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Fingers Crossed for Beagle
Adam_Trask writes "Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers. Beagle 2 has been carried to the vicinity of Mars by the Mars Express mothership, and released successfully to go its own way for the final leg of the journey."
Hip hip - Horray!
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
.. as a WWI veteran flying on his doghouse to Mars.
I personally think this must be one of the nicest Xmas presents in a while. And hopefully this one won't go awry and actually produce the results everyone in the community hopes for.
Anyone else thinking about 'London, The Beagle has landed'..
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
If this probe does manage to survive, then it will be a testament to the skill and abilities of the engineers and managers who helped build it. Hopefully, its success will inspire the bean counters to be a little freer in their funding in the future ;)
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Perhaps the best science book I've ever read is A Traveler's Guide to Mars. This book is full of the latest imagery from various mapping missions, and the author (well known planetary scientist William K. Hartmann) tells you, in clear enjoyable prose, basically everything we know about Mars and how it has been figured out. It turns out that Mars is way more interesting (and wet) than you probably expect. If you plan on following the Beagle 2 mission and the two NASA rovers that follow next month, then this is the book to have.
G.
Think of the environmental impact to outer space with all of that oil leaking from the British spacecraft.
Anyone else getting tripped up by the author's choice of referring to the nose cone as one word?
nose cone
nosecone.
nosecone?
WTF?
no secone? No Habla!
nosec one?
Oh! Nose cone! Sheesh!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I've been saving up a couple of excellent recent slashdot mis-spellings for just such an occassion:
1) "Analiser"
Something which makes one anal, I guess.
2) "Celibration"
To mark an important event by giving up sex?
It carries no passengers.
It has no propulsion system
It's not even airtight.
Instead of "spacecraft", wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a "box"?
Yes, I'd be happy to see a probe that manages to land on Mars for once. :-) It's sad to see those crashing probes. Even better would be if it not only landed, but also found something interesting while looking for life to create some hype! Would be good for NASA et al. as well. :-/
:-P
:-)
Oh, you missed a failed probe too:
NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely
Not that I really want to bash anyone for their failed probes. When you think about it, it's awesome they have even got probes to land over there. However, I could personally have been without things like mixed up distance units.
And it's not only NASA that makes these kind of mistakes. Read and weep:
"When the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 blew up less than a minute
into its maiden mission several months ago, it was revealed that the
disaster was created by a software bug -- a program that tried to push a
64-bit number into a 16-bit space. About $7 billion was written off in
that single disastrous explosion."
The reason for this? They accidentally uploaded the Ariane 4 software to the Ariane 5 before launch. Needless to say, the rockets didn't work exactly the same.
This math bug caused both the primary and backup computers to hang.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Well, half right. It's named after the Beagle, which is the ship on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist, which visited (among other places) the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated much of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Aurora roadmap:
More information: ESA or Spacedaily.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I don't think we have to worry about this. Two reasons:
1. The Earth is really big. Like, really really big.
2. Tonnes and tonnes of stuff is falling to Earth every day in the form of meteors etc., adding to the overall weight of the earth. Even if they burn up it re-entry, the remaining dust and gases or whatever have still got to weigh the same as the original rock.
If you're looking for stuff like that to worry about, worry that low-Earth orbit is getting too cluttered, and that one day there might be what the Scottish Sci-Fi author Ken Macleod called an ablation cascade in his book The Sky Road.
An ablation cascade is when a small-ish collision in orbit results n a whole bunch of high-speed fragments flying off and causing secondary collisions, and the whole thing spiralling off into a domino-rally-type exponentially-increasing SNAFU, until the Earth is surrounded by deadly high-speed fragments of metal meaning that we can't leave the planet for hundreds and hundreds of years.
now that's scary.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
I think you'll find the missing ingredient is money...
Quote of the week:
Interviewer: "What happens if you find life on Mars?"
Prof.Colin Pillinger: "I'll find it a lot easier to get funding for the next mission"
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)