Genesis Fireball

[schmosef]

Originally posted by SitFlyer
ROTFLMAO

Yep

[Jon P. Inghram]

JPL's got videos up now, it was tumbling very badly. Over on Slashdot someone had an interesting idea: if they used a single axis acceleratometer to trigger the various sequences during reentry the tumbling might have caused it to read incorrectly.

Here's a direct link to a good quality 6 meg QT video: http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net...is/genesis.mov

[agallag]

Damn, wherever that speedera.net server is, it's got one hell of a pipe. I just downloaded all 6MB in about 3 seconds. The only glimpse I got of the transfer speed said 3.88MB/sec.

Or else our caching proxy already had a copy of it, but that would be boring.

[cjolley]

Holy aerodynamically unstable Batman!

Either something was hanging out that shouldn't have been, or someone forgot to wind tunnel test that thing.

chuck

[KRSESQ]

Well, it definitely wasn't designed to travel vertically through the atmosphere at over 100 mph!

Kevin

[Jon P. Inghram]

Coulda been worse I guess...

[Ajax]

Happened about 30 miles from where I work... Got to see the real deal.

[KvHagedorn]

It would be nice to be able to describe anything that NASA does nowadays in any other words than "pathetic."

[Jon P. Inghram]

Yep, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Global Surveyor, 2001 Mars Odyssey, Mars Pathfinder, Magellan, Galileo, Deep Space 1, NEAR Shoemaker, and plenty more recent missions (not counting Cassini-Huygens as it hasn't hit it's mission success requirements yet) have all been "pathetic."

[KvHagedorn]

I was thinking of Columbia and the two Mars landers that mysteriously disappeared, but I suppose the more you do, the more things go wrong.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Mars Climate Orbiter was the infamous metric/English goof-up incident.

With Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2 they don't really know for certain what happened since by design (to save cost and weight) it didn't transmit any telemetry during entry.

After that disaster they made sure the MER's trasmitted extremely simple telemery during EDL so if something went wrong they'd have at least some data.

The shuttle... yeah, it's pretty hard to defend NASA when they had such a "nothing can possibly go wrong" attitude that when something unusal happened they just ignored it.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Coulda been worse I guess...

LOL From the Andromada Strain movie? BTW I thought I heard something about a remake of this coming out

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Mars Climate Orbiter was the infamous metric/English goof-up incident.

Multiculturalism at work again?

My name is confusion, saith the devil..

[VJ]

Originally posted by cjolley
Holy aerodynamically unstable Batman!

You are closer than you think: the stuntteam hired to catch Genesis was working on Batman 5 (and are now returning to it)...


Jörg

[KvHagedorn]

NASA's on drugs.. Catching the parachute with a hook from a plane? Now tell me THAT wasn't a batty idea.