Odyssey Arriving at Mars Tonight

moloader writes: "Odyssey will arrive at Mars on October 24, 2001, 0230 Universal Time (October 23, 7:30pm PDT/ 10:30pm EDT). As it nears its closest point to the planet over the northern hemisphere, the spacecraft will fire its 640-newton main engine for approximately 19.7 minutes to allow itself to be captured into an elliptical, or looping, orbit about 20 hours long. Go Mars!"

Comments

Far out (literaly!)

[zensonic]

Since space radiation presents an extreme hazard to crews of interplanetary missions, the experiment will attempt to predict anticipated radiation doses that would be experienced by future astronauts and help determine possible effects of Martian radiation on human


You have to give NASA credit for thinking far ahead. I'm not that optimistic about space exploration. We need some major breaktroughs in order to get further away from the moon.

First theres the problem with the propulsion system: we're simply not fast enough in our spaceships. In order to get anywhere we need to approach the speed of light or even exceed it (or better yet, make the whole thing about space/time irrelevant, but that is sci-fi for the time being)

Second humans are really not meant to be put in space. We need to adapt, and we need to adapt in a serious way. Most of our body is made up of this little molecule H2O, and we need lots of it to survive. Water is not easy to get in space! Food is another problem. Another is that the human bonestructure degenerates in space (it wouldn't be smart spending billions on spaceexploration just to make astronauts land on mars realizing that they have become crippled in the meantime. We can minimize the effect of zero gravity but the problem remains.

I dream of space too (wonder if all people does in a way). Just can't see how we're going to get there. What bothers me the most are that I don't find much evidence either, of breakthrough technologies that will make humans able to explore space by them self in my lifetime. Pitty really, it's just not the same wathing a robot land somewhere doing the exploration for us! (well maybe for the guy controlling the robot :)