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Mars Polar Lander Lost Again
IZ Reloaded writes "The Mars Global Surveyor during one of its latest scans of the area where the Mars Polar Lander was originally spotted, discovers that the spacecraft is no longer there! Space.com reports, "We conclude that our interpretation of these features was in error. This is not the location of the Mars Polar Lander. Because the landing uncertainty ellipse is so much larger than our images, and we do not have another candidate to which to target...we cannot continue to hunt for the lander," the MSSS site explains."
how can it "not longer be there"? this just shows it was never there in the first place...
"(score:5, trying to intice comments about martians"
The problem is the atmosphere. Even on earth plotting a trajectory through air can be rather inaccurate. Everything from pockets of turbulance, to what direction and how hard the wind was blowing that day can drasticly effect the trajectory. It gets even worse if it broke up, or a parachute didn't deploy, or got tangled. This is the reason why they have a landing elipse that is hundreds of miles in diameter.
me? insightful? we need the ability to mod the modders.
;-)
-1 American
Since modding someone funny gives them no /. karma some have started using interesting or insightfull in it's place to better reward humor and this might explain the mod.
Also whenever I meta mod and find I need to check the 'context' MOST of the time I'm MM-ing a post several weeks old, only once or twice has the article been still open for posting.
That last bit said I still rarely see meta mods on my moderation anymore, though at one time I could expect to see about 20% of my mods meta'd, and within a month or two.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Given the kind of crumple zones you'd get in a car made of arenak --- i.e. none at all --- I think I'll stick with plain steel, thanks. I don't like having all the kinetic energy of half a tonne of car travelling at 70 mph transferred to my torso via my seat belt!
Of course, if you could fit the car with Bergenholms, that'd be a different matter, although I suspect that the kind of pinball game rush-hour traffic would become would be even more stressful than it currently is. At least when you're in a traffic jam you don't run the risk of ricocheting off some pensioner's pet gerbil and arriving on Mars.
Well, I'm sure we'll do better when we send human explorers to the planet.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
You can make a rough guess of their capabilities based on HUBBLE imagery, and add some factors for super-secret NSA abilities on top of that.
Last time I was bored, I took a look at some raw Hubble images of Pluto, calculated the distance between Hubble and Earth on the day the picture was supposedly taken, and worked out the angle of view for 1 pixel of uninterpolated data from Hubble. Taking that angle down from Hubble's orbit height to Earth resulted in resolution just slightly better than 1" per pixel.
The NSA supposedly has at LEAST Hubble resolution, if not remarkably better.
(conspiracy theories, here we come...)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.