Mars-On-Earth Webcams Online

mkasei writes: "High in the arctic polar desert sits the Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station. Its first year of operations started about 5 weeks ago. There have been numerous technical difficualties but everything seems to be working now. Today they turned on 2 of 3 webcams so people can spy in on them. The habitat as it is called has two decks. There is a webcam on each deck. A third is to be placed outside facing the hab as "astronauts" egress out of the hab for EVA's in simulated space suits. They are working in collaboration with NASA's Haughton-Mars Project and other organizations to learn what it will be like to live and work on Mars. In the next few weeks they plan on testing out several small rovers and a prototype Mars suit."

Comments

Saturn 5? Was Re:Scientific American article

[joneshenry]

It seems to me Zubrin's plan immediately falls apart because we simply don't have "a single, heavy-lift booster rocket with a capability equal to that of the Saturn 5 rockets from the Apollo era". Is Zubrin talking about something similar to Magnum? According to that article, even if the plans for the original Saturn 5 haven't been destroyed, it is simply impossible for us to manufacture something similar to the Saturn 5 today. Magnum's 80 tons of payload would be a bit less than the 100 of Saturn 5.

Expectations...

[nick_davison]

But where's the "Up Space Suit" cam? And how do we vote them out of the Habitat?

Reality TV!

[Dr_Cheeks]

Phew, thank God for this. Big Brother and Survivor have just finished here in the UK - I need somewhere else to get my fix of reality TV. Question is; do they get rewarded with booze/food/etc. if they complete their tasks correctly, and get such privileges witheld if they're unsucessful?

And how does the system of voting people out work? I couldn't find anything on the site about it.

In Other News: Crushing Defeat After Just 5 Weeks

[absurd_spork]

In other news: The Mars Society's Arctic Research Station project suffered a crushing defeat after only five weeks of operation when their life support systems, hosted on the machine arctic.marssociety.org, went offline after a mass distributed denial of service attacks known as the Slashdot effect killed their web server, which was hosted on the very same machine.

Thousands of users watched the crew's last agonized struggles over two of the three newly-operational web cams. Again, a prosperous project has been killed by the mindless hacking activities of a group of anonymous cowards.