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Five Year Retrospective: Mars Pathfinder
An anonymous reader writes "Five years ago today, on September 27, 1997, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to lose communication with the Mars Pathfinder and ended its highly successful mission. The interview with Matt Golombek, Project Scientist, highlights Mars' warm and wet past. The still remarkable landing sequence, with first signal only 3 minutes after touchdown, seemed a rare combination of luck (bounced 16 times and landed on its base petal). Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie." NASA is getting ready to publish their future plans for deep-space missions.
The U.S. has sent how many manned missions to the moon, and how many to Mars? Yeah, I know the space race is over, and it's a whole lot farther to Mars than the moon, but still... it seems it's about time. We don't seem to have much luck with surface probes on the red planet, so maybe the only way to get anything done is send real astronauts.
Of course, with the recent metric/imperial conversion error, I'd hate to be in the first crew to touch down...
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.
So all we have to do is put CAMERAS on the next one and we can sell the rights to hollywood. That way we get a nice large investment from the movie industry, then when we get all the footage they can edit it all together into a REAL space adventure.
Well, if it cost less than a Hollywood picture, why not push it a little further? Seriously, NASA could pull my dollars directly if they were to include an IMAX camera setup on their future space missions, then put together a work of art to display in the theater... that's how they can privatize and overcome congressional budget limitations.
- passion
It's interesting to consider that the Pathfinder mission cost less than a "medium sized Hollywood movie" project, but is that really a valuable measure?
I remember the same sort of comparison made about the first Jurassic Park movie, where more money went into that one movie than in all dinosaur archaeology spending... ever.
But what does that tell us? Scientists are more thrifty than Hollywood? Hollywood is the definition of excess... "larger than life" has been its motto since day one. Or maybe that the market for movies is wider than the market for scientific progress? Well, science is funded by government and philanthropy, while movie-making is funded by Joe Sixpack and his family of teenagers who frankly don't give a shit about science, except for the D- that Becky Sixpack got last semester.
Why not find suitable comparisons between opposites. To recycle an old joke, Progress versus Congress? How much money went into the last election cycle? How much money went into purchasing the DMCA which further entrenches the Hollywood regime?
Will the Gulf War II cost more money than Rambo II or Superman II or Star Wars Episode 2? Will the special effects (either in terms of the decisively televised explosions or the new cinematic masterpieces unfolding in the election-year stump speeches)?
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Not mentioned, it cost less than the making of even a medium-sized Hollywood movie.
That's strange- I read that the total mission cost $265 million - more than Titanic cost to make. Still, at $1 a citizen, I think it was worth it.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I disagree with much of your argument about doing research just for the sake of science. The discoveries and fruits of science should serve mankind in productive ways. Research funding should not be dolled out to anyone who wants to do research just because it's fun. Projects need to have very focused goals and time scales. How else are you going to discover accidents that DO help mankind? I agree that a massive undertaking to send humans to the moon has benefitted mankind in many ways through trial and error, but giving large sums of tax dollars to new Ph.D.s graduating from Bob's College of Chemistry and Physics isn't going to result in a greater influx of new accidental discoveries that will be helpful to mankind. There are plenty of accidental discoveries being made from the well focused and well funded current research projects. If you haven't gotten the gist of my argument, basically what I'm saying is that given a nice, grand, properly thought-out project, many accidental discoveries will flurish from it.
There are already too many Ph.D.s in science and not enough positions for them. This is why it is so difficult for many to get a research and teaching position at universities. We don't need more scientists, there are too many already. What we need are more focused research projects that do benefit humans. Think of it as the public investing in science and later getting a return on the investment. Natural Selection in the Evolutionary sense is guiding science and our society(economics). Beneficial ideas and projects get funding, failures do not. And I don't want to forget to mention that Evolution doesn't give second chances; once you've had your chance to succeed or fail, that's it.
A few comments about your examples:
Regarding your comment of funding for super colliders, there should be only ONE supercollider. There is no need to have 5 or 6 spread through out the the nation. Build one massive supercollider that is multifunctional. This maximizes the efficiency of tax dollars and reduces redundancy of personnel and hardware.
A brief comment about scientific journals:
Another problem with current scientific literature is that only positive results are published, failures are not. This means that researchers working in closely related areas will learn through trial and error that certain chemical syntheses won't work. This further wastes public funding. If there existed scientific journals that published designated goals of a project and the failures associated with the project, a lot of material and time would not be wasted. But then again, this undermines the competitive nature of science not to mention that if your project is resulting in more failures than successes, perhaps it's time to choose another career.
Insight into why we don't need more scientists:
You should familiarize yourself with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. It is a very simple test that categorizes personalities in to 16 different types. There are generally two personality types found in scientists: INTJ (Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judgemental) and ISTJ (Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Judgemental). INTJ occurs in about 1% of the population. These people are really good at dealing with theories and abstract ideas. These people are your Einsteins, your Stephen Hawkings, and your synthetic organic chemists. ISTJ are good for doing repetitive technical tasks: routinely operating analytical equipment, being a watchmaker, etc... These people occur in about 5% of the population. So you see, graduating more scientists from universities is not going to improve the accidental discoveries in science. Truely successful scientists are born, not made. Their brains are, in a way, hardwired for that profession.
Employment Stats for the scientific profession (assumes individuals working in their field of study or education):
Chemists are the LEAST unemployed among scientific professionals. Biologists are the most unemployed and make up the largest percentage of educated scientists. Physicists are somewhere in between with regard to employment but make up the least percentage of scientists.