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New Mars Discoveries
sighted writes "The fleet of five active spacecraft examining Mars (in addition to the recently-missing Mars Global Surveyor) have been working overtime. On the heels of last week's finding of possible flows of liquid water, the ESA has announced that an entire hidden landscape exists just beneath the surface of the Red Planet, and NASA has released some really amazing images of layered topography that will yield many clues to the history of this strange world."
All the more reasons to spend money on NASA.
We need to spend money on NASA. NASA's pioneering work in the space race give us advances in technology. The exploration of Mars should be taken seriously to the extent of the level of Iraq war spending.
NASA is a legendary organization during the space race. We need to make NASA a legendary level government organization again.
We have very good reason to go to Mars. Discovering lifeform on another planet is very improtant. Even if it is bacteria life, it will be a still very important step to answering mankind's question "Are we alone?". Even if we don't discover life, we will advance the technological level of mankind by doing so.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-RMS
Why do so many /.'ers find it necessary to pick apart every post to the point of idiocy?
how mind blowing it would have been if the sub-surface radar showed roads or infrastructure of a previous existance... It would have turned the way funding is for space all around, as well as change text books all over the world.
Really impressive technology being used here. Kudos to those who make it happen.
And just where do you think Mars is located?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"working overtime?" gimme a break. spacecraft and robotic devices and test instruments do not have a workday, and are not limited by human weaknesses like the need for sleep, food, and bowel movements. if they work "beyond their expected life", that's a testament to good engineering. but please don't grant these manufactured goods human qualities.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Scientific American is running an article about how it now looks almost certain that there were large standing bodies of water on Mars in its early history. However it goes on to say that this probably only lasted for a billion years or so before the water froze/evaporated and mars slowly turned into the dusty desert we know today.
My own belief is that Mars slowly lost its atmosphere due to its low gravity and poor magnetic field and as the air pressure went down it was easier and easier for water to evaporate until at some point the pressure got to the point where the boiling point of water had dropped to below the ambient temperature of the planet and that was the end of the lakes/seas if there were any still around by then. Once in the atmosphere the water was dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, the H2 escaped and the O2 reacted with whatever was around producing the rusty landscape we see today.
You do realize that it's corporations (Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, etc) who do the bulk of spacecraft design, development, and operation in the US, right? And, for most rockets (obvious exception, the shuttle, which really should have been treated as a research platform, not a workhorse), these corporations have the normal profit motive, as they bear operating costs and compete for launch constracts. Often only the design is subsidized. Sometimes, as in the case of the Pegasus, even the design isn't subsidized.
It's funny, people viewing corporations as the answer to high launch costs, when it's corporations that currently run the show.
If what people actually mean is "smaller startups", they should read about the staggering non-success smaller startups have historically had with rocketry.
That doesn't mean that the business world won't give us "the way forward". SeaLaunch hasn't done half-bad, and I keep an eager eye toward the progress of SpaceX's Falcon. But this isn't "something new". It's just the latest iteration of a long, ongoing process.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?
We did it with a free society and a decent respect for life. (Blocking is mine.) I know that Americans are fed this story about how wonderful The United States is from an early age but you could do with a little more skepticism. A free society? Millions of you are prisoners of an economy, nothing more. Decent respect for life? Which country invented the A-Bomb, used it twice and was dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on the Vietnamese by the time Armstrong landed on the moon?