Crash Course Mars

[Zee Palmer]

NASApublished a detailed photo of the moon Phobos, which is on a collision course with Mars. As reported by the Live Science portal, due to its porous surface structure, the largest Martian moon has been described by scientists as a "cosmic potato."

Phobos, named after the Greek god of fear, is about 157 times smaller than Earth's Moon. Its dimensions are 17 miles by 14 miles by 11 miles. It orbits the planet three times a day, so close to its surface that it is not always visible in some places on Mars.

Scientists believe the orbits of both moons are very unstable. They predict that in tens of millions of years, Deimos will leave Martian orbit while Phobos will either break up as it approaches Mars' surface or crash into it. According to NASA, however, it is unlikely that this event will occur within the next 50 million years.

In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos in order to change its orbit, as well the trajectory of the larger space rock it circles, called Didymos. The mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), was designed as a kind of pilot program for deflecting potentially deadly near-Earth asteroids similar in size to the one that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs.

"We did not expect that many boulders that were that big to be blown off," Andy Riven, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and a member of the DART team, told National Geographic.

Thankfully, none of the boulders seem poised to strike Earth, but researchers were still curious where the giant rocks might end up. Now, they may have an answer. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed preprint paper, researchers describe the debris' potential destination: Mars.

Marco Fenucci, a mathematician at the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Objects Coordination Centre and co-author of the new study, tracked the trajectory of the boulders and ran simulations that projected their positions 20,000 years into the future. There are, of course, a lot of uncertainties involved in making such a far-flung prediction. However, Fenucci and his team found that in most scenarios, the boulders ended up crossing Mars' orbit in about 6,000 years.

Whether the space rocks impact the Red Planet's surface will depend on their composition. If they are structurally unstable, they will probably explode or burn up in the thin Martian atmosphere, the study authors said. But if they're solid enough, they will leave a substantial impact crater.

Fortunately, this problem is only hypothetical for now. Astronomers follow the orbits of more than 33,000 near-Earth asteroids, and have found that none of them pose a risk of hitting our planet for at least the next century.

Joanna Thompson is a science journalist and runner based in New York. She holds a B.S. in Zoology and a B.A. in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, as well as a Master's in Science Journalism from NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Find more of her work in Scientific American, The Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura or Audubon Magazine."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Joanna ThompsonSocial Links NavigationLive Science ContributorJoanna Thompson is a science journalist and runner based in New York. She holds a B.S. in Zoology and a B.A. in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, as well as a Master's in Science Journalism from NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Find more of her work in Scientific American, The Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura or Audubon Magazine.

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Scientists do not yet know what caused the Mars Orbiter to crash. (AP)

By Kathy Sawyer

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 1, 1999; Page A1 NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in space last week because engineers failed to make a simple conversion from English units to metric, an embarrassing lapse that sent the $125 million craft fatally close to the Martian surface, investigators said yesterday.Officials are scrambling to determine whether a similar error is buried in the computer files of two other spacecraft currently cruising through space: the Mars Polar Lander, scheduled to hit the Martian surface on Dec. 3, and the Stardust craft bound for a comet.It now appears the error had affected the orbiter mission from its launching almost 10 months and 416 million miles before its Sept. 23 failure. And yet the problem was never caught and corrected by the system of checks and balances at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which manages this and numerous other interplanetary missions for NASA.As a result, flight controllers believe the spacecraft plowed into the Martian atmosphere, where the stresses crippled it, aborted its insertion into Martian orbit and most likely left it hurtling on through space in an orbit around the sun.Baffled NASA officials said they were struggling to figure out how this happened, and bracing themselves for an onslaught of derision."Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major implications," said JPL director Edward Stone.The initial error was made by contractor Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado, which, like the rest of the U.S. launch industry, traditionally uses English measurements. The JPL navigation team, on the other hand, uses metric measurements in the complex business of figuring out a spacecraft's position relative to moving planets and keeping it on course. The contractor, by agreement, is supposed to convert its measurements to metrics.However, officials said, this simple error should not have cost them a spacecraft. Investigators are collecting information about whether concerns were raised by anyone during the mission but ignored, whether proper procedures were followed, and in general how both human and computer monitors failed to detect the problem."We are revisiting all the files from day one," said JPL's Charles Elachi, director of space and earth sciences. "We want to get to the bottom of this and fix it."The initial error occurred in computer files forwarded regularly by Lockheed Martin to JPL navigators, according to Elachi's deputy, Tom Gavin. The wrong numbers referred to tiny thruster firings performed routinely twice a day. The navigators, in turn, performed their analysis of the spacecraft's position in space based on the assumption that the descriptions of these firings were in metric units of force per second (newtons). In fact, the numbers instead represented pounds (of force per second). This led to tiny miscalculations of the spacecraft's course that compounded over time. There were subtle clues in the data that something was off, but no one recognized the cause until yesterday.Officials said there will likely be no personnel firings over the failure. As one put it, the emphasis will not be in "pointing fingers and dealing out punishment," but in "figuring out how the process failed and fixing it." Two separate panels are looking into the failure, including an internal JPL group and a review board consisting of both JPL and outside experts. An independent NASA group will be formed shortly.The orbiter was one in a series of missions being dispatched to Mars every two years, under NASA's recently adopted "faster, smaller, cheaper" philosophy. NASA officials rejected suggestions that the failure reflects badly on that approach. Historical failure rates for billion-dollar missions of the past, and the smaller, more frequent missions of today, are similar -- about 10 percent, they said.Under the discarded system of flying huge and complex missions only once in a decade or so, a loss was more devastating, officials said. In this case, they have the surveyor in Martian orbit and the lander on its way.This eases the sting of the talk show jokes that are bound to fly concerning the foolishness of the mistake, said Carl Pilcher, NASA's chief of solar system exploration. "Oh, God, there's nothing we can do about that. We'll live through it. . . . Then we'll wow them again."The orbiter's main mission was to monitor the Red Planet's atmosphere, surface and polar caps for one Martian year, or 687 days. First, however, the craft was to have served as a communications relay link for the lander. Managers said backup plans will allow the lander instead to transmit data either directly to Earth, through the global Deep Space Network of antennas, or through the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor. 1999 The Washington Post Company Back to the top

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