Martians Assimilate Spirit Rover.
- Thread starter Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
- Start date
This is Mars, not Leeds!
THe_KELRaTH
Regular
Proving there is life on Mars.. and they know what the off switch is for.
Well it seems our poor little £50Million Beagle wasn't so crap after all, if even this £400Million+ project failed.
I say we send some cookies and Xmas cards next time with the new rover, maybe they'll take the thing in the house and treat it like a real dog.
Let's just send an AIBO, they'll find a use for it...
We keep sending them millions-worth of freebies, when r we gonna get some prezzies?
I say we send some cookies and Xmas cards next time with the new rover, maybe they'll take the thing in the house and treat it like a real dog.
Let's just send an AIBO, they'll find a use for it...
We keep sending them millions-worth of freebies, when r we gonna get some prezzies?
Didn't this get argued to death in another thread a month or two ago? Hopefully they can find a way around the problem and get it working again otherwise there is always the second lander that is due to touch down on Saturday. I know the NASA TV feed is being broadcast live on campus here and at least one professor is speaking about it. Yes...I go to an engineering school...we get excited over these things.Dio said:I hope it's not somebody mixing up metric and imperial again. Come on America, the rest of the world has moved on<duck>
you can watch the Streaming News Briefing from this morning with this link: rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/e012204_nasa.rm Copy and Paste that link into your Real Player i.e. do file open and paste the link there and open it and it will play the 30 minute briefing.
Here is the official press release: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/news.../20040121a.html
Here is the official press release: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/news.../20040121a.html
pax said:
That's been tried before, it doesn't solve the problem.
The fundamental problem (despite the patriotic chest beating we seem to hear round here) is that landing on Mars is just plain difficult and risky.
Viking got lucky. Sure it was a well designed, built and executed project, but it also got lucky.
The problem with spending even more on probes is that fundamentally there's a limit to how much you can reduce the risk. By spending more you are increasing the cost-to-risk ratio, if that makes sense.
This is why "faster, cheaper, quicker" makes sense, because the loss of any individual probe is a blow, the financial loss is reduced. It doesn't do much for the people who work for 5-10 years on that probe of course.
The problem with "faster, cheaper, quicker" is that it generally gets morphed into "faster, cheaper, fewer", rather than "faster, cheaper, more", which is what it's supposed to mean. For the price of the 2 NASA rovers we could have built 20 Beagles, and even with the worst luck you might reasonably expect 5-10 of those to land safely and operate for a while. Trouble is, that's never going to happen. We get one chance.
The situation for NASA isn't much better, especially in a risk averse society.
You are all overlooking the obvious: When the european mars orbiter passed over spirit it blasted the rover with it's secret death ray so George Bush and his Mars plans would look bad. Also sweet revenge for the US sabotage of our poor Beagle2 (which they certainly did in a yet to determine evil way)
I dont think its because the US is risk averse. Theres plenty here who would debate that. I think its cause when the US and other nations stop caring about something they dont fund it. When nasa, for all that it stands for, cant muster 10% of the military budget its clear any real vision for space exploration left the political offices long ago. If the public was well informed on how much was spent maybe theyd like to see some more but Im not even sure if most people care all that much about space either.
I dont see anyone really caring about space exploration. Even the chinese effort is modest in terms of budgeting in that country tho its now a political showcase for them for the next couple decades.
I dont see anyone really caring about space exploration. Even the chinese effort is modest in terms of budgeting in that country tho its now a political showcase for them for the next couple decades.
Kristof said:Anyone here who thinks this just happened so they could re-use the same filmstudio with mars terrain for the second rover ?
K-
U know, WRT conspiracy theories, i was on the train this morning, reading about this thing and i imagined:
"mmmm this could be a hollywood-y kind of way to then eventually come up with evidence that there actually IS life on Mars."
Then i started imagining US officials in a Movie studio set up as Mars, simulating weird effects to the "be sent" from the Spirit and "prove" that the rover has been taken by aliens.
(I was very sleepy and hallucinating)
Did the conspiracy theory surrounding the landing on the Moon get anywhere in the end? I am still not sure what to think about that one, lets not even start on Mars...
