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It was the Bunny Thing. Opportunity's next. Oh no!

• When breaking out of the Earth's gravity well, you are indeed only breaking out of the Earth's gravity well. Not the Earth's and the Moon's.
• The moon's gravity is 1/6th that of the Earth's. From a kinetic energy standpoint (so we can compare apples to apples) it's 22 times harder to escape the Earth's pull than it is to escape the moon's pull. That doesn't mean it will require 22 times more fuel, since that would depend on the rocket design.
• The Shuttle's total mass is 85% fuel. (That one you got right.) The boosters use a solid fuel and the main engines are burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen at a 6:1 O/F ratio. That means at liftoff, the shuttle is carrying about 1.4 million lbs (650,000 kg) of oxygen, a substance which is readily available in the atmosphere the shuttle is flying through. Rocket liftoff from Earth is highly inefficient, but that's a topic for another post.

Yes, but WHY Glenn? If NASA was truly interested in studying the effects of space travel on the elderly, they would have picked someone with more space experience and better qualifications than Glenn. Matter-of-fact, they could have picked almost *any* astronaut retired or not and they would have been a better test subject.

Im sure that someone who once piloted a spacecraft by himselfis qualified to serve as passenger on another spacecraft.
Mission Successful. First American in orbit. Total time weightless 4 hours 48min 27sec.

Nasa's site has a lot more info, especially if you do a search on their site for 'tumbleweed'.
Some early research
Video from June 2001.

J

Nasa's site has a lot more info, especially if you do a search on their site for 'tumbleweed'.
Some early research
Video from June 2001.

J

Nasa's site has a lot more info, especially if you do a search on their site for 'tumbleweed'.
Some early research
Video from June 2001.

J

That the rovers that go there will move faster than a few feet per day?

That is an exaggeration. The rovers can go at least about 100 feet a day, but often stop to look around or poke rocks. Look how far Spirit has gone. It's lander is little more than a spec in this scene. I bet Opportunity will go even further per day when it moves out of the crater because there are less rocks in the way to study or stump the rover.

You mean, like this?

From the link:

Beyond science studies of their own, orbiters have an important communications role to play. Not since Viking has NASA employed both orbiters and landed vehicles together. Today, the Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters are helping the Spirit rover "talk" to ground controllers at JPL.

HAND

GTRacer
- ...to the Moon, Alice!

Funny thing is, a Republican senator did it first. And he wasn't an experienced astronaut.

Actually there is quite a lot of useful stuff there - Oxygen, for one, and possible materials for creating rocket fuel.

From His NASA Bio Page

He attended Muskingum College in New Concord and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering.....

When astronauts were given special assignments to ensure pilot input into the design and development of spacecraft, Glenn specialized in cockpit layout and control functioning, including some of the early designs for the Apollo Project.

It depends, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement that this is always the case, but yes, I can certainly envision scenarios in that the benefit to customers is worth the price of the upgrade when you get less than a 200% return as you mentioned. I hope I didn't come across by saying uprade every 9 months for the latest and greatest.

As far as having too many processors, I work in one of the premier supercomputing centers in the world (shameless link) and we probably have more processors in a single computer than some people have at their entire sites. So I have *some* understanding of the logistics involved. Having said that, you're absolutely correct, replacing hundreds or thousands of CPU's isn't something that you do every year (or even every three).

As before, you make good points and I'm not really disagreeing with most of what your saying. Just trying to point out that it can make sense to upgrade when you get less than a 200% or 400% return on speed. Espeically when you have world-wide support dependencies, like providing the CPU time for the Return to Flight Initiative.

The bigger problem is that after X years with no power, thermal effects (ie hot-cold cycling) on the electronics and drive motors etc would have rendered them mostly useless.

However, that doesn't mean there's no point going back to check it out. That's exactly what Apollo 12 did - they executed a planned landing within several hundred meters of an earlier Surveyor probe, cut bits off it (the TV camera) and brought them back to Earth for analysis.

