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NASA Cancels Hubble Mission, and Other Space Bits
An anonymous reader writes "NASA Watch is reporting that NASA has cancelled Servicing Mission 4 for the Hubble Space Telescope. The reason given is not for budgets, but for safety." ender81b writes "With all the excitement generated by the Mars Exploration Rovers now is a good time to look at future space exploration missions. One of the most exciting is the Kepler spacecraft which will search for terrestrial planets around nearby stars. Other interesting upcoming missions include the New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, Deep Impact which will fire a small impactor into a comet to study the insides, Messenger which will fully photograph Mercury for the first time, and the ESA's Herschel infrared space telescope and Rosetta spacecraft which will land on a comet for the first time. Whew, good time to be invovled in space exploration!" StarWreck writes "Cnet.com is reporting that the Mars Rover uses Java. The same piece of software that lets people around the world play video games on their cell phones is now letting scientists drive the ultimate remote-controlled car across the surface of Mars."
Sir, we've run into a serious problem with the mission. These Nielsen ratings are the lowest ever.
Oh my God! We've been beaten by a "Connie Chung Christmas."
I'm laughing at clouds.
on cellphones?? MHHH. Why am I not convinced...
;)
Well I guess this is good, it means Java is considered stable enough now for something such a critical (ie, cannot crash) to be used for that...
rebooting the rover prolly isnt an option
All night, waiting for the JVM to start up.
You killed Hubble! You bastard!
So, if there were a Coke Machine around on Mars, the Rover might (on it's own, mind you) decide to belly up to the bar and have a tall one! That's what we get for designing little machines to explore distant worlds on their own.
The reason for it is that Mars is too far away to manage the rover in real time - you have to wait 20 minuite to see the effects of your command.
:)
So all we needs is some decent FPS game players that are used to working the lag. If anything goes wrong, they can just yell out that it was a wall hack by some camper.
Hmm, Java.
Someone said on Fark the other day:
The next law will be the "Cake and Pie for Everybody Act" in which Cheney and Bush their buddies line everyone up and slap us with their dicks.
But I think that was the 'tax cut'...
Ask people if they think that the repeal of the "death tax" has one little thing to do with them. People are convinced that it was something that applied to everyday people....
+++ ATH0 +++
No, but Jack Black did have a bit part as a pilot in Waterworld, which featured the stunt talents of one Scott Hubbell!
From there, I think it's only one more step to Kevin Bacon...
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They wouldn't be abandoned.
Weepy celebrities and televangelists could hold telethons to raise money to send supplies out there.
Each package would take years to arrive, traveling to Mars by slow, efficient orbits that criss-cross the inner system to build velocity before finally careening into Mars' upper atmosphere, reentering, and bouncing to a stop, persued by eager colonists in grubby, patched space suits.
"Dig deep my friends! Just $350 can send a package of Ramen Noodles to a needy Mars pioneer. A mere $500 can send this roll of single-ply toilet paper, or two day's worth of tampons, to a brave colonist. And imagine the joy this package of Jolly Roger treats could bring, for only $150."
Stefan "I'll stick with suborbital stuff!" Jones
NASA then followed up by saying consumers would enjoy a more stable and robust space-exploration experience by upgrading to HubbleXP(tm)
You don't play enough RTS games! Every map has at least one good worthwhile mine for every player in the game! Pffft! What would be the point of building a moon base otherwise??
Daniel
Carpe Diem