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Mars Odyssey Completes Aerobraking
Cally writes: "Space.com reports that
Mars Odyssey has
completed aerobraking and is ready to begin its
main science mission. As the spacecraft has already produced exciting results before the start of the science mission proper, interesting data on the quantities of water in the Martian crust may be expected soon - not to mention that Odyssey provides another datapoint in the study of Gamma Ray bursts."
.. the prior story about preliminary findings. This is not redundant: It is something that has mostly been ignored by official NASA press releases but has still made it into the mainstream media. I really hope that the failure of NASA to mention that they already have detected "large desposits of hydrogen" close to the surface means that they're waiting to confirm their findings, not that there's some dark conspiracy postponing any serious trips to Mars by decades in favor of sinking money into NMD, ISS and the Shuttle instead.
Which would you rather do, set up a colony for the first time a few months away or a few years away? At least with Mars, if something goes horribly horribly wrong, they'll only be a few days or months away, as opposed to lightyears.
Some have suggested that we colonize a small part of the sea as a training ground.
problems with contaminating other planets with bacteria and Earth-based life.
Hello: we already douse all probes in Dial antibacterial soap first, to make sure we don't give any other planets weird fungi that we later claim were the first life found on other planets! (Sorry I don't have a non-cached link, the page seems to be down.)
That said, as for your: I'd rather send people there than have it sit in pristine condition
Why? What's so good about having people there? I say go after the Earth-based problems, and don't do things like spend three percent of our government's money on a trillion-dollar program just to get humans in a place they aren't very suited for being in the first place. When we've got the luxury of having solved most Earth-based problems, then you go after the extraneous stuff like that. Until then, I'm happy if we just do information-gathering type things: for that, you DON'T need people anywhere but in their office-chairs, except for whoever actually has to slingshot the probes into space. (Or have things changed since then? I might be dating myself here....[in a strictly platonic way, of course.])
Look, spending the resources we currently expend on space travel isn't going to contribute substantially to work peace (nor hunger, nor overpopulation, nor keeping people from being laid off).
On the other hand, the greatest points of human progress have historically taken place in two times -- exploration and war. Both of them create necessity, which is (of course) the mother of invention. I assume you'd rather avoid war, as would I, so exploration seems like a good investment.
Besides, its our nature to do this sort of thing. That's why people weaved reed boats, why they sailed before they could figure their position with any certainty, why we, as a race, have always struggled to see what's over the next hill.
The small-minded idea that you could solve disease, hunger and war by supressing the instinct to explore and becoming universal xenophobes is both juvenile and foolish -- at no time in history has anything like this proven true. Indeed, the worst times tend to be those where we stopped being curious -- dark ages, anyone?
I don't mean to be too brutal, but your half-thought-out assertion in this area offends me.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Actually, the preliminary exciting results would be that it didn't crash into the planet or just disappear.
Too bad they didn't use regenerative aerobraking...
Regenerative areobraking? What do you want them to do - put paddle wheels on the probe?
Okay, your comment was stupid. You probably just had a twitchy "Submit" finger and wanted to get a comment in there early. I can understand that. What is ridiculous is that at least two morons out there actually thought is was "Interesting" enough to mod it up to +4.
Would whoever did that please smack the back of their head for me? Thanks.
I don't think you really have to worry about slashdotting NASA. I'm pretty sure they got a hefty amount of bandwidth. And chances are also that its not gunna get that many hits at midnight e.s.t
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Let me try to answer my own question:
Mars is a place with resources; there's an atmosphere and useful raw materials are present. You could make livable buildings, air, even grow food -- all you need is enough energy and you can do a lot of things based simply on what we already know is there.
The moon, on the other hand, is relatively barren. Living there would be a lot harder, especially in terms of the no atmosphere thing. You have to bring just about everything you need to the moon, but could live reasonably on Mars just by moving power there and investing a lot of elbow grease, building infrastructure and etc. Potentially, you could make the surface of Mars the second-safest place in the solar system, able to survive even thtough years of zero contact with earth.
Just a thought, though, that it you want *practice*, the moon's probably a better place to start.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Actually, your idea that newly evolved intelligent life will be there in a few billion years is probably a bit off.
