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Sounds from Polar Lander? Well, Maybe Not
rosewoodwrote to us saying that those faint signals from the Mars Polar Lander have turned out to be much ado about nothing. NASA has said that based on the fact that other sites have been unable to hear those faint sounds, the sounds were probably terrestrial in origin.
From the martians! Really, this is too bad. i was sorta hoping the plucky little rover would pull through.
"ET phone paramedics! Get this %$#@ thing off me! Damn humans!"
Anyway, these space programs must be quite expensive because NASA has been hunting & hoping for signals from the probe since the 'crash' and still keep going.
Actually it'd be very nice to see their programs advance and not get setbacks like this. Because I want to code my last lines of Linux code in outer space. :)
It probably was jodi foster trying to drum up hype for another bad movie. (2 hrs and the damn alien was her father?!?!? GRRRRR)
The Martian Picture Association (MPA) managed to get an injunction giving them a monopoly on Martian pictures.
We are sorry to report that the faint signals heard over the past several days are not coming from the polar lander, Its only aliens.
BTW, to the moderators. Pancaked is a term for going splat, this is not a pancake troll.
kwsNI
I hope that this will not stop NASA or other Space agencies from going to Mars. What would be good is if NASA and the european space ageny joined forces and then sent a similar lander to Mars. Then America would not have all the costs.
I am sure that there is enough money floating around, and if there was some cooperation between europe and America on this then maybe, just maybe all those Americans will stop saying 'spend less on Space and more on Welfare'.
TURN THE STEREO DOWN ALREADY!!!
Are we supposed to buy into this lame weather balloon story again?
NASA should fess up and release the alien heads to the public.
..search for signals from Polar Lander.
:=)
Why couldn't they have given it a mobile phone ? You appear to be able to use them almost anywhere else. Maybe next time they should install a few mobile phone antenna masts in the vicinity of the landing zone as a backup to the backup comms system.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Not!
So it turns out CNN has been interfering with their dishes.
Big deal.
I have heard on good authority that the signals we recieved earlier have been translated and they in fact a message that came from mars, the message contained the following data; "If You Keep Sending This Junk To Us, We Are Going To Get Pissed Off."
Being a Dutch amateur-astronomer, the news of a Dutch radiotelescope looking for the Mars Polar Lander sounded nice to me. Finally a small country like the Netherlands can help a large organisation like NASA finding one of their landers. :((
Unfortuneally the Netherlands is a small country which is very high populated, so the amount of background interference is very high. We sometimes want to take a telescope out of the city to watch nebulas etc. but background interference is everywhere. If you look at air-photographs of Holland during night, you see one big light. That's probably the reason that our radio-telescope didn't find anything: a signal so faint as the one expected from the Mars Polar Lander is undetectable around here
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
I just think that we should simply encourage new technologies rather than laugh everytime another space robot goes boom. I once saw a show or something about scientists developing these little sensors that were so small and light that, when the machine that got them to a planet ejected them, they would kinda just fall to the ground and scatter like a spilled bag of Cheetos. It would be these Cheeto-bots that would take all the readings and data. It sounded like a cool idea to me at the time. I should think that if UMass students are doing graphic design on blood cells, we could build a Cheeto size robot.
Of course this is all coming from an Art major. So feel free to ridicule me with Scientific jargon.
Peace. Sway icq 5202646
Peace. Sway
Peace. Sway
kackle kackle, buzz buzz asckk asckk bzzt fffffiiiirrrr bzzt sssssssttttttt kackle kackle pppppppooooossssss asckk asckk ssssstttttttttt
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
have been unable to hear those faint sounds, the sounds were probably terrestrial in origin.
Surely the sounds where from terrestrial originin. Everybody knows that sound do not travel in space ;-)
I did not know that Radio telescope where in fact giant microphones.
My own recipe to win the Space:
1 - develop telepresence, i.e. remote control via Virtual Reality and sensorial feedback. With that, we don't have to build expansive life-supporting space infrastructures. And such technology will be greatly useful on Earth, too.
2 - Develop faster-than-light communication. Well, this is the SF part. Without that, telepresence would be limited to the Moon.
Any idea out there?
Ciao
----
FB
I am sure that there is enough money floating around, and if there was some cooperation between europe and America on this then maybe, just maybe all those Americans will stop saying 'spend less on Space and more on Welfare'.
.. it's too fucking bad! I am not personally resonsible for his situation, and so therefore I should not be financially responsible for his situation. The socialists who say otherwise are guilty of theft .. they are robbing me every paycheck of money that is rightfully mine, and giving it to some junkie on the street. This is an injustice that should and will be avenged, perhaps by a violent cleansing of the current government.
.. that's a promise!
And just what poor, wretched Americans are saying nonsense like this? "More on welfare," indeed. I guess such rhetoric would be par for the course, when one is talking to one of the bleeding-heart liberal socialists that are trying to take over the government and wrest power away from decent people. These are the people that want to take our government and turn it into one entitlement program after another. Then when decent people speak up against this, the liberals accuse you of being "heartless" and "callous."
Reality check: it is not my fault that homeless people are homeless! If Jimmy Whats-His-Name lost his job at the steel mill and has to sleep in the street covered with the funny pages from the Wall Street Journal, then that's obviously not a good thing, but as far as my paycheck is concerned
It is little wonder that these people are working to slowly erode the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution and take away the rights of people to own guns. My guns are cherished, beloved members of my family; I treasure the time I spend with them as much as I treasure the time I spend with my three children. Any liberal who shows up on my doorstep and tries to take away my sacred guns is going to get a bullet in the head and the chest. That's not a threat, liberals
Oh, and NASA isn't one fucking bit better than the welfare programs. It's just welfare for no-talent, out-of-work scientists that couldn't get real jobs doing real work. NASA is the biggest bullshit government program that ever existed. If God wanted us to explore space, He would have told us to in the Bible. As it is, NASA is almost as criminal as the welfare system. It should be disbanded, and those who are responsible for its administration should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
Those faint signals are really the Martian version of Jerry Springer being broadcast live.. it looks like Marvin the Martian wants to blow up Earth because it's obstructing his view of venus but the government insists that it's useful because it keeps sending spacecraft over for dissection and provides comic relief for the martians... so Marvin pulls out a vaporizer and #$!.. NO CARRIER
From what I remember of my Martian atmospheric chemistry (which is not much - I was much more involved in extragalactic stuff), the environment oxidizes anything it can get its winds on like there is no tomorrow. So given the length of time that the Martian Lander has been out there, I'd be surprised if much of it was still functioning even if it had landed softly in the first place. So I'd be very surprised if we heard anything now, and even more surprised if the NASA team was able to do anything useful with the lander now.
While NASA does lots of testing in harsh environments on the Earth's surface, nothing quite matches up to the difficulties of making a complex system lasts in the Martian environment.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This is too bad. Shit happens I guess.
After the Polar Lander was lost, I recall NASA saying they were going to use the orbiter to try to get images of the landing site to see if there was any sign of the lander. Were there any images released?
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
from http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html
16 February 2000: Mars Polar Lander Failure Uncovered? According to someone@jpl.nasa.gov: "A potential problem with the MPL descent sequence may have been located. During footpad deployment for the MPL, tests indicate that the touchdown sensors may have thought that the spacecraft had landed due to the force of landing gear deployment. If this occurred, the spacecraft would have separated from its parachute and descended normally to an altitude of forty meters. When the radar indicated this altitude, the spacecraft was programmed to descend at constant velocity until it touched down. But if the footpad sensors indicated a touchdown, the spacecraft would have shut off its descent engines at 40 meters altitude, dooming the mission."
sounds from a hot bowl of grits? "splash gloop squish squish," as it is poured down my pants. thank you.
In the 'heyday' of Pioneer, Voysger (even the Galileo and Cassini projects) the projects were getting more expensive and 'bloated' (according to the Congressional budgets) This money wasn't just being thrown away, but spent on backups, backups, and more backups and a lot of testing. (As a matter of fact, an "extra" spacecraft was often built to work out the bugs...)
The result: even through seeming distaster, these spacecraft did some amazing things:
- Voyager 2 was able to continue the "grand tour" of the solar system even though its systems were *pummeled* by particles in Saturn's rings. (There was a project that measured the density by 'listening' for spacecraft collisions on the plasma wave antenna)
- Galileo returned a huge amount of data even though the primary antenna was crippled.
