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Mars Odyssey Begins Overtime
thhamm writes "NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter begins working overtime today after completing a prime mission that discovered vast supplies of frozen water, ran a safety check for future astronauts, and mapped surface textures and minerals all over Mars, among other feats. An extended Mission until 2006 has been approved, and I hope it will last that long, maybe doing more safety checks for astronauts :)"
Umm, isn't this the first step towards the Doom 3 premise? I mean do we really want to start exploring Mars? It'll just eventually lead up to colonization via the Union Aerospace Corporation. Please somebody think of the poor Doom space marine that will have to go through this.
Roll on .mars
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
And we are the only ones here... spooky.
It will not be eligible for overtime pay.
While I think a manned mission to Mars would be a wonderful idea. I ponder if we would be able to collect enough data to see if using "greenhouse" gases to supply Mars with a more human-suitable atmosphere would also be a good long-term goal. I know that would probably negatively impact our manned missions there for quite some time until the "incubation" is well underway or finished, but I think that with what resources we've been able to find Mars may be more viable for a station or colony than mars.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter begins working overtime today after completing a prime mission that discovered vast supplies of frozen water
So when did that happen? I remember checking in on slashdot all the time and there would always be some thing about the mars rovers almost discovering water, but always missing some piece of evicende or something. I don't remember anything about an orbiter finding huge amounts of water (well I was on vacation for a month but I figured it would be pretty big on the news or something.)
Since they found indications of lots of frozen water near the surface in the south polar region, I wonder if there are any plans to send a probe/rover there?
They found "copius hydrogen" in the area, and "Researchers interpret the hydrogen as frozen water", but can we be sure without taking a look on the ground?
Seems like the next logical step...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
sending overtime-work to Mars is the kind of outsourcing we all love
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Like the Mars rovers for example:
If I was smart enough to be a NASA engineer I think I'd figure out that people are much happier with your performance when you exceed expectations. It's not like anyone knows what to expect from a Mars orbiter anyways. Nobody looks at the mission statement before launch and says "400 days? Gee, for 3.3 billion I expected more in the range of 550-580 days."Not anyone I know anyways. Maybe other people have more astrophysicist friends.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
According to the newly revised FLSA, the Mars Odyssey would be considered a professional exempt robot, as it's carrying out highly technical, professional tasks. Don't be mean and get the little robot's hopes up!
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
i think i once read, that Mars was the "target with highest failure rate".
..." :)
so this is a pretty good performance, with the two rovers still working (after doubling their designed lifetime?), Mars Odyssey, MSGS and Mars Express.
and the biggest objective a huge success: yes there is/was water.
no need to argue about the use of robotic missions for me. if you asked someone 10 years ago about water on mars: "yeah. water. mars. sure
An extended Mission until 2006 has been approved, and I hope it will last that long, maybe doing more safety checks for astronauts :)
But surely the fact that Mars' surface gets 2 or 3 times what Earth's surface gets would stop any missions from happening anytime soon (as in, within the next 20 years)? Or is the radiation not actually a problem?
How long does it take for Microsoft to get all patent rights for interplanetary email?
There is also a new Microsoft innovation, called MS Solar time, method for keeping track of time on different planets. It is based on the microsoft scheduler and the office assistant "Kenny the Galactic Clock".
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
Odyssey was launched in 2001... here's the mission timeline for more details.
The cute little bugger looks like this.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Yeah, what's up with the european orbiter? They promised us lots of new science/facts, but I looked at the ESA homepage, and.... nothing. :( Are they asleep or just lacking in the PR department?
http://libo.ru/ind/graf1/3086.jpg
A previous Slashdot story told us that Odyssey would be getting some new program featuring 'AI functions' so that it could do certain complex, but repetitive, tasks on its own without needing too much input.
What would happen, however, it this made Odyssey sentient? Could it build more robots, develop further intelligence, and then end up populating all of Mars with robots? If this happened, we might be in trouble.
