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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."
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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.)
.. 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.
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
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.
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.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
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.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
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?