As mentioned in the Odyssey mission objectives, "Mars today is far too cold with an atmosphere that is far too thin to support liquid water on the surface." Not an outright elimination of the possibility of intelligent life, but at least of intelligent life as we know it. The atmosphere is just way too thin, and things may only get worse on the surface from further bleed off without some form of intervention. I think the common view is that if there was higher (i.e., many cellular) life on mars, it was probably when back when the planet was warmer and wetter. Anything that might be left is likely barely eking out an existence in special environments.
And, in the few billion years you propose for intelligent life to evolve, the sun will have expanded to a red giant, and the surface of Mars will likely be nice and toasty. A bit too toasty perhaps for, again, life as we know it.
Finally, there's plenty of scientific value in studying Mars whether there's life there or not. The life issue is perhaps the most media friendly, and the one that most captures the pop cultural interest, but there's lots of other stuff to learn from that red rock.
-Wombat
They have their own tap off JPL's isolation router. Coming into our isolation router are quite a few REALLY fat pipes.
--Carlos V.
I swear, Slashdot could post the most mundane story about space exploration, and it still draws the same old complaints about this and that, the usual space trolls. I'm just going to respond to them all here for future linkage.
1.) If you have difficulty understanding exploration for it's own sake then you aren't "all for exploration."
2.) If we knew of all the ways we could use and develop (insert name of celesial body here), then we wouldn't need to explore it, now would we?
3.) Yes there are people dying in (insert Third World country here) of (insert Horseman of Apocalypse here). The reasons for these deaths are purely political in nature. Money is not the solution to all problems just as it isn't the root of all evil. If anything it becomes a scapegoat for the real causes of strife. I don't see how not spending the money on space exploration and letting Congress (of all people) spend it on (choice of one or more of the following: junkets, political campaigns, television commercials, Jesse Jackson, economic incentives, UN resolution, Jimmy Carter, "peace-keeping" expedition) to "make the world a better place" is really going to change a damned thing. (Name of two opposing ethnic, religious, or political groups here) need to talk to each other, and dangling money in front of their noses isn't going to get them to do that, it will just get them to chase that money.
4.) As for education reform, go talk to your state and local governments. If you don't know why you should be talking to them instead of the federal government, then you are an example of how badly we need education reform.
5.) Do you have any idea how small a percentage of the federal budget is spent on space exploration?
6.) We are NOT on the verge of nuclear war! At worst, the only countries on the verge of nuking each other are (names of two nuclear powers that didn't sign non-proliferation agreements)! And they aren't the ones sending up these probes, are they?
7.) With all the problems there are in the world today... why would you want to live in the world today? (name of celestial body) looks like a damned good alternative to me!
You think it's easy to make space probes that work perfectly?!
They have to launch these fragile robots through the harsh interplanetary void, always mere inches -- no wait, was it centimeters? maybe cubits... fathoms? -- from disaster...
Nasa once again launched a spacecraft at Mars. However, due to inaccurate calculations, the spacecraft missed its target and instead settled in a stable orbit, unable to crash into the planet and achieve its intital objective. A preliminary investigation blames a slight miscalculation due to the improper use of significant digits.
Mission planners are uncertain how to proceed now that the mission has been officially declared a failure. "We now have a $250 million piece of equipment uselessly orbiting the planet." A small group of scientists has declared the mission "not a total loss" as this might present a rare opportunity to study the planet before the orbiter crashes into the planet naturally at some later date.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The experiment you refer to involved a tethered satellite. It was performed on February 25, 1996, and as miles of tether were unrolled, the dynamo current grew just as predicted. The tether was almost entirely unrolled when it broke near the shuttle's end, whipping off into the void. The shuttle crew tracked the satellite by radio for several minutes, then lost contact.
After the mission, the tether was examined on Earth, and was found to have been melted through. Turns out the core of the cable was a porous material that had atmospheric-pressure air trapped in it during manufacture. The air leaked out through pinholes in the outer insulation and was quickly converted, by the high voltage (~3500V) of the tether, to a plasma far denser and more conductive than the surrounding ionosphere. Instruments indicated that the plasma diverted a full ampere of current (at 3500 volts) through the insulator pinholes, enough to melt through the cable.
That's why they don't let astronauts EVA any more without gloves.
OffTopic: That last line was a feeble joke, similar to the one in my original post. That post was modded up three points (by those who took "regenerative aerobraking" seriously) before being modded down five (by those who take mismoderation seriously). Is there a record for the number of mod points, both up and down, assigned to a single comment?