives 68, the ASCII code for the letter D."

I'm wondering if they made it more complicated than it actually needs to be to make themselves looks good.

Binary for four goes to D because D is the fourth letter of the alphabet. Looking at the parachute, the binary corresponds that way to all the other letters too.
 
Hey, if an original Saturn V rocket kit goes on EBay for $450, just think how much this stuff is gonna sell for when we finally colonize Mars? And if humans never get there but some intelligence either develops there or visits there, these will be valuable artifacts.

I mean, look here

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Set-Of-3-C...4bccbba59cd3a2c546da|ampid:PL_CLK|clp:2334524
3 pieces of fossilized dinosaur poop for under $90 with shipping!

and if nobody ever gets to Mars, both practically and existentially what difference does it make? In 4.5 billion years (in the absence of divine intervention) the inner planets are going to be toast (or in the case of Mercury, Toastier!) anyway

https://www.space.com/solar-system-fate-when-sun-dies
Good points. I don't think there are any Martians around curating the surface of the planet and our wastes are pretty few and far in between, for now. I'm just OCD. Pisses me off when drivers flick their cigarette butts out the window.

Has anyone ever studied how long our lander artifacts will last on the surface? Not talking about "functional" but let's say we visit the area where Pathfinder/sojourner are. Landed in 1997 so almost 25 years old. They may have some dust on them but that's about it. Given the thin atmosphere, complete lack of precipitation, mild quakes at worst, no active volcanism.... and the fact that dust blows on but doesn't dune in the area: could we come back in 100 years and see essentially what we see today? 1000 years, certainly UV and plastics breakdown will be a thing but the metal parts will probably only have eroded a little bit from dust abrasion. 100k years? 1M?
 
I'm wondering if they made it more complicated than it actually needs to be to make themselves looks good.

Binary for four goes to D because D is the fourth letter of the alphabet. Looking at the parachute, the binary corresponds that way to all the other letters too.
Yeah, the explanation got lost in the sauce talking about ASCII. As you said, it's just straight alpha numeric substitution.
 
Brewster Rockit Comic Strip for March 21, 2021
 
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