NASA's Perseverance Rover to attempt Mars landing tomorrow (2/18)

Amazing, if it works.

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Yep. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t share the fate of SpaceX’ booster a few days ago…

Holy guacamole, that’s a cool way to land a rover. Does the “drop ship” return to orbit?

No, not even close. It flies away and crashes a few hundred meters away.

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Same landing technique used for current Mars rover.

The helicopter probe is new and will be interesting.

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Yeah, the sky crane technique, used on Curiosity in 2012 - a good video (and preview of tomorrow hopefully) here - lots of worried faces at the 1 min mark:

At the time I was always thinking, I wonder if the drop ship rockets will fail and then land on the poor rover below, a sort of ‘Yay, we landed, I’m OK! So now to start the… < crunch >’ :slight_smile: :robot: As it happened the dropship yeeted out just fine…

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I hear this everywhere. What does it mean?

It apparently has two meanings:

  1. To throw something, possibly also yourself, with force.
  2. Used as some kind of expression of excitement and/or fun while doing something (like yeeting an object or yourself, see #1). Similar to Woo-hoo or Yeehaw.
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Boomer Reaction GIF by MOODMAN

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just case of ‘curiosity’… those people were actors, right?

:nerd_face:

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Not seen it mentioned in this topic yet, and as this is :mudspike: a shout out to the Helicopter that’s part of this mission.

A side effect of teenage kids in the house, sorry. :slight_smile:

All CGI I think, hence the expressiveness, smiling and general lack of stoicism associated with serious engineering.

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So a carrier take off, is yeeting off the boat. AGM-88’s, AIM-120’s are definitely yeeted at fools, but bombs are yeeted down in the mud as well, especially when you do a dive-toss profile. When you press the gun trigger, a whole stream of stuff gets yeeted at the enemy, who is yeeted from the sky, quickly pulling the handle that yeets him from his plane.

Did I get the word?

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The F-14 in multiplayer is frequently seen phoenix yeeting missiles into friendly aircraft.

So yes, you did get it. :rofl:

Bombs I would only say count when tossing. Regular drop not so much.

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Too funny!!!

Why do you think they choose a helicopter approach?? I would have thought a balloon would suffice for that type of mission with a lot less moving parts to break.

I’m not certain @piper but I think the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so comparatively low to ours that any balloon would have to be really large in volume, like massive. The winds on Mars are very fast, but apparently it doesn’t matter because the ‘air’ pressure is so low. It’s why they have to do a rocket powered descent, as a parachute won’t cut it for anything too heavy.

Would love to see a Martian Zeppelin one day though, very John Carter!

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Everyday Astronaut has his stream up.

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It’s a tricky ratio of when to use it acccurately - inversely proportional to the amount of ‘LEEROY JENKINS!!’ involved is a good guideline, I believe. :wink:

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out of ‘curiosity’ again, just checked the ‘Jezero’ crater name

In 2007, following the discovery of its ancient lake, the crater was named for Jezero[5] in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of several eponymous towns in the country.[6] In several Slavic languages (including Bosnian), the word jezero (pronounced ['ye.ze.ro]) means ‘lake’.

surely that, ‘lake’ in ours is ‘jazero’

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A nice live visualization of what’s going on.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mars2020/#/home

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