One of the more interesting findings was bacteria - someone had apparently sneezed near the camera when it was being assembled, and the bacteria was still viable after several years on the surface of the moon....

... Dr Joanna Morgan, of Imperial College, London, UK, told BBC News Online: "An impact the size of Chicxulub occurs on Earth about every 100m years. "That two such impacts occurred within 300,000 years and both hit the Earth at almost exactly the same place is statistically unlikely."

After all when Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter, it hit as at least 21 discernable fragments. If some of them had missed the first time, they would probably have hit some time later, being on intersecting orbits and all.

If we brought back 10 tons of mars rocks, the chances of getting a fossil are still slim to none. Talk about needle in a haystack. Not to mention the fact that you have to land near some of it to begin with.

According to NASA, a meteorite that was discovered in Antartica contains indications that life once existed on Mars. If life was abundant enough that a rock could be ejected from Mars and subsequently make it to Earth with some evidence of life (structures similar to Earth fossils and organic molecules) then I think the chances of finding a fossil in a targeted sample are much greater than you assume.

The ISS and Mars have the forest. Hubble needs a tree.

The cost so far for this most recent mars mission is over $800 million. Budgeting through further missions is set to exceed $15 billion. The ISS outdoes even this, with an expected cost of near $30 billion to finish the station, and estimated operating costs of $1.5 billion a year once completed.

Hubble needs about $100 million for a single shuttle launch. $200 million in equipment has already been constructed and is only waiting in a warehouse for a mission.

I don't deny the importance of the ISS and Mars missions. All these projects have significant importance for science, technology, and society as a whole. Hubble is about far more than "getting to see a black hole". We have made dramatic advances in astrophysics with the help of the telescope. We have gained immense insight into the depths of our universe, to an extent that won't be possible again for a very long time.

Taking relative cost of the three projects into account, Hubble is by leaps and bounds the most effective. Do the math. Fixing the hubble will only take 0.2% of the cost of the ISS and Mars missions. Given the advances in science and technology we have extracted from Hubble, the return on this small investment is tremendous.

That's why I sigh.

The ISS and Mars have the forest. Hubble needs a tree.

The cost so far for this most recent mars mission is over $800 million. Budgeting through further missions is set to exceed $15 billion. The ISS outdoes even this, with an expected cost of near $30 billion to finish the station, and estimated operating costs of $1.5 billion a year once completed.

Hubble needs about $100 million for a single shuttle launch. $200 million in equipment has already been constructed and is only waiting in a warehouse for a mission.

I don't deny the importance of the ISS and Mars missions. All these projects have significant importance for science, technology, and society as a whole. Hubble is about far more than "getting to see a black hole". We have made dramatic advances in astrophysics with the help of the telescope. We have gained immense insight into the depths of our universe, to an extent that won't be possible again for a very long time.

Taking relative cost of the three projects into account, Hubble is by leaps and bounds the most effective. Do the math. Fixing the hubble will only take 0.2% of the cost of the ISS and Mars missions. Given the advances in science and technology we have extracted from Hubble, the return on this small investment is tremendous.

That's why I sigh.

...but wouldn't it be a helluva lot quicker if ESA had stuck an ion engine or something onto the probe, like they're doing with the SMART moon mission? Why didn't they? I mean, even if it added a few years onto the development time, wouldn't it have got there quicker?

SMART is ESA's first mission using the ion drive and is used to test the technology. I think that, when the Rosetta project was given the go ahead in 1993, the ion drive was either not avalaible in its current form or SMART was selected as the test project. And you can not change the design of a long running project like Rosetta half way, without a significant cost penalty.

I saw that the NASA have launched Deep Space 1 in 1998. This probe flew by the commet Borrelly in 2001, using ion propulsion. As with the recent ESA and NASA mars missions, you can not compare the projects directly -- Deep Space 1 was a high risk project, didn't land, the speed/trajectories of the commets differ, etc -- but it shows the ion drive is certainly an option.

Pepijn Kenter.

This does not take into account nitrates in the ground, which might have contributed to atmospheric nitrogen in the past. Also, the water % in the table above is probably going to be revised, perhaps, studies on Nitrogen density are likely.