I guess my point is that cranking out cheaper spacecraft in a hurry is not the best way to go about things. (Gee... sounds like software development) It would seem prudent to possibly have fewer missions if the extra time and budget to devote to testing and double-checking. (Granted, landing a spacecraft on another planet *is* a tricky thing, but hey, the Viking series seemed to do pretty well..)No, NASA is wasting my taxpayer dollars, and unless they get their act together, I'm not going to be terribly sympathetic. Yes, space exploration is a worthy goal - but there are other organizations that can be created to accomodate our exploration than NASA... in my opinion, it has failed it's charter.
As everybody with an opinion and the belief that they should control national policy comes schleppin out to shout their theories... blah. Big militaries suck. Little militaries suck. No military sucks. There's always some tradeoffs and some advantages and goddammit this sudafed is makin me freak out so I'll shut up now.
This is rather amusing.... at least to anyone who's familiar with the work of Oscar Wilde
Yeah I totally agree. If we had any sense, we'd set up homeless farms and feed the homeless to the homeless.
How the hell are we meant to protect America from the Commies if our guns are taken away huh? So what if people get shot. They shouldn't have pissed off a gun owner should they! And any time someone gets shot, thats probably 10 people who they're not going to shoot.
And hell no! If we explore space then we're just trying to be Gods ourselves! We should have all astronauts executed for Blashphemy! And planes should be grounded too. If God had meant for us to fly he would have given us wings. And paleontologists should be arrested for even thinking about arguing with the Bible's account of creation.
The result? We're more ignorant about Mars -now-, than we were when the Viking probes landed.
America has a simple choice, IMHO. It can spend vast sums of money on weapons, most of which are likely to be banned by International treaties before they are ever deployed. OR it can spend that same cash on raising educational standards, improving the conditions of those on welfare, AND enhancing space technology.
"But what about potential invaders?" bleat the Hawks.
If your technology is advanced enough, there -are- no "potential" invaders. There is no threat so great that a sufficiently enlightened civilisation cannot build a non-offensive defence.
By bleeding NASA dry, and by NASA opting to be top-heavy, America has no central resource for space R&D. Indeed, it has no resources for space R&D at all. All the high-tech eggs are in that one basket. The Polar Lander is proof that Congress prefers scrambled.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I saw the result of the measurements done by the Dutch radioastronomers , that even made it to CNN and the campus newspaper (in Dutch ;-) , and, as predicted, there was no signal there. Just a stripe in a nearby frequency that could be anything...
I did not see the following ones, where they would try to point to another spot on the sky and check for the same signal again, and try to prove its Earthly origin ...
You can see the radiotelescope here , the staff, and the equipment, but the data analysis was done afterwards at the university. They managed to produce some extremely cool plots but no traces of the lander. :-(
Be happy NASA did that work, or you wouldn't have low orbits possible from aircraft.
Also, NASA would love to forget about this low earth orbit crap. Carl Sagan and others have been haranguing it for years to do some Real Work. Funding has been cut, so they have been required to change to the "faster, better, cheaper" model. It's a good idea; some $200 million probes will be lost. But no $5 billion probes are lost.
The Soviets beat the US into orbit, were damn close for the moon, yet none of their Mars probes survived. That NASA has been successful shows a great deal of technichal excellence.
The greatest hope for space exploration is China. They have a big space program, which will, hopefully, scare the Americans into spending more on space to beat the "Communists", like they did against the Soviet Union.
to: nasa
.02
from: big green dude
please continue to send tasty satelites in our general direction [stop] they coincide nicely with our breeding cycle [stop] failure to comply would be bad [stop]
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Damn those terrestrians! Oh, wait... thats us. Doh!
Sorry, but the movie was pretty lame. One of my favorite books ever.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
And if America followed your advice, what would we have? America would become England or -- worse -- Canada, bankrupting itself on ineffectual social programs and depending on the good graces of a military superpower for protection against anyone with a slingshot and a rock.
"The entire concept of having a standind military is outdated..." I laughed my head off when I heard this one. Obviously the product of someone who's grown much too accustomed to not having guerillas or angry neighbors pointing assault weapons at their ass on a daily basis. Go live in Hebron or South Korea and tell me how you feel.
