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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."
Great material. I really like seeing all of these missions and scientific discoveries listed in one concise manner. Not only does it make for great reading, but it also makes for good material during those inane "how can we justify space exploration" arguments.
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
What kind of energetic event does it take to break up and then hurl into space chunks of a planet that then, perhaps decades, centuries, or millenia later, arrive on another world as meteorites? The proposed big impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, was it sufficiently energetic to hurl debris free of Earth's gravity well so that there may be impacts from Earth on other of Sol's planets? What's the least energetic event that could still theoretically hurl a chunk of Earth into space?
This is exactly the kind of thing NASA has been trying to do in the past, and could show them the way forward.
But first we need a point to start the journey. This is why I think we need a moon base FIRST. Use the minerals and materials from the moon to manufacture a big spaceship to carry us there. There is no way we can build something big enough and launch it into orbit. It would be simply too expensive.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
It showed that it was possible to connect 4.5 million processors together to perform a massive calculation (takes it beyond theory)
Not to mention that it shows, if properly motiviated, 4.5 million people can be convinced to pay Seti's electric bill :p
Oh dear, I hear some criticism of both NASA and the SETI project. Though most space exploration is driven by military-industrial interests (lots of pork; forget projects like "Star Wars" - think space-based offensive nuclear capabilities to ensure a quick-strike), SETI is interested in a more noble pursuit: are we alone? Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence (to quote Ellie from the movie Contact, "You know, there are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, all right, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.."). Think about the dramatic changes that the discovery of intelligent alien life might bring about. Isn't that justification enough? Humanity might even be mature enough to handle the enormous cultural differences that typically lead to conflict whenever societies foreign to each other meet. Maybe. All of this doesn't even take into account the technological improvements that result from us rising to the complex problem of space exploration. For instance, SETI@home is a model example for distributed data processing if I ever saw one. Money spent here has some positive feedback for the economy, whereas money spent on long-term welfare provides little to none (not to mention sustaining unhealthy behavior on the part of the citizens). Plus, I want to know if aliens talk and look like the stuffed ones from Toy Story, or breathe methane gas and communicate using olfactory stimulus. Talk about a hard language to decipher. ;)
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
Kinda OT, but since you mentioned skewed nationalistic agenda, did you ever learn the _reason_ the Soviets were so interested in Venus? It turns out that some of the top scientists had convinced the government that if we ever had a nuclear war, Earth would end up like Venus. The 14 Venera landers were military research on survival in that type of environment. I'm not so sure about this, but one of my instructors insists that it was the data from Venus that finally convinced some of the old hard-liners that glasnost was necessary. Not one of them could tolerate the thought of Mother Russia ending up like the pictures that Venera sent back.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
There's some good stuff listed there, and some sad failures too.
I remember hearing about Shoemaker-Levy 9 and thinking "oh, that's gonna be so frickin' cool." When the time came, I was watching TV, and one of the NASA people was handling a press conference. Someone asked a question about what we should expect to see. Her answer was along the lines of "well, a lot of predictions have been made; some simulations suggest could see quite a spectacular plume, but it could be more subdued, me might not get to see much..." Before she got a chance to finish, an astronomer came out with a couple of bottles of champagne grinning from ear to ear. When the first pictures started showing up, my hair stood on end.
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It makes me sad that so few people can appreciate magic moments like this in science. Instead they turn to pseudoscientific herbal bullshit about holistic medicine, astrology, dowsing, planet X, moon hoaxes, remote psyhic viewing or past-life regression. There are a lot of good people out there working hard to bring real knowledge about the universe to all of humanity. Nothing good has ever come from a snake-oil salesman.
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... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
Creation deities? Some of the roman gods up there came a little bit after creation, in terms of their mythology.
a whacking great bolt of lightning should just about do it. The characteristics match across the board. The only issue being that conventional science admits of no source for such a bolt.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing