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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."
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.
This is exactly the kind of thing NASA has been trying to do in the past, and could show them the way forward.
I think SETI@Home has been successful at something many of these other events also achieved -- capturing the imagination of the populace.
... awestruck.
... that's something.
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
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
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.
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
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.
The hang up is that there is no formal definition for what constitutes "a planet" There are groups of astronomers working on this now (and this has been a subject of prior discussion on /.)
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.