Never mind the American military pulled Europe out of the fire -- twice -- and kept the Soviets at bay (as inefficient as their weapons might have been, when you're outnumbered 10 to 1, things tend to even out). Never mind the scientific, technological, and medical advances that military-sponsored research has brought.
Give me a call when your eyes open.
However, NASA should be praised for trying, and especially for having the guts to make an announcement like this, despite the low chances of success. What other government agencies do you know of that will come out and say "This probably isn't going to work, but we'll keep you posted anyway" ?
In the end, lets just hope NASA (and the people holding NASA's pursestrings) have learned a few lessons. There's nothing wrong with "faster, better, cheaper" as a design objective, but if you want to minimize the failure rate, you can't cut all the way to the bone. $5 mil more and we'd know what happened to the lander.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I suppose if those faint radio signal were terrestrial in origin, that's not nearly as exciting.....
LOL
I think The Onion summed it up best...
"Mars Lander staggers into NASA headquarters drunk, broke"
Russia not a threat? You must miss that their fighter aircraft are some of the most advanced in the world, a match for ours technologically, and able to operate from less built up airfields. The MiG-29 can operate from a grassy field. I'd love to see an F-16, or any US fighter do that without exploding from FOD damage. The Russian infantry weapons beat ours in some respects. Their rifles are more reliable than our M-16. They use .30 caliber rounds so they are less deadly than our .223(its true, too much to go into here.) The point is all things balance out. The Russian armed forces if they could be brought up to the funding and morale levels of US forces would be exceedingly dangerous, nearly a match for ours. And if it wasn't for our head start, they would beat us. Don't dismiss the threats that are out there. There are alot that could erupt into war against US interests. Thus we must remain ready to fight for those interests.
The UHF system only puts out 6 or 7 watts max and that's through an omnidirectional antenna. I tried getting the radiation pattern for the antenna but they think omnidirectional is truly omnidirectional.
Not used to gaving guerillas or unfriendly neighbors? This deserves to be marked up for humour. England has been in a state of virtual war for 2/3rds of my life. My home city was almost destroyed by the largest conventional bomb since World War 2. When I've walked down the streets, I see bomb-proof waste bins, designed to contain explosions.
I have grown up around armed conflict. I've been to schools, where lessons were interrupted by reports of who had just sunk which ship. The beaches I used to go to had "Danger, Sea Mines!" signs along the coast.
I've found unexploded bombs, whilst metal detecting. My landlord, when I was at University, was a tail-gunner for The Dambusters. A great uncle was one of those involved in The Great Escape. I have probably more direct experience with armed conflict than the majority of non-military Americans. And, frankly, it sucks.
There's nothing glorious about war. War IS hell, and hell deserves to be condemned for what it is.
As for the Americans pulling the Europeans out of the fire - there would BE no America if England hadn't single-handedly defeated the entire Luftwaffe, WITHOUT help from the oh so mighty US of A.
I'd gladly go to South Korea, if I'd the budget to build effective ECM systems, missile and projectile interception systems, and a nice, high-speed, high-efficiency vehicle. Sod the Korean threat! Given that, there's not a damn thing anyone on either side of that purile war could do.
Better still, I'd gladly build a rocket capable of carrying me, life-support systems, and PURELY defensive systems and fly to the moon or Mars. For the same reason that England remains the ONLY country never to have been invaded, for over 1,000 years (and even then, it was by invitation), not a single military power on Earth would be capable of shifting any homestead I chose to make there.
You can spend your money on progress, OR destruction, but NOT both. The military nations choose destruction, and as you can see, their technology is floundering and they are all but dead, socially.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The US doesn't have problem just with Mars missions...it's Delta launch vehicles are not the most reliable also, and the shuttle fleet is aging. Japan just recently had a failure launching a satellite. Russia....where to begin? We'll see if the fledgling Chinese program can avoid problems. Will they steamroll over problems in order to get the job done?
It seems the ESA has avoided problems for a while; they specialize and do one thing well: launching other people's stuff. Is that the way to go? Should NASA specialize on making landers and instruments and leave the launches to other countries and private industry?
