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NASA Preps Mars Underground Mole
Roland Piquepaille writes "People at NASA never cease to surprise me. Searching for water or presence of past life of Mars obviously needs drilling beneath the surface. So NASA is developing the Mars Underground Mole (MUM), based on a previous device used for the European Beagle 2 mission. But here is the twist. MUM will include sensors which were previously used to collect spectral imagery of Earth from pilotless aircrafts, especially Hawaii, according to NASA. While the Mole will stay on the surface on Mars and drill up to 5 meters deep, it will transmit data via a fiber optic cable to a digital array scanning interferometer (DASI). And the spectral images produced by the DASI will enable researchers to identify possible water, ice, organics and minerals under the surface on Mars. And this MUM will be a small one, weighing less than a kilogram for a length of only 50 centimeters. For more details and pictures about MUM, please read this overview."
The new system seems to have a bug. All the links on the homepage point to example.com. Replacing it with slashdot.org makes them work.
It's fixed now. Took them a whole 6 minutes of downtime, too (from taking it down to bringing it back up, I have no idea how long the error was there). I wish my admins at work were that fast. More like 6 hours for them.
Shouldn't we be searching out life under the Earth's surface first? http://www.reptoids.com/