MARS & the Curiosity Rover - NASA's latest hoax

[lux]

^ ditto

[Symbionese]

I suppose that for all these "fake" missions they put a lot of brain power in it how they would do it. Maybe the engineers involved actually think they are trying to find a solution for something that's real. So the solutions they come up with will mostly sound good, in theory. But, one of the rules of engineering is that you can never know if an idea is good or not until you've tested it in practice. That's something which is almost completely missing in all those missions - and still they are all succeeding flawlessly. That's not proof they are really faked, but a strong indicator.

This is what I've thought, as well. Whereas I'm now satisfied that NASA is a propaganda mill, I do think that legitimate engineers are employed for the theoreticals - and employable, worthwhile engineers are too savvy anymore and too compartmentalized to be caught celebrating the crescendo of their "hard work" on camera, thus the hammy actors http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?p=2373541#p2373541 Based on my personal dealings with engineers, I'd say that in real lifen real life, these same legit NASA engineers (and not the media or even NASA doubters) would be asking the toughest questions and raising the loudest doubts.

[Flabbergasted]

Ms Savanah McCoy, Career Conwoman in Chief


Hello dear esteemed members of CluesForum,

Here is an update on our lovely career conwoman in chief Ms Savannah McCoy, whom I mentioned in this forum post dated September 23, 2012, available here:

http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f= ... 5#p2375583


Charming Ms Savannah McCoy cheers with her colleagues at JPL's Section 375 Testing Facility at the success of the SkyCrane test.

Pretty maybe, but I wouldn´t say charming. She not only looks like a recent high-school graduate but she sounds like one, reading from a script, monotone, with no sign of personal involvement. Exactly like someone reading a homework assignment in a classroom after rehearsing ten times. And all that blinking while she is looking into the camera/teleprompter? Not much blinking when she is celebrating with the other actors.

Good find, CitronBleu!

(link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YasCQRAWRwU)

[hoi.polloi]

Based on my personal dealings with engineers, I'd say that in real lifen real life, these same legit NASA engineers (and not the media or even NASA doubters) would be asking the toughest questions and raising the loudest doubts.

Your scrambled points in this post appear to be the following:

1. There are "legit NASA engineers".
2. "The media" is compared to "NASA doubters" as if they are more similar to one another than aforementioned "legit NASA engineers".
~and~
3. The "legit NASA engineers" ... "would" be raising the loudest doubts under circumstances you don't explain.

It sounds like you are taking the points we raise on this forum (NASA engineers are not legit, and they are sell-outs and the mainstream media protects their lies) and shuffling them - like a deck of cards - with points that are the antithesis of our research (NASA is legitimate, this forum is comparable to the mainstream media and we should expect NASA engineers to be whistleblowers).

You sound like the old Christophera-Gamalon fuckheads from 911movement, arguing in circles with non-points that can't even be read by the average person. Are you a robot designed to make our forum unreadable? If you don't make yourself more clear immediately, you will be deleted.

[brianv]

Based on my personal dealings with engineers, I'd say that in real lifen real life, these same legit NASA engineers (and not the media or even NASA doubters) would be asking the toughest questions and raising the loudest doubts.

Your scrambled points in this post appear to be the following:

1. There are "legit NASA engineers".
2. "The media" is compared to "NASA doubters" as if they are more similar to one another than aforementioned "legit NASA engineers".
~and~
3. The "legit NASA engineers" ... "would" be raising the loudest doubts under circumstances you don't explain.

It sounds like you are taking the points we raise on this forum (NASA engineers are not legit, and they are sell-outs and the mainstream media protects their lies) and shuffling them - like a deck of cards - with points that are the antithesis of our research (NASA is legitimate, this forum is comparable to the mainstream media and we should expect NASA engineers to be whistleblowers).

You sound like the old Christophera-Gamalon fuckheads from 911movement, arguing in circles with non-points that can't even be read by the average person. Are you a robot designed to make our forum unreadable? If you don't make yourself more clear immediately, you will be deleted.

And the "communist" "terrorist" handle don't sit easy with me!

[CitronBleu]

David Oh, Lead Flight Director, MSL

On the SkyCrane


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIaNfO1lU6s

Host Leo Laporte: “When I first heard how they were going to land Curiosity, I thought “there is no way they can do that!”

