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"This is not meant to be a personal attack but a dialogue and exercise in thinking."

Okey-dokey, shoot. (And thanks for responding quietly and intelligently to my slightly... exasperated... GPP. ;-)

"You do not find it "daft" to think that we were created from some primordial stew which was transformed in some way to create 2 of a species which evolved out of this stew that went on to procreate and evolve into what we are today?"

Nope. Firstly, all of the first "live" organisms were asexually reproducing, so you only need one of the organism, not two arising simultaneously (which would, admittedly, require truly absurb levels of chance).

Secondly, you're talking about abiogenesis here, which is slightly different from "evolution". As it happens I also believe abiogenesis is possible, so I'll carry on...

Thirdly, yes - I do find the idea that a random bunch of chemicals sloshing about in a particular tide-pool somewhere could give rise to all life on earth somewhat hard to take.

However, when you consider the entire earth's surface as the reaction dish, it's a little less hard to take. With the recent discovery of the elemental building-blocks of life even in interstellar space, you can likely factor in the entire surface area of every sufficiently energy-rich surface (planet, asteroid interior, moon) in the entire universe, and it's less of a stretch again. Then factor in the fact that the universe has had ample resources of solid matter heavier than helium (ingredients for life) for about 12.7 billion years (+/- 0.2 billion)), and that adds up to an awful lot of sloshing and an awful lot of chances...

Don't get me wrong - I fully realise how unlikely all this sounds, but OTOH:

1) We're dealing with durations and quantities that simply can't fit into the human imagination. We mistakenly (and automatically) use "not in a million years" as synonymous with "never"... But you could make an argument that for anything that happened even roughly once in a million years, since the Big Bang it "should" actually have happened about 14,000 times!

2) It is theoretically possible. Extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible. It's "allowed", given even our current understanding of science, and doesn't posit a single additional requirement.

(Forgive me, but:) A big (self-created!) magical beard in the sky who can selectively disregard laws of physics at will and (despite not being remotely human) seems to display all-too-human motives and reactions is contrary to everything we know so far. Even if we accept it's possible he's literally omnipotent, we have no explanation for how it's even possible. To do so would require we begin by throwing out every single scientific tenet we've ever accepted, on no evidence whatsoever.

Basically, it's a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. Science gives one explanation which, while unlikely, is theoretically possible. Religion gives an answer which (as far as we know) isn't possible, and provides not an ounce of evidence to support it.

"Give me one example (besides Frankenstein) where life was created from non-life."

When you eat dead flesh or vegetables, and your body breaks it down and turns the non-living atoms and chemicals into living tissue? Or not even organic food, but synthetic drugs, or Lithium, or charcoal biscuits for indigestion?

If you want an example of a bunch of inanimate chemicals spontaneously giving rise to life, well, haven't we just got through agreeing how incredibly unlikely it is to happen in any particular place at any particular time? So what are the odds of it happening twice, in (when you look at the time-scales involved) quick succession?

And how about the already-alive and ever-pre

Option 3 is embraced by current space explorers!
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/tmsb/stirling/doc/stir l_radisotope.html

That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.

Venus average surface temperature is higher than Mercury. Mercury is not backed like a cinder. It is composed of basaltic silicates, iron and nickel, refractory oxides. These materials have a very high melting point. Venus has active volcanoes. We already have detailed images of them.

That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.

Venus average surface temperature is higher than Mercury. Mercury is not backed like a cinder. It is composed of basaltic silicates, iron and nickel, refractory oxides. These materials have a very high melting point. Venus has active volcanoes. We already have detailed images of them.

That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.

Venus average surface temperature is higher than Mercury. Mercury is not backed like a cinder. It is composed of basaltic silicates, iron and nickel, refractory oxides. These materials have a very high melting point. Venus has active volcanoes. We already have detailed images of them.

That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.

Venus average surface temperature is higher than Mercury. Mercury is not backed like a cinder. It is composed of basaltic silicates, iron and nickel, refractory oxides. These materials have a very high melting point. Venus has active volcanoes. We already have detailed images of them.

You should also consider: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ ...

And your point is?

SOHO's servers are a mix of xServes, Suns (B1600, v100, v240), and I think there's an intel system in there.

