The Best Of Planetary Explorers

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's timeline is published today on the top seventy five events in recent planetary explorations. Since June and July inaugurates three new landers going to Mars, it is curious to see their selected images: Venusian crust hot enough to melt lead, comets colliding with Jupiter, Europa's frozen ocean. But the most precious discoveries may be those chalked up as nearly free riders: the fifteen Mars rocks that annually are found among Antarctic meteors [100 grams total] and all those four and half million personal computers doing SETI@home CPU cycles."

Comments

SETI@Home - Best?

[goldspider]

"and all those four and half million personal computers doing SETI@home CPU cycles."

Perhaps I'm too demanding in my definition of "best" but I'd submit that any project, no matter how ambitious, would have to produce something before earning this kind of distinction.

Re:SETI@Home - Best?

[SnowDog_2112]

I think SETI@Home has been successful at something many of these other events also achieved -- capturing the imagination of the populace.

I remember as a child, reading magazine articles about the moons of Jupiter, seeing an artist's conception of Jupiter rising behind a Volcano on Io, and being flabbergasted ... awestruck.

Whether it was picturing running on the moon in the low gravity, or gazing out the window at Jupiter as a passenger spaceship did a loop around the gas giant on its way to an unknown destination, my imagination was completely dedicated to space travel.

Years later, I run SETI@Home for the same simple reasons. The thought of having some small part in what could arguably be the biggest discovery ever ... that's something.

If SETI@Home never finds anything, it has still succeeded in giving me some measure of joy and excitement, that I'm doing my own small part.

Re:SETI@Home - Best?

[TopShelf]

Perhaps the strongest result to come out of SETI@home is the validation of a new means of performing research, i.e. the distributed computing model. SETI@home took that model and rolled it out into the public domain where everyday people could become a contributing part of research.

In that sense alone, regardless of concrete results, SETI@home belongs on the list...

Re:SETI@Home - Best?

[sixdotoh]

whether or not SETI@home finds anything, it has opened the door for distributed computing. i don't know any exact dates, but i do know that SETI@home was the first example of public distributed computing that i heard of. and it has since created the public interest and model for other distributed computing projects such as cures for cancer and other scientific research.

Re:SETI@Home - Best?

[isomeme]

Seti@Home has produced something; thanks to this work, we can now make pretty firm statements about what kinds of ET signals are *not* present. This is a valid and extremely important scientific accomplishment. It allows us to refine models of what is out there, and saves us the trouble of looking in already well-explored experimental territory.

By analogy, physicists tried for a decade to produce Higgs bosons before finally getting some evidence that they'd produced a few. The earlier experiments were not "failures", though. Each of them proved that the Higgs had some minimum energy higher than what that experiment had reached, and that proof allowed theories to be confirmed or revised as appropriate.

ALL Unmanned

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to get a human being off of this stinkin' rock and onto ANY other planet?? Fine. Good. We're sending probes to most of the other planets in the solar system. We're already reasonably sure that some boogeyman isn't going to kill us if we go into space. We're already reasonably sure a different boogeyman isn't going to kill us if we land on Mars. Why don't we send a human being instead of multi-million dollar paperweights?

Ummm ... they left some stuff out here ...

[SuperDuG]

Remember the mars probe that bounced off the atomosphere into oblivian? Or the one that crashed and burried itself into the surface? Or how about the countless explosions of commercial satellite payloads of the titan rockets?

Not to mention losing 2 out of the 5 shuttles because engineers sorta just "guessed" a problem was okay.

Seems to me that while there have been some noteable accomplishments there are also some major pitfalls in the nasa program. I know that space exploration is a new field, but it would be nice if simple mistakes weren't happening.

Re:Ummm ... they left some stuff out here ...

[Matrix272]

Not to mention losing 2 out of the 5 shuttles because engineers sorta just "guessed" a problem was okay.

What other option was there? I'm definitely not a NASA astro-physicist, but it seems pretty logical to me that there's no such thing as a rescue mission in space... yet. I do admit that the recent disaster might have been avoided if they would have fixed the broken tiles on the wing, but how would they do that? Do they have spare pieces of everything in the shuttle, just in case something happens? Eventually you have to realize that the chance that a relatively minor mishap could turn into a disaster might outweigh the time and cost of attempting an ad-hoc, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants temporary solution.