[laughs]

LL: "Now you were never able to test it, were you?"

David Oh : "We were never able to completely test the landing system... because the gravity on Earth is three times heavier that the gravity on Mars... so we can't run the landing system we'd always crash everytime on Earth... so we tested it in pieces, we did simulations... erh... we, you know, counted on data taken in the seventies, on parachutes... and did wind tunnel tests, we did everything we could... but we could never test it end to end and we could never be sure it was going to work on landing day... it was definitely not a sure thing."

[...]

LL: “So who is it who came up with the idea that ok, we will ... in fact before our coverage we had an interview with Steve Sell who, of course, was responsible for that SkyCrane... was it Steve's idea to do that? Who came up with that one?"

DO: "I don't actually know the person who came up with it... hmm... I think there's a team of people who worked on it hard...”

... which follows that no empirical testing was carried out to determine if the mission could succeed at all.

[lux]

If there is any tech person at NASA who has an ounce of smarts, they must certainly KNOW this has to be bullshit.

Landing on Mars via a preposterous contraption that has never been tested. Yeah, right.

[CitronBleu]

On Science Fiction and the MSL Sky Crane




Questions, questions...

How could NASA have approved a 2.5 billion dollar project to send a bizarre, never-tested contraption on a mission to a distant planet 150 million miles away?

Who came up with the idea of a powered flying crane to lower an interplanetary rover? And furthermore how was such a fabulous idea considered by NASA at all?

Mission Concept Review

It seems NASA approved the Mars Science Laboratory mission on or about October 2003, if we go by the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) Project Time Overview available in NASA’s June 2011 audit report on the project. (http://oig.nasa.gov/audits/reports/FY11/IG-11-019.pdf)

An interesting note is the absence of any fixed name for the contraption. In technical reports available on the web the prototype is alternately designated under the names Sky Crane, PDV (Powered Descent Vehicle), and DS (Descent Stage).

The flying crane concept is said to be influenced by the aptly named Sikorsky S-64 Sky Crane helicopter. JPL Systems Engineer Steven Sell, one of the engineers who designed the MSL crane, worked at Sikorsky as an engineer from June 1993 to June 1994. (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/steve-sell/4/327/676)

According to Sell, NASA approved the Sky Crane system based on recommendations from

“a panel made of former Apollo astronauts, senior engineers, and a few former pilots who flew the big Sikorsky Sky Cranes. They advised NASA and agreed that using a rocket-propelled sky crane was the only feasible way of safely landing a payload of this size."

http://blog.grabcad.com/2012/08/how-to- ... teve-sell/

On the design of the prototype:

“Testing each component and simulating the conditions on computer provided enough data to perfect the final design.”

http://blog.grabcad.com/2012/08/how-to- ... teve-sell/

So how did the JPL engineers come up with the concept?

Let's listen to Tom Rivellini, Principal Mechanical Engineer for EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing), discussing the JPL team debating on the best way to land the rover:

“ ... so we thought, you know, is there some way to take advantage of the best of both worlds, this nice high propulsion system with a lot of control, this rover that's, you know, ready to drive off and hardly any type of egress needed... and lo and behold, after a lot of throwing stuff on the white board, and yelling at each other... no that's no good! what about this, what about this! That's how our meetings really go... Boom! This thing comes up... Hey, why don't we just use our descent stage, drop the rover down, deploy the mobility while it's in the air, and just put it down right on its wheels. And we looked at the controls guys and said... we can do it. And we said... we probably need a better radar, we might need some better rocket motors, but we can do it. So we were very excited about that.”

http://blip.tv/scvtv/scvtv-com-8-20-200 ... -1-3253827

Here is a page taken from the Mars Science Laboratory Mission Concept Review board, dated October 28-29, 2003, which outlines the options considered and the choice of the Sky Crane as the landing method for the MSL mission:



p. 124



http://web.archive.org/web/200610071330 ... 3-2974.pdf

“Has Nasa gone nuts?"

It is interesting to note the nature of many of the comments and reviews written about the Sky Crane before the landing took place: they are often, if not all, marked by utter incredulity. How could this “thing” work?

