Posted on 05/04/2018 9:24:34 PM PDT by hapnHal
NASA is headed back to Mars! The InSight spacecraft is scheduled to rocket away from Vandenberg Air Force Base early Saturday morning.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of an Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASAs InSight lander heading to Mars to study the red planets interior structure.
Saturdays launch is just the first step in InSights voyage to Mars. Launching a probe to another planet is not routine, but most scientists will have more butterflies when InSight approaches its destination late this year. Asked whether he will be more nervous during InSights launch or landing, the mission's principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt replied: EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing), without a doubt Launching a spacecraft, its not that its trivial because theyre super-careful, and theyve got all these different bases covered, but they really know what theyre doing. Its a lot more deterministic.
The Atlas has an amazing success record of getting things into the correct orbit, the trajectory that its planned for. Im reasonably confident.
EDL is a whole different ballgame. Its such an incredible engineering challenge to land this tiny little spacecraft on another planet, which we know pretty well, but is still a pretty mysterious planet.
Why they going back there? I guess they could pickup the flag our Astronauts put there and bring it back to Shiela Jackson Lee. Still seems like a waste of money.
> Still seems like a waste of money. <
I agree with you. Debtor nations should restrict their spending to necessities only. I guess that makes us lacking in vision, or something like that.
But I don’t care. If you don’t have the money in the first place, don’t spend it.
Launching on the 57th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight.
InSight will provide an interior snapshot of Mars to learn more about how rocky planets are formed. A heat probe will dig under the surface to look at the temperature of the interior. A seismometer will measure marsquakes and meteorite hits. In addition, a radio science instrument will transmit InSight's position to Earth as the planet wobbles in its orbit around the sun. The wobble provides information about the composition and size of the Martian core.
Or, to put it succinctly....
Hope all the Nuts and Bolts are tight on this one.
The InSight Mars lander is scheduled to launch on Saturday (May 5) at no earlier than 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT/1105 GMT). Here’s how you can watch it in person, or online at Space.com or other locations. You can watch the launch live on Space.com beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 GMT).
Still seems like a waste of money.
I think Governor Moonbeam’s 77 billion dollar “Bullet Train” is a real waste of money. barf,barf !!
Hooray! Cause 20 trillion dollars down the drain isn’t enough!
Isn’t it rare to launch interplanetary stuff from Vandy and not the Cape?
>> I guess that makes us lacking in vision, or something like that.
Words of a pensioner.
> Words of a pensioner. <
I’m not quite sure what you mean there, Gene. Unless you mean that a wise pensioner will carefully watch his money, and not go into ruinous debt. If that’s the case, then I’ll certainly accept the label of “pensioner”.
LOL, yes.
why is the West coast being used,
instead of the Cape?
surely, an escape trajectory does not
need a polar orbit.
is the Atlas booster
specific to Vandenberg?
"For InSight, the Atlas V 401 offers enough performance to enable launching a Mars mission southward from Vandenberg, mitigating a more-crowded launch schedule in Florida."
Good sighting from San Diego up to first stage cutoff.
Still seems like a waste of money.
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Yeah. Knowledge is vastly over rated ... we need to concentrate our greatly diminished and extremely limited financial resources on the homeless disadvantaged racially discriminated and the LGBTXX communities for real impact to improve the economy and lead the world in fighting climate change and social justice while implementing a universal income and free schooling and including navel gazing lessons for every one who asks regardless of national origin or method of entry into this broke and broken country !!
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