Most of the power consumption comes from disks (many terabytes of solar physics observations), and there's a fair amount of CPU power needed for processing the data.

Now, if you're looking for recommendations for servers in London or http://www.nyctourist.com/soho1.htm>New York, I can't help you.

Oh ... on the low power requirements, we've got a bunch of Mac Minis lying about, but they're mostly used by the system administrators, (loghost, system monitoring, etc) not the folks doing heavy graphics manipulation.

All documents produced by the US government is public domain. Much of Google Maps and other mapping services are based on public domain NASA and US Geological Survey data. The high-res pictures of the more interesting bits of the US are partly made from commercial aerial photography, though. NASA's World Wind application is all government data.

Unfortunately most of the world's governments are not so enlightened.

And this just after news about how the US is cutting down on NASA's budget and missions like this..

The US federal government cut NASA's budget? Do you have a link for this? The only articles I've seen indicate an increase in NASA's budget, virtually one of the only non-defense sectors of the government to see an increase.

The physics of wind power is such that for every doubling of wind speed, there is an eight-fold increase in the amount of wind power.

Erm, last I checked, both lift and drag increase with the square of speed, not the cube.

The physics of wind power is such that for every doubling of wind speed, there is an eight-fold increase in the amount of wind power.

Erm, last I checked, both lift and drag increase with the square of speed, not the cube.

Well, I had to go check, but the GAS program (along with the Shuttle Small Payloads Project) is offically gone, though they did not close up shop until 2004. The last mission flown under the SSPP, a Hitchhiker, was lost on Discovery.

If you want cheap space access, you still might be able to get it at the followon porgram, managed out of the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

http://www.wff.nasa.gov/efpo/index.html

Taking that Law, we can now turn to the most famous equation in the world, E=MC^2. This states that Energy is equals to Matter, times the square of a Constant. Energy and Matter are interchangable: Energy can turn into Matter, Matter can turn into Energy. When combined with the Principle of Conservation of Energy, you get this statement:

"Energy AND Matter can neither be created nor destroyed."

Now that we have established that, we can turn to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states:

"All work processes tend towards a greater entropy (disorder/lower energy density) over time."

The universe is getting more disordered and more simplified, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, the theory of Evolution has the basic principle that everything is getting more organized and more complex.

My arguments summarized:

1. The Big Bang cannot be true as it contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics.

2. Evolution cannot be true as it contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

My opinion on the universe:

1. The universe started as a complex and orderly living entity, which, over time, began to expand. As it aged, it began to expand, and the life began to DEVOLVE until it reached our current state, humans. You can even witness this devolving process. Think. 10 or so years ago, we didn't have so many hurricanes, earthquakes, or other devastating natural disasters. People are becoming stupider by the day.

2. As for where the entire mass of atoms came from, either there is a God(which is possible), or the universe has always existed, and there in some incomprehensible way, time started a billion years back, and the universe came into existence with time. And remember this. There might be something larger than a universe...

References:

http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6e.h tml
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/thermo1f .html
http://www.taftan.com/thermodynamics/FIRST.HTM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermod ynamics
http://www.entropysite.com/students_approach.html
http://www.secondlaw.com/
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/370.asp
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-thermod ynamics.html

This is what I understand the laws to mean...if I'm wrong, by all means, correct me...

Okay. I looked up one of those results, Replication of the Apparent Excess Heat Effect in a Light Water-Potassium Carbonate-Nickel Electrolytic Cell. You have to pay for the entire article, but the abstract is freely available. I quote:

Replication of experiments claiming to demonstrate excess heat production in light water-Ni-K2CO3 electrolytic cells was found to produce an apparent excess heat of 11 W maximum, for 60 W electrical power into the cell. The 28 liter cell used in these verification tests was on loan from a private corporation whose own tests with similar cells are documented to produce 50 W steady excess heat for a continuous period exceeding hundreds of days. [...] the present data do admit efficient recombination of dissolved hydrogen-oxygen as an ordinary explanation.

The reproduction wasn't nearly as dramatic as the original claim, and there's a potential ordinary explanation. He's making an extraordinary claim, and I want to see extraordinary evidence: eliminate the ordinary explanation and make it produce as much energy as he says for as long as he says.