Yes, we need accountability for the use of our money, and we also expect returns. We also need an understanding that, despite our starry-eyed Hilton-in-space dreams, space exploration is still somewhat new, getting there and doing something other than just orbiting is difficult, and that most of the successes we do have (SOHO, Hubble, Chandra for some) are hardly ordinary achievements.
The Harrier can't outfly a MiG, true, but it CAN out-manoever it. You can't hit what you can't see.
Of course, you don't really need aircraft to deal with aircraft. Most modern aircraft have very sophisticated and therefore sensitive electronics. Confuse the computers, arc the switches with a high EMP, and watch the aircraft blow themselves up.
As for infantry weaponry, armies march on their stomachs (Napoleon). Take out the supply lines, and the toughest army in the world will rapidly disintegrate. Sure, some soldiers know which bugs to eat, but if you're using more calories than you're gaining, you're going to fall over, eventually. It's not an IF, merely a WHEN. If timing is tight, throw in some artificial snow, or drop firecrackers from a glider. Adrenaline rushes and cold both consume a massive amount of energy. Energy they're not replacing.
So far, I seem to have dealt with most of the Russian threat with a radio dish, a generator, a few Molotov Cocktails, and some bog-standard psychology. To produce the same effect, with much higher death rates, America needs to spend several trillion dollars, plus an unknown (but probably comparable) amount in it's black budget. Money it -COULD- be spending on creating a healthier, more enlightened civilisation.
There's nothing wrong in protecting yourself from aggression, but when that involves beating others to a pulp IN CASE they think about doing anything, it's not the others who are the aggressors.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
-dvorsd
As for the Americans pulling the Europeans out of the fire - there would BE no America if England hadn't single-handedly defeated the entire Luftwaffe, WITHOUT help from the oh so mighty US of A.
Actually, the Luftwaffe was still active when the US came into the war. Shot down quite a few US aircraft too. And as for their being no america? WHo in gods name would have successfully invaded and conquered? No nation had the naval capability to launch an invasion. Any fleet would have been destroyed before it got anywhere vital. At most we might have lost Alaska and the island territories. Remember the top two navies in the world were the British and the American. And if Britian were defeated, the surviving government officials would have fled to Canada and cooperated to keep US shores secure. Not to mention the fact that if they did manage by an act of god(thats what it would take) to land a serious invasion force on the US mainland, there were quite a few guns in the hands of private citizens, who would stand up and fight off any invader. The US would not fall. Lose territory, yes, but even if the other allies failed the US would have held out. You cannot defeat a people that are 100% behind a war for the survival of their people, who have more industrial might than any other nation, who produce enough food to feed the entire planet, with some of the most advanced technology in the world, fighting on their home ground, with freedom to own personal weapons. Only a fool expects to win against that sort of enemy. It would literally take an act of god for the axis to conquer the US.
See
9 9-00f1.html
http://www.spacer.com/spacecast/news/mars-polar
microswitch bounce when legs unfolded turned off the landing motor.
Before Chuck Yeager, everyone said the sound barrier was impenetrable.
No they didn't, people had been sending objects faster than the speed of sound once the first high powered rifle was developed. If you want to talk powered objects exceeding the speed of sound, the V-2 did that quite nicely.
In fact, they made the fuselage of the X-1 like a rifle bullet (30-06 maybe) because they knew they were shot a supersonic speeds.
The sound barrier was an engineering barrier, they weren't sure how the X-1 would control, and how much buffeting it would take when it penetrated it. They knew there wasn't any Physics reason it couldn't be done, unlike the Speed of Light.
George
Still, you don't know as much as you think. The Harrier was a joint US/UK project. I fact the current versions the RAF/RN and the USMC are quite different, both countries have gone on their own development path after the initial models. And Harriers for all their benefits are some of the most unsafe aircraft in any militaries inventory, are unreliable, limited in ordinance they can carry, etc... The vertical takeoff is almost never used, they can't carry enough weapons that way.
As for food, the average infantryman can carry several days worth of food in MRE's. And the MRE won't go bad for oh at least 5 years. Solves that problem. Plus, in combat if they need to keep going, theres always methamphetamines which do get issued in dire situations, and research on a variant of a nicotine patch that delivers nutrients instead.
