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The Phoenix Has Landed
Iddo Genuth writes "Precisely at 7:53PM EST, the "Phoenix Mars Lander" touched-down on the desert-like surface of Mars. Since its launch on August 4th, 2007, the spacecraft has covered more than 680,752,512 kilometers, traveling at average speeds of around 120,000 km/hr. Upon arriving at its destination, the Phoenix will begin its exploration of our intriguing neighbor planet, in a mission to help astronomers resolve at least some of the many questions regarding Mars. The key question remains: can the Red Planet support some form of life?" Hella grats to our nerd brethren — you looked great on the Science channel. Yes I'm watching this live. Can't wait to see what happens next.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.
Update: 05/26 03:0 GMT by KD : zof sends a link to the first pictures from Phoenix.
Can't imagine it's very live what with the lightspeed delay..
But then... what if they do find evidence of life? I mean large, complex forms of life, not some fossilized bacteria that everyone will debate and bitch about. That's what I'm hoping they dig up.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A completely minor comment, but I'm struck by that strange and vaguely illiterate use of "precisely." I mean, could the spacecraft not touch down at some "precise" instant? Isn't it the nature of momentary events like touchdown to, well, happen in one precise moment?
I guess if it exploded and came down in pieces, it might not touch down at one instant, so maybe the fact that it touched down at precisely 7.53, instead of at roughly 7.53 (with some parts coming in early at 7.50 and a few stragglers not making it down until past 8) is good news.
Sorry, carry on.
Mars lander destroyed be meteorite...
That would suck
What?
Interesting the diffence in the types of images each school tries to capture
Arizona - Images of Mars
Arizona State - Images of Girls
To have a successful landing of this sort on Mars is brilliant, and continues to build hope that there might be a manned mission there in my lifetime, I can only hope.
Ever since I read the Mars Trilogy (red, green, blue) I have really hoped that it could come true in some way like those books show. (not all the bad obviously)... I would love to see it start, I really would.
... to those scientists that worked hard and put both heart and soul for at least a decade on Phoenix. I can't wait to see what images and data we get from Phoenix.
It's going to be an eventful summer here on Earth, that's for sure.
Oh yeah... We all heard that before.
What?
Great job, JPL & Arizona!
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Knowing some of the engineers that work on and manage these programs I am very happy with landing and everything it represents. More so I am looking forward to other robots, not the rover type but different task oriented machines like Robonaut and Chariot to make it off of Earth!
One day the world of robotics will have the answer.
I understand your point. Just so we're all clear, though; Phoenix sits on legs, not wheels, so there will be no 'puttering around' the pole.
Years ago, we put vikings up on mars. The more amazing in that they were nuke powered. Now, we fight about it all the time. Even phoenix would be better served had it been nuke powered. But now, about half of the ppl do not want human systems going, another group fights sending nuke power up, and another wants NASA dead altogether. Back in the 60's and 70's, we all came together on saying that ALL of this was important; Long term robotic probes AND human missions AND the environment (as we understood it). It was not one vs. the other.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned that the reason for human missions to the moon was because of uranium/plutonium. Yet, ppl were upset about what a waste human missions were without realizing that we could fire up new MUCH LARGER missions to mars and elsewhere and let them use plutonium. I never bought off on W's idea that the moon would be a good launch pad based on the hydrogen that is there. But if we have LOADS of plutonium, that is a different matter. We can easily rail launch missions combined with large amount of energy via plutonium without worrying about it being spread all over the earth's atmosphere. Hopefully, at some point, Americans realize that one idea does not need to preclude another. For instance, human missions do not need to prevent robotics from going (or vs. versa).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think I saw somewhere there first photos will arrive at 9:30pm EST?
I'm watching a smooth feed on:
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163
I give it 30 seconds 'til a Decepticon pwns it.
I, and many others, missed the live stream. If someone could hook up the rest of us with the landing video footage, that would be awesome!
- DaftShadow
The water is likely a wee bit further north. Congratulations on a successful landing though.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
EDT, not EST. :)
Phoenix Mars Lander Touched Down 2 Hours ago
was I the only one who saw the phoenix project logo and thought it looked remarkably similar the Firefox logo? Firefox was originally called phoenix was it not? Coincidence? I think not!