Hmmm. And the reason it's no longer happening would be...?

Also, I thought "dark matter" was dark in part because it doesn't emit or absorb light.

Ordinary hydrogen, as we know, readily absorbs light. Then, after a short time as an excited atom, it re-emits the light, producing a beautiful red glowing nebula in the sky whenever clouds of hydrogen are found near light sources, e.g. stars.

So, why would hydrogen atoms when they fall to the "true" ground state suddenly stop acting like ordinary hydrogen atoms, and refuse to absorb any light? Why don't we see glowing nebulae whenever these clouds of hydrinos are located near stars?

Or at least offer it alongside, for example, Einstein's Cosmological Constant theories--an example of when something other than experimental evidence clouds a scientific mind.

I disagree with that. A non-zero cosmological constant is physically plausable and is being seriously investigated.

"There are a number of other observations that are suggestive of the need for a cosmological constant. For example, if the cosmological constant today comprises most of the energy density of the universe, then the extrapolated age of the universe is much larger than it would be without such a term, which helps avoid the dilemma that the extrapolated age of the universe is younger than some of the oldest stars we observe! A cosmological constant term added to the inflationary model, an extension of the Big Bang theory, leads to a model that appears to be consistent with the observed large-scale distribution of galaxies and clusters, with COBE's measurements of cosmic microwave background fluctuations, and with the observed properties of X-ray clusters."

from http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101accel.html

> Oh! Gee! You can spell! I tremble before greatness.

No need to shiver child - just be more careful with your piercing insights next time.

> postdoctoral offers to ponder over and job offers from CYSCO to reject.

So you're not joining the hoi polloi working class? No worries, perhaps CYSCO one day opens a full department on self-similar network research. :-)

> >Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.
> But I can strike a middle ground. There's another sports metaphor for you.

Net!

> > [tifr.res.in].
> Sure, sure. Dream on brother.

Sure bro, hey - pass on my regards to the "primes are in P" , er, physicists?

> > but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.
> Never said I was. Physics is, at it's roots, an experimantal science.

This thread and the one before it display of your problem ego.

> excludes the JPL, though it's connected to NASA. They're all right). ...
> > http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html [nasa.gov]
> >Famous enough for you? It's useful too ...
> See above.
The JPL isn't connected to NASA - it belongs to NASA. as in "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory"
Injecting late qualifiers to somehow redeem wrong argument fools no one except yourself. It takes a true man to admit he was wrong and carry on.

>It's 'Cosmic', not 'Kosmic'. COBE, not 'KOBE'

Oh! Gee! You can spell! I tremble before greatness. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have postdoctoral offers to ponder over and job offers from CYSCO to reject.






>Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.

But I can strike a middle ground. There's another sports metaphor for you.





>Sure, if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In your >area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than IIT Kanpur, based on >the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees [tifr.res.in].

Sure, sure. Dream on brother.


>In any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to this >world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding theoretical >paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand -- both have their place -- >but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.



Never said I was. Physics is, at it's roots, an experimantal science. It's all good so long as we don't have crooks like NASA who defraud taxpaying citizens off of their money and give little actual results in return (this excludes the JPL, though it's connected to NASA. They're all right).


> http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html [nasa.gov]
>Famous enough for you? It's useful too


See above.

It's 'Cosmic', not 'Kosmic'. COBE, not 'KOBE'

Regarding your love of 'academia':

Now we see it:

> Name one famous result (in the academia,
> not in National Geographic)

Now we don't:

> clearer and wider perspective thanstudents from
> places like TIFR, which is very isolated from anything
> other than mainstream academia

Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.

> > Studying at an engineering-focussed IIT,
> > instead of, say TIFR or IISc, may have
> > helped develop 'snobbish theoretician syndrome':
> > familiarity breed contempt. ...
> top students in the country (statistically)
> graduate from my Alma Mater and her sisters

Sure, if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In your area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than IIT Kanpur, based on the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees.

In any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to this world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding theoretical paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand -- both have their place -- but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.