"It'll just eventually lead up to colonization via the Union Aerospace Corporation. "
Don't you mean the Armadillo Aerospace Corporation?
About time! for too long Mars has been a flat-shaded sphere.
"discovered vast supplies of frozen water"
I must have missed that. All I've heard about was some frost at best. Where was this found?
BC
Both the Jupiter Gallileo and Venus Magellan projects went triple their design lifespans. However, they could have gone even longer, had NASA not canned them. Both were getting "creaky": insufficient propellant to do much, and instruments breaking down. Plus it costs a fair amount of money- up to 30% of the original mission cost per year- for a slice of the Deep Space Network and scientist to run and analyze the data.
We'll probably see this debate about the Mars Rovers if they survive into 2005. Both are already 2.5x their design lifetimes, have some instrument failures (a sick wheel motor, a dead spectrograph), and are tying up a couple hundred engineer and scientists full time.
People that write stories seem to always exaggerate things quite a bit, and then people believe it without even thinking. This deal with the mars rover that it "mapped surface textures and minerals all over Mars" is totally bullXXXX. The rover just drove around a tiny little area smaller than a football field, yet the description sounds like it went all over the place, but people will believe what they read without even thinking. This is like when people come back from vacation saying that they went all over the place within a given area, lets say, Europe, when in reality they just went to Rome in Italy. Then they start explaining with all the authority in the world about the place, and will without remose provide everyone that listens with a full evaluation of the place, regardless if they don't know what the heck they are talking about.
But without a stable magetic field, how are we going to get greenhouse gases to accumulate on Mars?
MMMM... Mars mustard...
I think you can start with the basic premise of actually reachine the destination, entering orbit, and sending back some data.
There have been a few missions that haven't reached even that basic level of success. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It costs us a lot less energy to just uplink the data from MER to ODY and let them send it back to Earth than for us to send it all the way back to Earth directly. The energy we save that way, we can spend on driving around, doing science, and staying warm. ODY did such a great job relaying data for us that it soon became our preferred communication mode -- we haven't returned any significant amount of data through another path for months. (Though we did recently test that we can also return data via ESA's Mars Express.)
To put it another way, without ODY, we'd have only about 10% of the pretty pictures you can find at the MER home page.
So on behalf of all of us MERfolk: thanks, and congratulations, Odyssey!
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
Anyone have any idea of the water quantities they are talking about here? If the surface has been mapped in the IR spectrum at 100m resolution then what is the surface coverage of water?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
http://www.rense.com/general48/stransge.htm
The playboy bunny spotted on mars
Don't know if many Slashdot people are dairy farmers, but their worst nightmare is having hay fields taken over with yellow mustard. And that isn't half as bad as garlic mustard, which is threatening to take over the entire forest undergrowth in the Great Lakes region.
Do we really want to turn Mars from red to the yellow of a serious mustard infestation?
The idea was to put some degree of industrial realism into a university course -- in industry you spend more time coming up with estimates and schedules than doing mathematical proofs of Fourier transform properties. But the students didn't seem to "get it" regarding why this "make work" exercise was added to the lab.
Then one day I overheard a student tell his lab partners "We're engineers damnit! Whatever estimate we come up with, we double it!"
That was a very proud moment for me as an engineering educator. Not only did that student understand the exercise, he learned the concept of padding an estimate so you have some engineering margin against the eventual schedule slippage.
I don't think it will be that big of a concern. The particular strain of mustard has it's genome mapped so they will know for sure that it's earth life if it spreads. I'm also pretty sure that as tough as it is, it's can't survive Martian conditions in the open. Hell, we could send Kudzu and not have to worry about it spreading in subzero temperatures and near airless conditions with no oxygen and unchecked UV radiation.
If it were anaerobic extreemophiles, it might be worrisome. Complex plant life as we know it should die unprotected.
Blaze a trail to the New World