Further, nitrosomas and nitrobacter are extremely common bacteria in earth water - ask anyone who's run an aquarium - I predict they may be among the first bacteria discovered on Mars.

My .02 cents

They already knew Mars has ice caps. So now it appears there was once liquid water also.

Click here For the copy/paste inhibited

Still has some good stuff.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressrelea ses/20040302a.html

Clicky Here

I found the live video from NASA here:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

They are talking about it right now it is real interesting.

No link in the article. Here is the press release: NASA Press Release

can be found here

I think I know what they did with the apes that came back from the early spaceflights.

They put them in charge of NASA TV programming.

I mean, J.H.C, when the "big spacewalk" was happening a week or two ago I tuned into NASA TV, and what did I get to watch?

**NOTHING**

Well, not quite nothing, a grainy image of the command center with an even grainer occasional camera view of a bigscreen projection of their track, which was 100 times worse than simply going to J-Track. Do you seriously mean to tell me that NASA controllers did not have a video feed of or from their own astronauts outside the station, and that all they had was nearly unintelligable acryonym laced audio? Or is it that they simply can't afford a $5 video splitter?

( During the hubble repairs a few years ago at one point they showed nothing but a video feed of an inanimate obscure connector between the shuttle and the telescope. Apparently the shuttle didn't have enough downlink bandwidth, and they needed them all for the job at hand. )

In any case if NASA and the administrationis so concerned about public image and if they really want people to get enthused about spaceflight, how about simply spending an extra $5000 for a single extra camera on the station to provide a view of the interesting things going on?

Throw in another camera to give us a LIVE view of the earth on another channel - 24/7. How many of you wouldn't LOVE to see a 400 mile wide live video feed from space of the earth, and follow it along with J-Track, a recent GOES image, and your atlas / globe, dynamic topographic and/or terraserver reference feed?

Isn't this supposed to be the information age?

Can you imagine how utterly amazing it would be for science teachers to be able to plan a science/geography class around an hour of that each couple weeks with a few groups of kids around 5 PCs all watching the different feeds and trying to match them to the live feed? Add in a few kids using google groups and google news to provide live socio/political/weather commentary, etc etc.

I think I know what they did with the apes that came back from the early spaceflights.

They put them in charge of NASA TV programming.

I mean, J.H.C, when the "big spacewalk" was happening a week or two ago I tuned into NASA TV, and what did I get to watch?

**NOTHING**

Well, not quite nothing, a grainy image of the command center with an even grainer occasional camera view of a bigscreen projection of their track, which was 100 times worse than simply going to J-Track. Do you seriously mean to tell me that NASA controllers did not have a video feed of or from their own astronauts outside the station, and that all they had was nearly unintelligable acryonym laced audio? Or is it that they simply can't afford a $5 video splitter?

( During the hubble repairs a few years ago at one point they showed nothing but a video feed of an inanimate obscure connector between the shuttle and the telescope. Apparently the shuttle didn't have enough downlink bandwidth, and they needed them all for the job at hand. )

In any case if NASA and the administrationis so concerned about public image and if they really want people to get enthused about spaceflight, how about simply spending an extra $5000 for a single extra camera on the station to provide a view of the interesting things going on?

Throw in another camera to give us a LIVE view of the earth on another channel - 24/7. How many of you wouldn't LOVE to see a 400 mile wide live video feed from space of the earth, and follow it along with J-Track, a recent GOES image, and your atlas / globe, dynamic topographic and/or terraserver reference feed?

Isn't this supposed to be the information age?

Can you imagine how utterly amazing it would be for science teachers to be able to plan a science/geography class around an hour of that each couple weeks with a few groups of kids around 5 PCs all watching the different feeds and trying to match them to the live feed? Add in a few kids using google groups and google news to provide live socio/political/weather commentary, etc etc.

I think I know what they did with the apes that came back from the early spaceflights.

They put them in charge of NASA TV programming.