> Name one famous result (in the academia
Your request for a 'famous result' is laugable - the primary aim for NASA isn't funding research that is sufficiently theoritical to meet your tastes. Here is a concrete result from NASA materials science:
    http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html
Famous enough for you? It's useful too

I expect the Moon does pretty well when you're on the dark side, but when you're on the sunny side I don't think it offers any radiation shielding. No magnetic field, no ionosphere.

Please correct me if I'm wrong...

Lunar regolith could potentially be quite useful for radiation shielding.

But there's a fundamental difference between the Apollo-era technology developments and the modern ISS efforts. For Apollo, nothing existed. The problems were largely unknown. Folks tooks lots of risk, and they were very creative with their solutions.

The ISS is all about risk avoidance, and all the technology developed for the ISS is being created within well-known bounds and limits. Want to fly an experiment on the ISS? It needs to be made from space-rated materials (i.e. stuff we already have and know about.) NASA has a list. If you use materials that aren't on the list, you have two options: a) change to approved materials; or b) go through the space qualification process. Most folks opt for (a) because it's less expensive in both time and bucks. The rules, regulations, and processes tend to funnel everyone back toward known materials and processes. It's like setting out on an expedition to explore your bathtub.

I'm not a fan of the ISS simply because it became more of a political platform than a scientific one. There *could* be amazing stuff done there. Instead, we use it as a corporate welfare program for the aerospace industry.

If that last statement bothers you, ask why the ISS can't have more than two crew aboard if the Shuttle doesn't fly. The answer is "water." There isn't enough water capacity in the ISS to support a third person, and they don't have the water reclamation facility installed yet. You'd think that basic self-sustenance equipment like the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) would have been one of the *first* modules launched, not the last. Nope. Here's where I put on my tinfoil hat - If the ISS could sustain itself, cutting back Shuttle launches (i.e. budget cuts) would be acceptable. However, if the ISS inhabitants die without regular Shuttle missions, the Shuttle *must* fly! This all comes back to the situation where the ISS is the place for the Shuttle to go, and the Shuttle is what keeps the ISS going. It's a parasitic symbiosis that just drains the global economy.

I belive I'll see new technology derivatives from the rovers on Mars. I don't expect squat from the ISS.

... the whole is a massive waste of time and money.

Except there's spinoff - literally and figuratively.

Yo, peep dis: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/

Apparently, the speed of light when the zero point energy is lower (as between the two plates generating the Casimir effect) the speed of light is higher than the speed of light in vacuum at normal zero point energy levels.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/wa rpstat.html

Windows users get the Earth and the Moon. We get a spinning beachball.

Quite correct. The thing with World Wind is that it's community-driven, so if people want ports then they need to step up and join in. In addition to your links there's also a forum section for ports and a how to get involved page on the Wiki. We welcome all the help we can get - I came to WW from the Slashdotting 12 months ago, so let's see what this time can bring :)

Pop over to the forums if you need help :)

A goatse image on the Road Map page within 30minutes of the Slashdotting. You're getting slow dudes :p

I didn't mention in the article, but there is a partial clone of World Wind for Linux done by a community member.See the thread here for more info.

People can also join #worldwind on irc.freenode.net. That's probably the best way to get involved with developing and find out what's where.

And lastly...yes, Mars is on the way. Stay tuned.

the 22 CD ROMs from the Clementine project can be accessed from here

http://starbase.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/clem1-l-h-5-d im-mosaic-v1.0/
(jpegs are in the browse directories)

or if you have not the got the bandwidth they are only 220 USD from

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cd-rom/web_store.cgi?ca tegory=hires

now if only I could find a the above as a DVD torrent, hmmm

the 22 CD ROMs from the Clementine project can be accessed from here

http://starbase.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/clem1-l-h-5-d im-mosaic-v1.0/
(jpegs are in the browse directories)

or if you have not the got the bandwidth they are only 220 USD from

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cd-rom/web_store.cgi?ca tegory=hires

now if only I could find a the above as a DVD torrent, hmmm

Science at NASA seems to be aimed at, or at least appropriate for, kids. Granted it's mainly space science, but it's pretty good.

