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

My favourite: Mars Express and Beagle 2

[davidmb]

I believe that this ESA project will show how a complex space mission can be carried out professionally on a (relatively) low budget without compromising quality.

This is exactly the kind of thing NASA has been trying to do in the past, and could show them the way forward.

Re:SETI@Home - Best?

[confused one]

It has accomplished something, in scientific terms. It showed that there are no discernable signals at the level the search was performed.

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

Ah, ah, ah!

[c0d3fu]

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. ;)

Re:Soviet Venera landers were nifty

[bravehamster]

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.