I mean, J.H.C, when the "big spacewalk" was happening a week or two ago I tuned into NASA TV, and what did I get to watch?

**NOTHING**

Well, not quite nothing, a grainy image of the command center with an even grainer occasional camera view of a bigscreen projection of their track, which was 100 times worse than simply going to J-Track. Do you seriously mean to tell me that NASA controllers did not have a video feed of or from their own astronauts outside the station, and that all they had was nearly unintelligable acryonym laced audio? Or is it that they simply can't afford a $5 video splitter?

( During the hubble repairs a few years ago at one point they showed nothing but a video feed of an inanimate obscure connector between the shuttle and the telescope. Apparently the shuttle didn't have enough downlink bandwidth, and they needed them all for the job at hand. )

In any case if NASA and the administrationis so concerned about public image and if they really want people to get enthused about spaceflight, how about simply spending an extra $5000 for a single extra camera on the station to provide a view of the interesting things going on?

Throw in another camera to give us a LIVE view of the earth on another channel - 24/7. How many of you wouldn't LOVE to see a 400 mile wide live video feed from space of the earth, and follow it along with J-Track, a recent GOES image, and your atlas / globe, dynamic topographic and/or terraserver reference feed?

Isn't this supposed to be the information age?

Can you imagine how utterly amazing it would be for science teachers to be able to plan a science/geography class around an hour of that each couple weeks with a few groups of kids around 5 PCs all watching the different feeds and trying to match them to the live feed? Add in a few kids using google groups and google news to provide live socio/political/weather commentary, etc etc.

Whatmore is the NASA home page is featuring the Super Bowl Superzoom One Loooong Pass - NASA Drops in on the Big Game What is up with that? Has NASA been tasked by the FCC? Is this some new mission to earth program? Hell I hope that they found intelligent life on Mars because there ain't none in Houston.

Are you referring to this image ? That dark streak and "puddle" are a shadow from a contact prob on the arm.

You are correct...I don't believe the microscopic imager has the magnification muscle to view something as small as bacteria, and the Mossbauer spectrometer is very specific in what it can analyze (iron-bearing minerals). These rovers are, as designed, primarily geological instruments.

For details about what the rovers are carrying, instrument-wise, see this page.

It would be regrettable if this annoucement only amounted to "We have evidence from the rock layers / erosion patterns / spherule concretions that water must have been involved in the creation of these features", as we already know that water can today exist in liquid form on 30% of the planet's surface, and that water has been active on the Martian surface in the recent geological past (source). But given NASA's reluctance regarding all things water-related, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it's going to be.

The really interesting stuff is the things they have avoided talking about, like the "mud-like texture". But most interesting in terms of water evidence is the trench dug by Opportunity. If you look at the fairly solid wall of soil at the right you will see a slightly dark streak on it. That streak leads directly to a puddle on the floor. Given this visual evidence, and the structure of the soil, it is pretty obvious that this stuff is wet.

The simple reality is that Mars is a wet planet. The oceans didn't just vanish, they went underground into the porous subsurface world of Mars. That's where the real action is, not on the UV-sterilized surface. All we see of Mars' underground water world on the surface is the occasional puddle or pond, the black streaks and Malin's famous gullies. If you want to see Martian life, find wet underground regions with geothermal activity.

You can view NASA TV online, as well, it seems... (The page also has satellite coordinates, and alternate sources for NASA TV)

NASA TV

And if you really can't wait 10 years... NASA's Stardust will bring back some pieces of comet in only 685 days :)

Seeing as how you're on the "inside" of this thing...care to spill on any details of what the Big Announcement will be about tomorrow?

According to this, about 100 billionths a degree above absolute zero. This just turned up with a quick google and it has most likely gotten lower since then. As for refridgeration, not in the near... or distant future.

Most of the smaller body you suggest is another spherule has a shadow cast over it...

I don't see the shadow you're talking about, maybe you're looking at the wrong one.

...it is possible it's nothing more than a portion of the substrate that stubbornly refuses to detach from the spherule.

