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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."

6 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. First Post and Thank God by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    First Post and Thank God (and the /. team) that /. is back up! hurray! even if I do have to substitute example.com in place of slashdot.org!

    bja, from #slashdot

  2. Example.com by powerset · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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.

  3. Example.com by Hornsby · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Looks like the system is still bugged out. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

    --
    A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
  4. Re:Example.com by Zen · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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.

  5. Re:In case of Slashdotting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Uh, I think it was supposed to be funny, not informative!

  6. Needed on Earth by a10t2 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Shouldn't we be searching out life under the Earth's surface first? http://www.reptoids.com/