Great news from The Moon and Mars.
[CASUAL FRIDAY]
Articles about science and life to enlighten the weekend.
What do they have in common, the Moon and Mars? The number 240:
240 thousand miles to the Moon
240 million miles to Mars
This week we′ve been surrounded by space news from thousands and millions of miles from home.
- To begin with, the Japanese were able to make an upside-down moon landing. A failure just 150 ft above the ground, caused the craft to crash and the solar panels that were supposed to face East to receive the sun light, are now facing West. An interesting story follows about using for a few hours the remaining batteries and the plan to activate the solar panels, but later.
Despite the error, for the Japanese mission there are more achievements to celebrate, mostly because earlier attempts to land by other countries, have failed.
In two weeks we'll have more news about the mission survival tasks.
- Going millions of miles farther, to Mars, other bad news are accompanied by a lot of achievements too.
Just think that an helicopter needs a rotor to fly, but in the tinny atmosphere of Mars, 1/100th of the one we enjoy on Earth, requieres the rotation of the rotors to be 2,400 per minute !! (40 per second), instead of 500 RPM on earth.
Once a flap got damaged, the little chopper was no longer able to fly. It provided 72 successful missions. NASA said the cheap technology craft used off-the-shelf, cellphone processors and batteries from 2015. "Massive victories for engineers around NASA".
But the mission is not over yet, Perseverance, the mother craft, will continue exploring Mars surface.
Let's have fun, make comments and share. CM/.