Here is a sharper image of the the same object, it clearly shows that the spherile is one object

I don't see why this shape should be outside the parameters of the process I'm describing.

This shape as well as the the spherical shapes of the other spheriles are more likely to be hematite crystals caused by some metamorphic process. The process you describe wouldn't form the smooth shapes seen in the images.

Most of the smaller body you suggest is another spherule has a shadow cast over it...

I don't see the shadow you're talking about, maybe you're looking at the wrong one.

...it is possible it's nothing more than a portion of the substrate that stubbornly refuses to detach from the spherule.

Here is a sharper image of the the same object, it clearly shows that the spherile is one object

I don't see why this shape should be outside the parameters of the process I'm describing.

This shape as well as the the spherical shapes of the other spheriles are more likely to be hematite crystals caused by some metamorphic process. The process you describe wouldn't form the smooth shapes seen in the images.

Who said Mars had no atmosphere? Any object with a gravitational pull that exceeds the mean escape velocity of gas molecules (over-simplifying here - better explanation here) will have an atmosphere. The moon has a gravity below that mean (think of it as a vertical line on a bell curve, but before the bell), hence it has little/no atmosphere.

Mars, on the other hand, is a much larger body and hence has enough gravity to retain an atmoshphere of about 1-9 millibars, depending on altitude. Indeed, it's the very existence of this atmosphere that allowed the lander to slow from 12,000mph to 1000mph before the parachute opens.

As for the issue of proof... I agree that this one experiment does not constitute undeniable proof of life on Mars. However, the results of the experiment met and exceeded pre-mission criteria for life detection. It was only after the fact that all of these other alternative explanations came about. I think that Ockham's Razor applies here: if it looks like a duck and quacks, it's probably a duck. Even if it isn't a duck, it deserves serious consideration.

Which leads me to this point: According to the expert that NASA paid to design and perform the experiment, there is positive evidence that there is life on Mars. However, NASA takes the opposite view: "The biology experiment produced no evidence of life at either landing site". This is not what their own chief scientist on the experiment in question believes. If he's a quack, why did they hire him?

So, if NASA has doubts about the validity of the results, then why aren't they be sending more life-detection experiments to Mars? Wouldn't that be the scientific thing to do? No other lander (past or planned) has direct life detection experiments. Why not?

Is it just me or is anyone else getting tired of hearing what music each rover "wakes-up" to as reported on by nasa each day on the NASA Rover Status Page?

It was cute the first few times, but now it's just getting insipid as these engineers try desperately to link the day's work with the title of some song.

Ok guys, we all know you have gigs of MP3s and you're all really cool. Now, why not just start every rover morning with Also Sprach Zarathustra?

My God! It's full of dicks!

yeah, you get the bends, that's why austronaught have to breathe pure oxygen for 2(IIRC) hours before going out on a space walk - the pressure in the suit is far less than 'normal' pressure inside the ship/station.
YOu also have to make sure that you let all air out of your lungs, otherwise they migh pop - another scuba diving related danger!
Not sure if you would be able to live for extended period in a vacuum but with a oxygen supply. Nasa had an incident with a suit getting decompressed and the guy was OK, but fainted because of lack of oxygen he stayed consious for about 20 sec. you can read more about it here

If you look at the spheroid in the upper left of this image you see a spheroid that actually looks like two partial spheres stuck together. It looks to me like it's caused by an imperfection in the crystal structure. Anyway the shape couldn't be caused by the spheroid rolling around on the surface.

Anyone know where the images of this 'pasta-like' object are?

You can see it here. It's a little above and to the left of the center of the picture.

Other pictures from that day (sol 30 for Opportunity) are here. They drilled the area in the following days and there's a picture of the 'pasta' post-drilling, but finding that image is left as an exercise for the reader.

Anyone know where the images of this 'pasta-like' object are?

You can see it here. It's a little above and to the left of the center of the picture.

Other pictures from that day (sol 30 for Opportunity) are here. They drilled the area in the following days and there's a picture of the 'pasta' post-drilling, but finding that image is left as an exercise for the reader.

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

These can be illusions, of course.