NASA Selects Mars Landing Sites

carstene writes "NASA has announced the finial landing sites for the upcoming mars rover missions. Looks like they are going looking for water in a dried lake bed and a promising site that looks like it contains hematite."

Comments

They oughta send one to the Face

[Anonymous Coward]

And have it apply some makeup. The Face is showing it's age, man.

Re:They oughta send one to the Face

[assosiation]

note the quote "Once they reach their landing sites, each rover's prime mission will last at least 90 martian days (92 Earth days). The rovers are solar-powered, and in approximately 90 days, dust accumulating on the solar arrays likely will be diminishing the power supply. "

Have those people ever heard of wipers????? :)

NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Niggers Always Smell Awful

If Kryptonite make Kryptonians weak

[wowbagger]

If Kyptonite makes Kryptionians weak, does hematite make Hemos weak?

Perhaps Hemos should stay away from that area of Mars...

Re:If Kryptonite make Kryptonians weak

[satanami69]

Everyone knows Big Black dicks with purly white cum are his only weakness.

Hematite?

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be the use of hematite?

Re:Hematite?

[eggstasy]

If you remember the controversial meteor of martian origin that was found a while ago, you will also recall that the alleged signs of life were iron crystals of a kind that is usually, at least on Earth, only produced by bacteria.
Hematite is an iron ore. It's logical to assume they're looking for more rocks like that one, which could point towards the existance of life on Mars, past or present.

Re:Hematite?

[Tablizer]

What would be the use of hematite?

To fix the hemaloose :-P

Re:Hematite?

[young-earth]

Check out the article which explains that researchers now

think that there is now abundant evidence that most and probably all of the magnetites in ALH 84001 formed because of shock heating of carbonate. Faceted magnetites resembling the supposedly biogenic magnetites are crystallographically oriented in the carbonate lattice and could not have formed inside bacteria. We infer that ALH 84001 magnetites differ from abiogenic terrestrial magnetites because terrestrial carbonates never experienced the unique impact history of ALH 84001.

So if NASA is looking for hematite in order to prove something, they'll just be proving that the rocks they found got banged around.

Somehow that seems like a colossal waste of time and money, so hopefully they have some more noble, or more useful, reason to pick that location.

Re:Hematite?

[barakn]

The problem with Creationists is that they'll post without knowing what they are talking about. Gray hematite can precipitate out of hotsprings here on Earth, and spectroscopic evidence has been found of gray hematite on Mars. NASA is looking for evidence of ancient hotsprings on Mars. The Martian meteorite has nothing to do with it. young-earth's post should be modded Overrated.

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Some harder than others

[djupedal]

"Landing on Mars is very difficult, and it's harder on some parts of the planet than others," said Dr. Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science in Washington, D.C. "In choosing where to go, we need to balance science value with engineering safety considerations at the landing sites. The sites we have chosen provide such balance."

And the Finial site, may well prove to be the hardest of all...

Not biological

[barakn]

Gray hematite can precipitate out of hotsprings here on Earth, and spectroscopic evidence has been found of gray hematite on Mars. NASA is looking for evidence of ancient hotsprings on Mars, which would only point to liquid water, not life.

DUH

[Anonymous Coward]

DUH hematite is what makes mars appear red, that shit is all over the damn planet not just in that spot.

hematite- latin root similar to hemoglobin, got its name from the red appearance......same as Hematite

it there a GPS satellite in Martian orbit?

[The Lynxpro]

seems like that would be of more use... I'd love to see a private corporation do that as well as send a "spy" satellite with decent imaging equipment to do an independent analysis of the Cydonia region... I bet that endeavour would go *missing* (cough cough)....another victim of the Cosmic Boogeyman that dislikes most probes we send to that planet...either that or its the Cybermen behind it... NASA has very little credibility in my book. Any agency that claims to lose a probe because they were using English measurements when the scientific community has used the metric system for a century (not to mention the US Military since the creation of NATO) just doesn't pan out... Maybe we should get them to certify the next Presidential election...