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."

Comments

Awesome!

[Kiba Ruby]

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.

Re:Awesome!

[Mixel]

I thought that was the moon race; Russians won the Space race...

Re:Awesome!

[Tim C]

How convenient that the country that first got to the Moon also got to define that as the finishing post. Russia put the first satellite, the first living creature, the first man and the first woman in space, and I think it was a Russian cosmonaut that performed the first EVA, although I could be wrong on that one (and don't have time to google it). They were also the first to put an object on the Moon.

I don't mean to belittle NASA's achievements, but to simply say "The US won the space race" is disingenuous.

just think

[netsfr]

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.

Re:overtime pay for robot workers?

[Cherita Chen]

"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."

Not quite true. They need to eat, sleep and shit - just not in the "biological" fashion that we carbon based life-forms do.

It is well known that;
A.) The Mars rovers are often limited in the amount of work they can perform due to light availability (food).
B.) The rovers must also transmit data back to the earth (shit).
C.) When power is limited due to lack of light, they must cease all science operations (sleep).

I would say that both of these rovers do in fact have a workday, and that it is much harder than most of the folks here on Earth would care to imagine...

Re:White dolphins discovered in Hellas Basin!

[Rei]

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.