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Terrestrial Garbage On Mars
An anonymous reader writes "The garbage left behind by the twin Mars rovers was highlighted this week by the close-up view in panorama of the Spirit rovers' heatshield. Not including the various Viking, Pathfinder and some crippled probes, the human contribution of rover hardware to the martian surface now includes a few odd nicknacks, parachutes, heatshields, back shell,landing petals and many wheel tracks. It may be September before the rovers themselves become part of the red planet's debris field."
It will be "just like home".
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
They'v been throwing their rocks at us for years; we're just returning the favor.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Where's a giant spaceship that turns into a maid with a vacuum cleaner when you really need one..
It's a travesty that the pure & honorable planet Mars now has the solar system's worst semi-sentient race befouling it's gloriously pristine dead surface with plastics and shiny metal.
The only thing worse would be the filthy creatures actually setting foot on Martian soil!
Vote for Martian succession this winter to keep the Martian surface clean!
or they'll be getting pretty angry that we're messing up their clean planet.
"Tomorrow's forcast: Cloudy, slightly windy, with a chance of radio active alien debris coming from the Northern sky."
Although never positively identified, it was thought to be a piece of Kapton tape - an adhesive used often in aerospace applications.
Reminds me of an old joke: The surest sign of poor engineering is wrinkles in the duct tape.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Everything I'll need when I get there!
All that expensive hardware just being thrown out as trash, what a shame.
I'd be happy to give it a home!
Can someone give me a ride to go pick it up?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Agreed. This article submission would have been better if titled "Pics of our cool shit on Mars!"
A few probes on mars if pretty close to nothing.
and when we get there we'll find them rednecked martians with our rovers up on blocks.
Next, I shall completely spoil the purity of the Sahara desert by dropping three parachutes and 72 bottles of sugared soft drinks on random locations across it.
Just think, in a few million years when we've wiped every bit of out existance from Earth, aliens will be able to land on Mars and deduce that a civilization was once there. Ah the irony.
In 200 years, later preservationists will gather all the stuff out of the museums, and strew it over the landscape, to make it "as it was" when humans made the first robotic baby-steps in space exploration.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Reminds me of an old commercial from the 70's. The updated version would feature a pair of NASA rovers driving across the Martian landscape. The rovers throw a bag of drive-thru trash out the window, which lands at the feet of a Native Ameri...er...Martian. The camera pans up and we see the native shed a tear. Shame on us! Don't we all feel terrible about the space program now? Please see "Wayne's World" for details.
Oh my! TV Land (?) played an episode last year and I forced my wife to watch "the coolest space show of my youth". I switched to something else after about 5 minutes, embarassed for the actors on the show. Clearly my memory of the show far outshone the reality.
The concept was fantastic, but the execution was miserable...
Well, if the current tenants of Mars will just ask kindly, I am sure that we can clean up after ourselves.
But they have to ask first.
Preferably in writing...
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."