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Mars Rover Ready for Risky Descent into Crater
Riding with Robots writes "After months of scoping out the terrain, the robotic geologist Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars. Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think the potential for discovery is worth it. 'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days. The scientific allure is the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments. As the rover travels farther down the slope, it will be able to examine increasingly older rocks in the exposed walls of the crater. '"
The MERS mission has been an incrediable sucessess that one doesn't hear much about, unless you read slashdot. A 90 day mission that has lasted 3 years and shows no signs of stopping as funding has been approved to at least september and so long as they are showing results, I doubt that is going to change. Most of the costs is in launching and building the damn things. From that stand point, looks like they've gotten their money worth out of them.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
One way to get new toys is to break the old ones. If you had driven those greenscreen monitiors down a crater, they would have been replaced with some new shiny CGA monitors. I don't htink NASA is setting out to break "the little rover that could" but they are getting more and more adventerous with it, doing things that may have previously been ruled out for safety concerns. "The last thing it ever does" is better than saying "Hey everybody, Watch this!"
We are all just people.
You know, sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in the details of these rover missions, but I am always pretty humbled when I think of this remote controlled do-dad, once pieced together by earth-bound scientists, sitting on some planet 50 (or so) million miles away and still responding to our every command. Just to think that thing is out there, on mars, right now.
:)
Reading story after story about the various space exploration projects and we can get a little desensitized to the pure 'awesomeness' of the kinds of things our space exploration agencies are doing. So a moment to just consider this achievement is warrented I think.
How great would it be to have a go at driving that thing?
But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water?
We use our experience on Earth to form a hypothesis about similar features on another planet.
Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics.
We form a hypothesis but we can't support or deny it until we observe evidence. If the evidence supports then it looks like we knew it all along. If the evidence denies then it raises more questions.
As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet.
We have observed minor impacts on the Moon and a major one on Jupiter.
At some point in time, their speculation hardened into consensus without ever thinking to validate it. Many of the craters we observe in the universe have highly unusual features that don't appear to strictly correlate with physical impacts.
Consensus is built with mathematical models. Probes and telescopes are used to validate our hyptheses. Again, if observational evidence does support a hypothesis then more questions are raised and new ones are formed. As for not correlating with physical impacts (I'm not entirely sure what you are referencing here) there are craters formed by volcanoes and probably some caused by exploding meteors (meteorites).
My point is that the overall predictive track record and the large number of unsubstantiated consensuses within astrophysics today do not support the notion that we should be able to accurately predict our findings on Mars at this point in time.
We have hypotheses. Yes we want water to be found on Mars and it shouldn't be unexpected. There is an incredible amount of water in the universe and it would be foolish to only expect to find it on Earth or the moons of Jupiter.
Mars was a molten ball of magma that eventually began to cool. Why would anyone not expect that sometime between being a molten ball of magma and its current state as a presumably cold, dead world that there wasn't flowing water on it?
Someone's never owned an HP Laserjet II.
I've hit them with hammers, dropped them, kicked them, used them as doorstops, and they don't quit printing. Just keep them happy with toner and paper.
We believe we killed one once. It was locked in the back of our campus transport vehicle, and some kids with nothing better to do stole it, torched it and left it on railroad tracks to get hit.
When we got the smoldering wreckage back, the LJII was in the middle of what used to be the cargo cab. It was black.
If you dropped it on a piece of paper, you'd be hard pressed to prove that it wasn't still putting toner on the page.
They wouldn't have enough money for them. Without astronauts, they wouldn't attract as big a budget, because that's what gets the bucks.
Hmm. I agree and disagree. On the one hand, certainly astronauts help sell NASA to the public, which probably helps keep NASA in the budgetary eye. On the other hand, one of the reasons NASA is so f***ed up is because they are mandated to spend money on various projects in various politician's districts, which is what they truly care about (mmm, love that pork).
So I would say that as long as the sweet, sweet money was being spread around, the politicians would be happy. And if we truly had 1,000 probes constantly sending back neat-o images and data, I bet the sheer volume of discovery would actually exceed the romance of humans in space.
But I admit the point is arguable.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
~wolf
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
I think people have been more impressed with the Hubble pictures more than anything else from NASA these days. I agree that if they would have blanketed the solar system with probes there would have been a lot more to show in the way of pictures and data and would have gained much more public interest.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown