They’re just using a lithobraking maneuver.

Yep!  If the US government had found evidence of aliens, he would 100% have blabbed it publicly by now.  Ergo, there ain’t any such evidence.

In their defense, there is an awful lot of news right now involving Musk and/or Trump.  I hear ya, though.  I could use a break from all of that.

Low orbit’s one thing, but Mars is a great deal further away. Heck, even the Moon is a great deal further way. The signal loss is the real problem. The reason the DSN antennas have such huge dishes is similar to why optical telescopes like to have big mirrors — aperture is king when you want to observe very faint…

YES!!!!!

Nah.  Salt.

I’m honestly humbled by that statement. Thank you. I’m gonna miss this place too if/when it shuts down. I’m already missing the rest of the whole Gizmodoverse. This is basically what’s left of it.

You can actually use Agile on a safety critical product. What matters the most is the discipline and mindset in which you’re working. You need your requirements and your tests very well defined from the start, and you must absolutely not deploy to the end user community before a high level of rigor in the test…

I don’t have a Tesla, but from what I’ve read, they all have emergency release levers. What they don’t all have is manual release levers. This seems like a weird distinction, but it’s real. So, the manual release lever is just a regular door latch that you can use anytime you want, except it’s mechanical instead of…

It’s the biggest problem with the Agile design methodology. You’re supposed to maintain momentum by focusing on producing a minimum viable product with each sprint. The idea is this keeps you from getting distracted, which is great, but the problem is that it enables business wonks who want to call that product done. I…

It is super cool, I‘m glad you’re enjoying it!

And the limiting factor for that isn’t the Mars satellites, as you just pinpointed the real problem. It’s the ground stations here on Earth. JWST is a stupendously amazing instrument, but it just exacerbated that problem massively, and that’s nothing compared to what Artemis is going to do to the problem.

Minor addendum: simultaneous to MAVEN, they’re also communicating with MRO. It’s listed that way on the DSN Eyes page because of the relay system; the reality is that only one of them is actually talking to Earth, but it’s sending and receiving data for both of them.

I suspect that was the point of the remark, but they’re seriously underestimating the scales involved, because it makes absolutely no difference. Radio telescopes in the Deep Space Network are not really aiming at individual Mars spacecraft. They’re just aiming at Mars itself. Firstly, because they can’t slew fast…

I just noticed another problem with the article. They say it would be helpful because it would make “the comms target larger than the planet itself”. Actually, a network of Starlink-like relay satellites orbiting Mars wouldn’t appreciably change the apparent size of Mars (from the perspective of radio telescopes on…

I just looked up the actual tweet and it’s even less than that. SpaceX is just responding to an RFP (that Blue Origin and Lockheed are also responding to) for the latest iteration of the existing network at Mars. The current system just takes advantage of Mars orbiters that already there. NASA would like to send…

Plenty who get their vehicle “wrapped” deal with similar issues in ~four to five year’s time when the wrap comes off.

And that is a very fair point. The headline itself is pointing out something he never said. Light speed has nothing to do with the transfer rates, just latency, and AFAIK, he never brought that up. But I had to go “whaaaaaa....” about his actual concept, because damn, it’s dumb. Never mind the bonkers transfer rates,…

Musk didn’t explain in enough detail to know if that’s what he’s getting at, but there’s no way that’s going to get petabyte bandwidth. Mars is still a really really really really long ways away, and the inverse square law kills — most of the signal will be lost traveling from Mars whether it comes from the surface or…

Yeah, but even if we make that correction, it’s still pie-in-the-sky.