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Venus Express Blasts Off
kitzilla writes "The European Space Agency's Venus Express probe has been successfully launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The mission's first attempt was scrubbed last month after technicians spotted a problem with the lift vehicle. In about five months, Venus Express will pull into orbit around our closest planetary neighbor and begin five months of scheduled observations. On the short list of mission objectives: a detailed mapping of Venus' surface, a survey of the planet's complex atmosphere, and a look into the possibility of active Venusian volcanoes."
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/0 8/034230&tid=160&tid=98
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
sometimes i wonder if there will ever be a slashdot thread without at least one google comment :)
Martini Glasses
Yes, absolutely. Who cares ....
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..... bzzt .. sorry this Kansas Educational broadcast has been interrupted by the real world.
... bzzt, back to the Kansas educational department broadcast ...
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In fact let's ban all forms of research
In fact let's ban all forms of thought. And art, and music, oh, and teaching any form of science - especially that evilolution stuff.
Let's ban
Research doesn't always give directly useful results. It might - or it might not. The process of doing research might give useful results - or it might not.
In fact doing almost anything might give useful results. Or not.
But backing off from researching the local area - now that's really silly. Volcanoes on Venus - who cares? Well I do, for one. Any better understanding of volcanoes would seem to be a useful thing to me - there are quite a few in the world. It would be nice to learn something about them in a completely different environment.
Yes, and let's ban the Internet, and electricity, and inoculations, and
"Cats like plain crisps"
My goodness, I was seriously asking what the use is. I was not asking "Why is such a useless thing being done?", I was asking what the use is. And that's what I'd like to honestly know. Of course I know that not all research is useful right away, but there must be some motivation behind finding out about volcanoes on Venus.
Get a free Video iPod!
So it's great to see a space mission that combines engineering with real science and that isn't just predicated on the public's gullibility as to the long odds of ET life.
I know that the /. 'love all things space' crowd will mod me down, but I've got Karma to burn.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
If the human race innately took your attitude, we'd still be living in caves.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The difference here is that there's little commercial use for a high-resolution map of Mars or Venus. Accurate maps of Earth are extremely economically valuable.
However, although it's not public domain, Google Earth is freely as in gratis.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
That there will be active volcanos on Venus, if only for the simple fact that it's apparently close enough to the Sun to be "as hot as hell", but not quite close enough to be baked to a cinder like Mercury, plus there was some interesting things observed when we last sent a probe - even with lens-cap problem.
teewurstmann does raise an interesting question - "Why are we looking for active volcanos on Venus?"
The answers "Because we can." or "It'll lead to great jumps in science." would not suffice with your average Joe Bloggs though, and if we wish to increase our ventures into space, or even just continue with space exploration altogether, then we're going to need a "hook", or a goal that we can present to the public in a unified answer that satisfies their curiosity and is not an outright lie - although a little white lie like, for example "We hope to discover a significant mineral deposit on the moon which will facilitate longer journeys into space." or "By studying the metals and minerals on Mercury we can discover how to create stronger, more tolerable materials on Earth which will create better housing, stronger and lighter cars..." etc.
Come up with a Grand Idea if you like - "We're going to save mankind."
Now seriously, who wouldn't think that saving our species is a noble goal? We don't have to tell the public "from ourselves", we'll just keep'em guessing - the continual doses of paranoia we're getting from our governments aren't doing too much harm, so we'll use a little "poetic licence".
Why are we looking for volcanos on Venus? Why not? Why not start at Mercury, or Venus, or Mars, or anywhere else in our solar system and look at it like one of those colour tests a few of us must have done in chemistry in high school.
Oh look, Mercury is mainly this colour, which means it's made mostly of this mineral... Venus is very acidic, and has all sorts of interesting liquid metals at venusian "room" temperature... Mars seems to have water, or the evidence of water...
We study, and learn, and find out how our solar system is constructed, and then one day, maybe if we don't destroy ourselves beforehand, we use the models we've made from this gathering of knowledge and we create plans.
We plan which solar systems nearby would be likely to have a sufficiently earth-like blue-green planet. We plan where we could find in our galaxy various minerals, fuels, and other resources needed to build, maintain, and power our ships as we go searching for other life, and other worlds. We plan to spread out, to colonise the most idyllic locations, and make sure that our species survives through sheer weight of numbers. We plan to live, to explore, to discover, to learn, to expand our minds and evolve.
We've been sitting on this little blue-green marble for a long time now, long enough to nurture the maths, physics, chemistry, and biological sciences enough to show us how to get up and explore the rest of our solar system. Now we need to use that knowledge and help ourselves before a meteor, asteroid, or sheer stupidity kills us.
Why explore the solar system? Why pick over rocks on Venus?
Because these are our baby steps, our first tentative journeys into space, the beginning of what I, and I'd hope many of you too, would dearly wish to be the start of our much greater journey into the galaxy.
Mistakes will be made, and lives will, as they have, be lost, but those people, our first space explorers, did not die in vain. We already have gained much knowledge, and it may not be used to any large extent now, but it will prove to be invaluable in the future.
I only hope that politics, greed, apathy, and stupidity don't condemn us to live our final days here, stuck on a world we could so easily leave if we simply worked at it.
His name is Robert Paulsen...
What??? What???
From TFA: "The European Space Agency's Venus Express probe..."
The "nation that flew to the moon" was the U.S. of the 1960s - the one that invented stuff, the one that manufactured stuff, the one that didn't care about "self-esteem", the one that wasn't morbidly obsessed with not offending anyone, the one that dared, the one whose future was still before it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Politics, my naive but well meaning friend. No country wants pictures of its top secret places free for the world to see. Look at the whole google-spotting fun going on already with people posting up pics of bomber bases, submarines, warships etc. Lots of countries really don't want you to know where they keep their tanks, or that they've sneakily pushed up their advanced forces into somebody else's disputed territory.
Lots of farmers in Europe got caught out a few years ago when the satellite images proved that they were claiming subsidies for farming land they weren't actually doing anything with, lots of logging companies in the Amazon probably would prefer that hippy ecologist PhD students don't get ready access to high quality data. Pick your prefered flavour of scenario.
Some countries find it good not to let others know what they are doing with nuclear power. Commercial companies are doing very nicely making money out of selling you pictures, why should they want you to get them for free?
Right now, geographical and geological data about Mars and Venus are of commercial / geopolitical little worth, we can just about get remote control robots there. Wait till any medium sized company and tin pot dictatorship can get 50 people there with mining/digging/ fighting equipment and then it will be interesting to see how easy it is to get high resolution maps "of the land 10km to the East of US Mars Base 7" "geological survey of 100km surrounding Exxon drilling rig 39" etc....
What rot. If that was the case we'd have used an Ariane. The rocket used here was Soyuz / Fregat - a Russian launcher.
The latest Soyuz is a joint venture owned by Russia and Europe, though the design is Russian origin. It's pretty much the most advanced spacecraft ever built on Earth, solid and reliable, and costs only $30 million per launch. (compare to the ancient shuttle costing over $600 million per launch)
Nice to see Europeans continue their agenda to do actual science which benefits the entire human civilization instead of burning money for ridiculous political/self-esteem/military goals.
Good luck, Venus Express!