Slashdot Mirror
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."
Teaching everybody the metric system and getting them all to USE IT AT THE SAME TIME!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Dr. Smith from Lost in Space, of course.
Everybody knows that.
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... +
As if the universe had something bad to eat the night before, we get a moon named PUCK circling Uranus.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.
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
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?
I'm still waiting for a new planet to be added to our solar system. Hell, it's been a hundred odd years since the last one was found and some people are finding that one to be faulty? Come on people! NOTHING should take a century between updates!
This is exactly the kind of thing NASA has been trying to do in the past, and could show them the way forward.
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.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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.
ta da da .. ta da da ta da da
*opening star trek music plays*
Space-- the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission--
to explore strange new worlds...to seek out new life and new civilizations...to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Captain's Log, Stardate 2948.5.
Starship Enterprise remains stranded on the moon. We have been through a trying time. As per Starbase 11's orders, we have intentionally crashed the Enterprise into the moon, in hopes of allowing scientists on earth to observe an ejected spray of lunar ice. Our next mission is to boldly fly a balloon in the clouds of Venus.
Mr. Spock: I must say, Captain, the human mind is infinitely illogical. I am amazed at it's unconventional approach to science.*superior smile*
Dr. McCoy: Was that a smile Mr. Spock? I must say that was a definite display of human emotion.
*spock raises suspicious eyebrow*
Coming up next week: The crew of the Starship Enterprise tries to seek out new life and new civilizations by launching the SETI@HOME project.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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
Probably off topic, so Mod me as you will,
However, there is a great picture on the
Astronomy Picture of the Day that looks like its flipping you off.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
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
In the next decade we will see the first of a totally new class of orbiting space telescopes - large arrays of sensors spanning many tens of miles across. These will be true orbiting interferometers which will bring amazing optical resolution to "near-earth" explorers.
The ramifications for earth-based planetary exploration are huge. Currently, work is being performed on how to keep such a satellite array in perfect alignment. Low-thrust ion engines and tide-stabilizing configurations are flying as we speak.
NASA has plans to launch the first Space-Based Interferometer in 2009. Taking into account the inevitable schedule slide, we should start seeing some really cool pictures in about 2012. AND, since the array will live relatively close to our "Big Blue Marble," it might also be a reason to keep the ISS and the manned space program in general running for another decade. All it takes is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
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.
[OTRANT]
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.
[/OTRANT]
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w