EMP is great, but the only technology that can set loose a practical blast of EMP is nuclear weapons. Resaearch is continuing, but it is not a practical tactic yet.
I'd like to know the experience you have to judge the need for military power. Have you spent any time in uniform? I am currently serving in the United States Marine Corps Intelligence community, and trust me, if you saw all I do, you would believe in the need.
And there I was thinking that the thing used radio waves to communicate with earth.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
One failure scenario involves the leg deployment: the recoil might trigger the landing sensors on the footpads, so a little flag is set saying "Ground detected". Now, much later, when the parachute is cut away, the computer checks that flag which has not been cleared due to a software error. And it says, "Oh, hey, I'm on the ground! Time to turn off the rockets." Projected impact speed on the ground is over 80 mph. SPLAT.
Another interesting scenario: there was talk of searching for the lander parachute using the Surveyor spacecraft, so NASA asked Lockheed Martin, "Where did you say the parachute would fall again?" Lockheed Martin redid the calculations and it came out that the parachute could very well be draped over the poor lander. Imagine the lander - "Help, help, I'm trapped in a parachute." Yes, these are the same guys who screwed up the units in the previous orbiter fiasco.
And there are many many many other failure scenarios, too depressing to enumerate further: in summary, too little money, too little testing, and not enough redundancy means that not only was this mission likely to fail, it is unlikely we'll even know why it failed. Faster, better, cheaper - bah!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
and whats wrong with Canada eh?
depending on the good graces of a superpower for protection?
1)the military machine of the US would have ground to a halt without the natural resorces of Canada during WWII
2)the fact that our regular troops beat your "elite" troops in every military games since the 60s.
3)US military/industrial conspiricy vs the Avro Arrow. (nuff said... i dont need to get on a rant)
the current concept of the military is outdated. the nature of war has changed so much in the last 30 years that the current/previous system is in need of change. (see your own militarys experiments with the new "tech warriors" and the changes that face the military machine.)
funding for space reserch is needed. i belive more advances that benifit mankind as a whole have come from space reserch. (as opposed to new ways of killing us off then preventing it. the millitary has a habit of cause before cure discovery)
personally i really want off this rock...
i find it hard to belive we put people on the moon in a tin can and got them home and due to bugets we can't but a tin can on mars.
Proudly Canadian eh!
"long live the new flesh"
-videodrome
it responded alright. take a look at http://marstruth.tripod.com to see what REALLY happened. The truth RULES!
I almost thought you were serious until the Bible thing.
anyway, if you want to be 100% logical, you might have a point
however, most human beings have some sympathy for others, and don't think it's OK to have people starving in the streets. it's like Dennis Miller said: you can't just keep tinting your car windows until the homeless people on the street go away.
now, after saying that you may think I'm one of the "Welfare not space" people. I'm not. In fact I think that our spending on space should go way up.
but the first thing we should do is pay off the debt. If we do that, we'll have $250 billion/year more to spend on whatever, money we now spend on interest payments on the debt.
Ahh, you Colonials are so easy to wind up.
Saxo Grammaticus
If god wanted us to eat small furry animals, he would have given us teeth.
The U.S Government in an attempt to control world population institutes a new law limiting people to have 2 children and making abortions mandatory for anyone trying to have more. Should I form a militia to over throw the current government?...YES.
If the population is so far out of control that such measures become necessary in order to make continued life on Earth possible, why then I'll be the first one to shoot you and your militia buddies in the head. You don't have a "right" to screw the rest of us just to satisfy your own religious fanaticism and megalomania.
On the other hand, if such measures are not necessary, let me know where your militia is holding its meetings, so I can join up.
You see, to a real grown-up adult who's able to comprehend the whole rights'n'responsibilities thing, life looks pretty damn complicated. That's part of being an adult human, and it's also what absolutists and reductionists like you are running away from when they retreat into their little fantasy worlds. As Samuel Johnson said, "He who makes himself a beast rids himself of the pain of being a man". He was talking about the responsibilities that come along with a capacity for moral choice, and he was talking about the fact that some people refuse to face up to those responsibilities. The point applies to you just as as well as it applies to the average street junkie.