Re:Ummm ... they left some stuff out here ...

[Planesdragon]

I'm definitely not a NASA astro-physicist, but it seems pretty logical to me that there's no such thing as a rescue mission in space... yet.

After Apollo 13, there's no excuse not to have a resuce plan.

A high-manuverabilty "rescue pod" to stretch the shuttle's supplies and a "quick lauch" plan to send the next shuttle in the que (sic) to bring the astronauaghts home.

It is rocket science, but it's not miracle-work. "There's nothing we could have done" is an unacceptable answer from NASA when it comes to rescue of astronauts.

Re:Ummm ... they left some stuff out here ...

[tony_gardner]

You know, I've never really understood this sort of comment on slashdot. I mean, we're geeks, right. I mean, something like 90% of the stories on this site revolve around how perfection in automation is practically impossible to achieve. About how, a certain level of bugs is to be expected no matter how much the software is tested.

What, exactly, makes you think that NASA has some sort of secret magic bullet that they're not telling us about? What's the reason for the space shuttles carrying astronauts? Because automation is unreliable, at best.

The scientists at NASA don't just sorta guess. They make educated guesses. Sometimes those guesses are wrong. The stuff we don't know about flight at the kind of speeds would shock you. (Try googling for "real gas effects" or "radiation heat transfer" together with "re-entry" if you're interested.) For instance I believe that on the first shuttle flight the prediction of center of lift was off by 0.7%, necessitating doubling the flap area.

So combine the science we don't fully understand with automation and we will have failures. It's just a fact. Would you prefer they didn't try?

Soviet Venera landers were nifty

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up in a small, conservative USian town and so the education that we got about space exploration was exclusively about USian missions (in fact, the school board prohibited the teaching of information about Soviet successes since they deemed such information to be unpatriotic.)

But the fact of the matter is that the Venera landers were a marvel of human engineering. They were able to touch down on the planet's surface, take instrument readings, and even return pictures of the planet's surface and skyline .. all of this in an environment where the temperature is 900 degrees (Fahrenheit), the atmospheric pressure is 100 times what it is on Earth, and it rains sulfuric acid. The Venera landers only operated for a few minutes each, but it's a wonder that they were ever able to operate at all! Mars looks like a cakewalk by comparison.

A lot of what we know about conditions on Venus comes from the Russian missions, and it's unfortunate that more schoolchildren (at least here in the US) are not taught about it because of some skewed nationalistic agenda.

Planet Colony

[Matrix272]

I think it's about time we looked seriously at starting a colony on Mars. It's fairly obvious that space travel in general is still pretty risky business, so why not go for the gold, in a manner of speaking?

As long as the astronauts are risking their lives (and spending MY tax dollars), do something I'll be able to tell my grandchildren about. I don't give a rat's ass about "mapping to outer solar system cometary fields and Kuiper Belt" or looking "for water-ice on the closest planet to the Sun". Whether there's water on Mercury doesn't affect me, or my children, or their children is any discernible way. Building a city on Mars does. Let's get to it.

Re:Nevada

[eclectic4]

There are even MORE books and even MORE links to web-sites proving the contrary. The proof offerered as to the moon landing's reality far, FAR outweigh those of the skeptics. This is a no brainer.

I have researched every single claim of the "faked moon landing" people, and have not found ONE that wasn't explained rather simply. In fact, there are dozens of things that show this was done on the low gravity surface of the moon that CANNOT be explained by any artificial means. Look at the moon dust fly up from the wheels of the rover, etc...you CAN'T do that on Earth. There are literally hundreds of things (not counting the very real fact that we delivered men to the moon, and then they walked on it), that can only be explained by the moon landing's reality. People like the ones that host the site at your link are looking for a couple of bucks from those easily swayed. If they wanted to truth to be told, they would just tell it, not sell it. Again, this is a no brainer. Meaning, if you don't believe it, you HAVE NO BRAIN. heh...