However disbelief and skepticism were soon forgotten after the rover landed on Mars. Previous skeptics were now believers. It is as if the Sky Crane had suddenly and swiftly achieved among the public what the lunar Apollo missions were increasingly failing to accomplish: to have us believe in the impossible.

Moreover it is difficult to come across any coherent or relevant information in regard to the feasibility of the Sky Crane as a working system: in effect most, if not all, news articles, interviews, and technical reports detailing the mission seem to focus almost exclusively on discussion of the comparative advantages of the landing method (legged, pallet, airbag) rather than on its technical feasibility. It is as if the never-tested prototype simply could not fail.

Where the magic happens...

So who then actually designed and built the prototype?

The department at JPL which oversees all spacecraft prototype design is designated under the name Team-X.

Team-X, or JPL's Advanced Projects Design Team, is “a cross-functional multidisciplinary team of engineers that utilizes concurrent engineering methodologies to complete rapid design, analysis and evaluation of mission concept designs.” (http://jplteamx.jpl.nasa.gov/)

Perhaps the design team was inspired by JPL engineer Gentry Lee, one of the peer-reviewers for the Sky Crane 2003 board review and a successful writer of science-fiction literature with such titles as The Brama Universe (1996) and The Tranquility Wars (2001).

The following pics are taken from a six-minute video of science-fiction room “Team-X,” where NASA spacecraft prototypes are born, including the design and conception of our very own Mars Sky Crane:






Interviewer: “I assume this is kind of conceptual at this point but you, what, like, strap a rocket to an asteroid, and try to brake it out of its [orbit]... ?” Engineer: Yeah! [team goes into general laughter]”


“I think another aspect of this room is everything is supposed to be fun.”


“It really comes down to coming here and grabbing the toys.”




Playing with my Xbox is fun.


Look at my cool CAD design


And it can even work as a SmartBoard too!
This little gem at 05:22 : “This is not ink on the board. When I am done I can save this to a file.”


Here we have the MSL wheel flexors - they also work well as wall hangers.

Full video:

[icarusinbound]

References to the S-64 Skycrane provide only a superficial analogy for the purported Mars Sky Crane / Rover tandem combo design. In reality, an underslung load being transported by a helicopter represents an almost totally different set of force vectors. Unless a tactical delivery was being attempted, a helicopter would have a very slow or static flight profile before unhitching a load, or perhaps even take some advantage of a slight uphill gradient to act as a ground chock-stop for a netted/palletised delivery. Crucially, the physical seperation between the underside of the delivery vehicle and the top of the load remains the same, right up until the point at which the load has actually landed. The load-cable remains under the same tension during the whole flight, as a consequence of the gravitational weight.

I struggle to see exactly what's claimed to be going on here with the Rover tandem design.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/0 ... 38742.html

By the point in time when the tandem combo supposedly slows from 200 mph (320 km/h),down to just 1% of that speed, the Rover is meant to be dangling below the descent stage. Is the final contact of the wheels to the surface as a result of a drop from an almost-fixed point in mid-air, or, does the drop from the moving point of the descent represent a rope-trapped short fall, and the final crucial contact with the ground is still under the physical control of the Sky Crane hovering above it??

And Team X....what on earth do we take from this pantomime performance? Is this really/truly how an aerospace design team would be working? How effective is the dynamic of a group of 15 people, fighting over a wireless mouse? (my toes curl in horror just as you noted, the guy actually says, "this is not ink on the board. When I am done I can save this to a file.”)

Let's take a temporary leap of credulity for a few moments, and believe that NASA (and key sub-contractors) must put some kind of flash-bang hardware up into the sky sometimes. Something more than a firework, but considerably less than the USS Enterprise. These people just do not look like engineers. They do not sound like engineers. Are we seeing a deliberately dumbed-down Disney tv movie representation, with these wunderkids acting as happy substitutes for a back-office of non-photogenic nerds?

I fully accept that I am an aging dinosaur, but I am at heart still an engineer. To me, complex design problems require structured engagement, modularisation of sub-elements, identification of all parameters, leadership, meaningful tests. Of course there can be modelling and CAD simulations and informality. But scientists and engineers in the real world don't randomly contribute in music theater environments that "Encourage Wild Ideas". This is just so...Apple. I remember Steve Jobs being interviewed years ago (well, he appeared to be, anyway), when he was being asked about dress code in the office. He came back with some retro-profound comment along the lines of

"We're not about blue collar, or white collar...we're open collar. My people come in to work to play. So we do a little basketball in the office, have some sodas, and most of the ideas and solutions we need just flow. And the hard stuff we figure-out at the mall"

.