Before everybody starts kvetching about the satate of NASA funding (oops! too late!) it's worth noting that the FY2001 budget that Clinton submitted to congress calls for a 6% increase in NASA funding (compared to a 1.5% increase in the total budget). I realize that this still has to pass congress but it's a sign of confidence and a good starting point. This brings NASA's annual funding into the neighborhood of $13 Billion.
Also, recent successes by NASA, such as the Eros asteroid study and the earth mapping mission (which could have and maybe should have been done unmanned) have attracted a lot of positive press.
Those guys looked good because they launched a lot of birds, and eventually succeeded. If we sent ten probes to Mars over a short period, some would work and some wouldn't, and we'd get data back. Look at Iridium - dozens of launches, a few failures, operational on schedule. (The service isn't selling well, but it works as designed.)
That said, do you know what the best way to curb the national debt is? The feds need to stop selling the securities (backed by the 'full faith and credit of the United States') & if you own one, cash it in. Consider it your way of paying down the national debt.
You see, the interest earned on your savings bond (etc.) is the interest on the national debt everone seems so interested in getting rid of.
This story has way too many holes in it. Something doesn't sound right. There is more to this story then is being told. A mars bound craft disopears. NASA spends months looking for it. They heard something, ohhh, its just some ET thing ( not as in the movie ), no big deal... WHAT ?!? You heard what ?!? They seem to be passing this up like its not a big deal. There is a LOT more to this story. It just doesn't add up... I do belive there is something out there, where is the question. They ( we ) will make contact one day. ( not as in the bad movie ) Its just a matter of time.
> "Help, help, I'm trapped under a parachute." The Russian Venera program has a few amusing snafus of its own. After building a probe strong enough to survive the Venusian atmosphere (extreme heat, pressure and sulphuric acid rain), they successfully landed it on the surface. Unfortunately they didn't get any pictures because the lens cap had melted and stuck on! A subsequent mission did get the pictures, but when the arm designed to place a sensor on the surface to measure its properties was deployed, it landed (you guessed it) on the ejected lens cap...
the pioneer probes are not as far from earth as the voyager 1 probe, below are the statistic from the voyager and pioneer probes Voyager 1 top stat. Voyager 2 Distance from the Sun (Km) 11,445,000,000 8,987,000,000 Distance from the Sun (Mi) 7,111,000,000 5,584,000,000 Distance from the Earth (Km) 11,499,000,000 9,106,000,000 Distance from the Earth (Mi) 7,145,000,000 5,658,000,000 Total Distance Traveled Since Launch (Km) 13,251,000,000 12,465,000,000 Pioneer 10 Distance from Sun (1 February 2000): 74.46 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.24 km/sec (27,380 mph) Distance from Earth: 11.07 billion kilometers (6.879 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 20 hours 30 minutes Pioneer 11 Launched on 5 April 1973, Pioneer 11 followed its sister ship to Jupiter (1974), made the first direct observations of Saturn (1979) and studied energetic particles in the outer heliosphere. The Pioneer 11 Mission ended on 30 September 1995, when the last transmission from the spacecraft was received. Its electrical power source exhausted, the spacecraft could no longer operate any of its scientific instruments, nor point its antenna toward Earth. The spacecraft is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle), Northwest of the constellation of Sagittarius. Pioneer 11 may pass near one of the stars in the constellation in about 4 million years. So you see the distance isn't the reason we can't track them, Pioneer 11 is "broken" and we still actively track Pioneer 10, and it is looking for the heliopause as well the voyagers. And yes I totally agree with you about finding the heliopause that will be the definitive answer in telling where the solar system ends. PS - the Pioneer info was updated on the first of feb this year, and the voyager stuff was updated on the fourth of this month. And all of this can be found at JPL's and Ames research centers web sites.
okay, I have to give the British credit for the Battle of Britain. Half-credit, though, because there's no chance in hell that the RAF alone could have stood against the Luftwaffe.
The more I read, the more of a fruitcake you sound like...Mars is safe because England is. Hmmm. Last I checked, you can shoot a rocket to both...
We have a place in my country for people like you: it's called Montana.
*WE* put people on the moon? No, *Americans* put *Americans* on the moon. Canadians watched it on TV, when they weren't too busy watching the "All Moose Porn, All The Time" channel.