Slacker Astronomy
http://www.slackerastronomy.org/slack-live.xml

Science @ NASA
http://science.nasa.gov/podcast.xml

Universe Today
http://www.universetoday.com/audio.xml

Berkeley Groks
http://www.groks.net/groks.rss

Regulus
http://www.regulusastro.com/regulus/whatsup/podcas t.rss

Actually, yes...

In 2003 there was a giant storm on Mars... from this article about it:

Sunlight on Mars is about to become unusually intense. The planet goes around the sun in a 9%-elliptical orbit with one end 40 million km closer to the sun than the other. Mars reaches perihelion--its closest approach to the sun--on August 30th. During the weeks around perihelion, sunlight striking Mars will be 20% more intense than the annual average.

"This means the season for dust storms is just beginning," says Bell.

There is apparently an accepted correlation between Martian solar intensity and Martian dust storms.

While this is exciting for amateur astronomers to see a process like this happening on Mars, it's also very forboding and ominous. Mars has a bad habit of becoming engulfed in planet wide dust storms which almost totally hide the surface features of the planet.

I am sure many amateurs like myself would prefer NO dust storms on Mars while it is so close to the Earth, and so favorably positioned for Northern hemisphere observers. This has been a great Mars apparition so far, I've watched it growing in the eyepiece since August. If the dust stays clear, Mars will be large enough to enjoy until almost February. If it turns into a cloudy red ball, well...

This page shows a dust storm growing from the 2003 apparition of Mars, and a picture of the dreaded featureless red ball.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/09jul_mars dust.htm

NASA Ballerina link if www.popsci.com give up

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpeg/115084mai n_ballerina.mpeg

Actually, the wheel problem has healed itself. See:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spir itAll.html#sol326

The solar panels have been so well cleaned by the storms, that the power levels reached 900 watts in August.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spir itAll.html#sol572

Actually, the wheel problem has healed itself. See:

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spir itAll.html#sol326

The solar panels have been so well cleaned by the storms, that the power levels reached 900 watts in August.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status_spir itAll.html#sol572

Hi Paul,

I am glad to see you respond. I know that it can be hard to be gracious when everyone is throwing stones, and I do appreciate your gracious response.

Now, I am afraid I must proceed to throw a few pebbles of criticism:

1) You have stated that "Annual lighting discharges are well in excess of any heat energy input to the planet." What is your source for this calculation? The earth receives on the order of 10^17 Watts of solar irradiation.
According to the NASA Global Hydrology and Climate Center (http://thunder.nsstc.nasa.gov/primer/primer4.html ), about 100 lightning strikes occur per second. I have had trouble finding a definitive value for the average energy of a lightning strike, but wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning) gives an average of 500 MJ for negative strikes (95%) and 300 GJ for positive strikes (5%) for an average energy of about 15 GJ per strike. That is only 1.5x10^12 Watts. I also wonder about this storm that is supposed to have used a quarter of a year of earth's sunshine energy. That must have been one hell of a storm. I'm not sure you have your numbers right.

2) Recorded pressure levels in a tornado are less than 100 millibars below atmospheric (reference: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/ ). That means that the pressure inside a tornado is about 9/10 of an atmosphere. I would hardly call that a vacuum level appropriate for a particle accelerator. Generally in a particle accelerator you at least want to get well below the conductivity peak in the Paschen curve at about 10^-3 atmospheres. The last particle accelerator I built operated at 10^-10 atmospheres (10^-11 on a good day).

3) Putting charge on one side of a capacitor draws charge onto the other side of the dialectric of the capacitor but does not transmit energy to the other side, unless you are using a very high frequency. Try charging one side of a capacitor while the other side is disconnected from the circuit and see how much energy is stored in the cap. I once tried building an electric motor based upon this misconception, so I am very familiar with it. You can test this using a capacitor and battery with some wires, so I encourage you to explore this yourself.

4) Cerenkov radiation is usually blue. Mako1138 had a good post addressing this point. Of course, I suppose that interaction with some sort of atmospheric chemicals could result in green light coming from a Cernkov radiation source. However, if you want anyone to think that the green is from Cerenkov radiation, you will need to have some proof that it is.