The projected office utopia exhibited by the NASAs/Apples/Googles of this world just seem so...unrealistic. And that's the problem. They're permitted to be perceptibly improbable. What does that mean ?? I've said this a few times now, and I think I mean it: if I'm going to be force-fed an unreal reality, shouldn't it be produced more realistically?? Last time I checked, I'm not a super-hero, just someone who is a skeptical digital emigree, armed with an ounce of perceptual ability. Lots of people must see the cracks in this scenery- or am I being over-optimistic?

[Fred54]

I have not posted anything in a while on this topic due to being somewhat busy and also a little cautious as to how best proceed with what I had originally planned, also I have spent considerable time reading through the volume of other posts that are contained on the forum in order to get a better feel for the entire forum. This is one point I want to make clear to everyone that reads this and also make it immediately understandable and intuitive to anyone not just those people on this forum that possess an understanding of science and physics that exceeds what I would consider the knowledge of the general public. With that said I tried to make a graph of the martian atmosphere with earth's overlaid on top, it was a miserable failure. No matter how I tried I could not get anything that would work, would be understandable to the general public, and be factual and representative as well. I could make a nice profile of the earth and mars would end up as a line on the x-axis, and using a log scale didn't set well with me either. So here is a solution that everyone no matter what your background entails can easily understand. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of mars is 5 millibars (I had to look up the conversion but it made sense since it is such a fine scale) Take an average clear plastic drinking straw make a mark in the middle and 2 inches (50mm) on either side of it. Insert the straw into a glass of water so the middle mark is even with the water. Now if you suck water up to the top mark that is 5 millibars vacuum relative to earths atmosphere if you blow the air down to the bottom mark that is 5 millibars pressure once again relative to the earths atmosphere. This simple illustration should serve to immediately give everyone an understanding of what the pressure actually is with out any kind of confusion as to units of pressure and also clarify what Heiwa is actually saying when he refers to the "very thin martian atmosphere" (and I always think he is being too generous in his description).
Now one final note pressure is not density BUT they are directly proportional and this should also give everyone a feeling for the martian atmosphere's density as well.

[icarusinbound]

Fred, can you please clarify: whilst you are giving a good clear kitchen physics claification of what a positive and negative pressure difference of 5 millibars (compared to local atmospheric) looks and feels like, is this with a context that the absolute pressure of Martian atmosphere close to the surface is itself just 5 millibars?

Meaning that it is some 200 times less 'dense' than what we have outside, right now?

[Fred54]

Let me rephrase it a little bit when you blow the water down below the surface 2" (50mm) that is the total amount of pressure that is present on the surface of mars. The amount of pressure to force the water down the straw is what is found on the surface of mars. Maybe I should not have included the "relative to earths atmosphere" part. What I was trying to convey is that it is a very tiny amount of pressure to move water 2" (50mm) and it is equal to the atmospheric surface pressure on Mars. And once again pressure is not density but the 2 are directly related so this should also give you a feel for the density of the atmosphere as well. Think of density in this way swing your hand through the air there is virtually no resistance now try and do the same thing through water, there is huge marked difference, and the air density on mars is proportional to the pressure. But I cant come up with a good analogy for atmospheric density on earth or mars because unless you are bicycling into a 30 mph(50kmh) headwind you never even realize the atmosphere is present.

[lux]

But, isn't the Martian atmospheric pressure figure only according to NASA or NASA-approved source?

[Fred54]

Yes but as I told Heiwa I will use their own data to hang them with to the best of my abilities.

[CitronBleu]

MSL Sky Crane designer and Team-X member Marc Rober on the Curiosity landing


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCKogFDM3Zg

Anyone notice a curious flash frame that occurs right after the announcement of the landing? It occurs between 03:16 and 03:17, right before Marc Rober points his finger to the camera. The flash is very brief and the frame is not visible using stop-pause or slow-motion analysis.



Is that just an editing quirk?