What's wrong with Canada? Let's see...there's the grand triumph of socialism, nationalized health care -- which bankrupts the country and forces people to come to the US for surgery. Then there's Quebec. Just go smack ol' Frenchie in the face a few times. Or better yet, let them go independent and turn into a Third World country.
Crappy weather, high taxes, poor health care, tiny industrial base...who wouldn't want to come, eh?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
SHHHHHHHH......
*** BOOOOOOOOM ! ***
How are the high-tech jobs over their? After graduating from college I'm going to move out of America. I'm sick of this fucking country. (Espically after just getting arrested for only 7 grams of cannabis.) I would like to work as a network admin but I would guess that the country is quite popular, and their aren't that many jobs. Or the government makes it a pain in the ass to get a work visa.
Looks like the aliens are not to blame. The below describes a fatal design flaw. Enough of rocket science reality, now back to Eno and Deep Blue Day. http://www.spacer.com/spacecast/news/mars-polar99- 00f1.html Cameron Park - February 16, 2000 In a surprising development, an industry source told "SpaceDaily" Tuesday that the Failure Review Board for the Mars Polar Lander has located a fatal design flaw that is regarded as the most probable culprit in the Lander's disappearance last Dec. 3 somewhere over the southern polar regions of Mars. According to our source, the flaw is remarkably simple -- and involves the simple "ground contact" switch system designed to turn off the Lander's landing rocket motors the moment one of its three landing legs touched the Martian surface. After its initial high-speed entry into the Martian atmosphere, the Lander's planned sequence of events was as follows: At about 7.3 kilometers above the surface, while the Lander was still moving at about one-half km per second, it would have deployed its 8.4-meter-wide parachute, which would substantially further slow it, but which -- in Mars' faint wisp of an atmosphere -- would be unable to slow it below about 80 meters per second.
STAR WARS! Eight hours and and the damn alien was HIS FATHER?!?!?!? GRRRRRR
Thanks for that link -- it's pretty amazing to contemplate the extent of human technology's reach. Almost half a light-day's journey in Voyager 1's case, and it's still going strong.
Looking at the performance of these spacecraft, built with decades-old technology, makes one realize just how much is gained by spending the extra dollars up front and doing the job right the first time. Here's hoping things go half as smoothly with Cassini as they have with the V'gers.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
At least I heard that was the message coming from the aliens from the Mars Polar Lander.
the only technology that can set loose a practical blast of EMP is nuclear weapons.
...and how about the Russian brief-case sized microwave-bomb? Take it near a computer center, detonate and crash boom bang, EMP for fun and profit.
>>the average infantryman can carry several days worth of food in MRE's
Ahem. You have several days worth of food. Then what? Eat leaves? Hardly "solves the problem" does it?
>>I am currently serving in the United States Marine Corps Intelligence community,
Oh this is TOO easy...
i still think it landed on a little gren mans door step either that or it was really a supply drop for martian colonists that the goverment has not told us about so if they fail no one will notice
lose != loose
NASA has some REAL fundemental problembs, and it's all down to beaurocracy and lack of real direction. It's going to be vry bad for NASA if the ESA's Mars Express mission works out 100%. Even worse if Beagle 2 performs properly. Not only does it have a certain (if eccentric) style to it, namely carrying a piece of artwork by Damien Hurst and a specialy composed Blur track to announce it's all clear and landed, but it was done on a shoestring budget and has the highest since to mission ratio so far in space exploration. After the loses of teh Mars probes, and the possible desgin eras in the workhorse landers, and the fact that the mars express mission has nothing that is particular technicaly advanced over NASA (hell, chunks of it are based on NASA expertise), I'm sure it wont be long before politicians start asking questions. Is it time for an ISA? Well, maybee. For space exploration is science and science has always worked best in co-operation. The ISS is a red herring, largely political IMHO. But some of the European co-operative science programs are working very well, and would beneit both the USA and Europe if the USA got in on them. Cern is probably one of the most succesful European Co-operative efforts (and I'm a eurosceptic!), not to mention the Joint European Torus fusion project. ESA seems to be much better at getting things done for less cost (barring the occasional mess ups). However, if we want colonies on the moon and in space, forget NASA, ESA or an ISA. That needs industrial/commercial will, not from the state.
If God created us in his own immage, how do you explain Vanessa Feltz?