I have seen both Cerenkov radiation and the weird yellow-green sky in person (I was in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City_Tornad o ). In my own estimation the color is very different, although they both looked 'weird'. I can't explain it, but both kinds of light were what I would describe as 'penetrating to the eye'. I suspect that this may have had to do with the ambient light conditions in which I observed both.

5) Usually when people use the term "vacuum energy" they are speaking of the energy associated with quantum fluctuations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy). You seem to be using the term to talk about the energy in the interplantetary plasma. Could you be more specific about which vacuum energy you mean? There is a large amount of energy total in this plasma because space is so large, but the energy density is fairly small. If you are referring to interactions between the interplantary plasma and the weather, could you be a little more specific about what that interaction is, and what the predictions or observations of your theory are?

6) What sort of observation

If on 1 in a 10000 pictures would capture some rare kind of rock in mars, with the extended lifetime of the rovers it will be more probable to find that rock, among the data.

You must mean this rock.

Opportunity was the rover that got stuck in a dune, took a few weeks to finally get it free. Here's a nice time-lapse movie (MPG) of the rover getting out of the dune. The movie actually spans about 3 weeks.

Opportunity has also been down inside a large crater (endurance crater) and the engineers were worried it might not be able to get back out again.

One of Spirit's 6 wheels has been acting up and drawing too much current, so they decided to disable that wheel and drive that rover backwards, dragging the disabled wheel-- which it has been doing for at least a year I think!

Both rovers have had several spontaneous "cleaning" events that cleared off the dust. It was later confirmed that the dust devil whirlwinds we've seen in pictures from Spirit occasionally hit the rover and blow off the dust.

The Energizer bunny thing is a bad analogy. Duracell and Everready advertise their batteries constantly, and try to ensure they are prominently displayed at counters, kiosks, etc, but everyone knows that they deplete quickly. In the case of modern high-drain electronics like cameras, incredibly quickly. If the rovers used their chemistry, they'd have been dead within days. And would just have been more toxic landfill, like all the useless short-lifespan cells the batery companies sucker people into buying instead of investing in a few dozen NiMH cells and a quick charger that will last them a decade or so....

The current splendid Rovers use Lithium-ion chemistry.

The Mars Science Laboratory will be launched in a few years, but I am beginning to agree with you. MSL could be another NASA 'Battlestar Galactica'. Why screw with success? A little continuity might be in order. A slightly improved Opportunity rover would be quite cheap. They last a long time. Their exploration value is absolutely without precedent. If two rovers are good, six would be better. I have to believe this opinion is circulating at NASA.

Oh, and as a tip... Of those, the Opportunity heat shield impact site they drove to is among the nicest IMO.
That one is like the others also available as an uber size version.

- Spirit panoramas
- Opportunity panoramas

I'd assume all there are available in anything from small to huge images in typical NASA fashion. :-)

- Spirit panoramas
- Opportunity panoramas

I'd assume all there are available in anything from small to huge images in typical NASA fashion. :-)

It's called Gusev crater.

Not to be cruel and kick up their bandwidth, but is a larger version

Does anyone have a link to LARGER pictures of what the rovers are seeing? The linked to 360 view [http://origin.mars5.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/sp irit/20051021a/site_A114_880_navcam_360_cyl-A627R1 _br.jpg%5D is cool, but too small for details. Looking for a nice one to span two monitors for a nice desktop. I remember some of the first shots showing the side of the landing craft, some tire tracks and such were just amazing.

From this page it looks like the two telescopes in combination have a resolution 10x that of Hubble. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 m in diameter compared to the LBT's 8.4 m (but atmospheric distortion lowers the resolution of ground-based telescopes). The main advantage to the dual-telescope set-up is not the increased resolution, but the ability to do optical interferometry: cancel out the signal that you don't want, or select for the signal that you do.

The Keck Telescope in Hawaii is also designed to do optical interferometry, though I'm not sure what kind of results they have gotten so far.

I agree with Dvorak. Maybe that's because I'm somewhat of a dinosaur too. So I wrote my own photo program that performs the important fundamentals, such as merging Mars Rover raw photos into color images and generating web pages with lat-lon-altitude from the image exif info. Important, fundamental stuff! (This can't be advertising if if I don't make any money on it, right?)