Units.
Phoenix went exactly 423,000,000 miles at the leisurely pace of 20.7 miles a second.
Now if we had done something really COOL, like drive there in a Jeep Commander, we would have used 22,263,157 gallons of gas and been MUCH better prepared for Mars.
Someone will bitch about fuel cost. OK, look at this: at $4/gallon it would cost $108,972,294 -- that's $411,027,706 cheaper than this $520M "good deal". Jeep is currently offering a $2.99 gas lock-in which would bring the total savings to $453,433,160. I mean WOW, they could spend the rest on parties and just tell us it's really, really complicated.
Now ask if the Phoenix has 4 wheel drive. Or A/C. Or the peace of mind knowing it's fully covered under a manufacturer's warranty.
Tough to beat if you ask me..
Everyone seems to be happy!
Did anyone else notice that they were using a Mac to view the images on? Also looked like they had already uploaded all of the images onto a gallery. Someone sharpen that screenshot and get a link :(
"Hella grats?" This is even worse than digg....jesus
Phoenix is not a very optimistic name for a space craft.
http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=313&cID=7
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Phoenix Mars Lander Touched Down 2 Hours ago
(It's a Dupe)
It is a mythical bird that arises from the dead every so often. It was already dead and buried once. After being re-designed on a few items and re-tasked, it has new life. Who knows, maybe in about 1.5 years when it is buried under ice, it MIGHT just survive it and come back. It actually has a chance of that (though quite slim).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Within minutes of the first downlink, pictures were available on the net.
one
two
three
That's fantastic.
Here are the photos it has taken so far.
http://fawkes1.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=0&cID=7
And that is why the moon is of UTMOST interest to us. It turns out that it has URANIUM. Uranium that can be bred into plutonium. That plutonium can be used on the moon, for long distance mission travel, for fast travel mission, for staying on mars, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Phoenix landed at 6:38pm EST and confirmation was received at 6:53pm EST. How someone can be off by 75 minutes and call it 'precisely' is beyond me.
I followed the link to the TFOT site given by the OP. On that page was a link to "more up to date information" on the status of the lander. Check out: http://www.tfot.info/news/1189/the-phoenix-has-landed.html Curiously, 2/3 down the page is an image of the lander which is titled: "NASA's Phoenix spacecraft on Mars - actual image (Credit: NASA)"
...I'm not sure how they can call that an actual image...
I found this particularly interesting since I have a second window open, and I'm watching the -relativistically speaking - "live" coverage from JPL on NASATV. In this coverage, they have JUST begun to get images of the solar panels a few minutes ago... And from what I can tell, none of them look like the "third person" photo on the TFOT site. Tried to post a comment to this effect on TFOT, but couldn't.
*sigh* this all must have been faked just like the lunar landings....
All those complex calculations sound like a waste of effort. Just set the ballistic trajectory to the desired spot then let the Phoenix rise from the ashes of the fiery explosion of impact.
The last place that they tried to claim being first at, was North America. And the ppl from Siberia/Russia had gone across the land bridge a long time earlier. Now, the russians have been by mars first, been to orbit mars first and even were on mars first. Of course, if you are asking who was able to have SUCCESS on each of these first, that is a WHOLE different matter. In that case, America's Mariner 4 was first successful flyby, Mariner 9 was first successful orbiter, and viking 1 (and 2) was first successful landers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Consider the first one of that design, is the one that did not live....
Phoenix has risen from the ashes of the first models mistakes, triumphant and ready to work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wish NASA wouldn't get so distracted during the "fun" part of these missions. It seems like a regular pattern, they set up frankly a pretty awesome web site, put up a countdown timer, plaster it with nice background articles and then update it very regularly ... until something happens. Then it's frozen in time for an hour or two (this time all they could come up with was "we got a signal") while they're all slapping each other five and pouring champagne into their consoles. The $420 million (or whatever it was) came out of our pockets, all I ask is that they get *one* intern to stay sober at the golden moment and clue in those of us who don't get the Science Channel.
Anyway it's great to see they pulled it off. It's weird how so many space shots worked on the first try and then we totally blew the next half-dozen tries. I blame the Martian strategic defense system.
Dammit, the University of Arizona website (which hosts the high resolution images) has been slashdotted. A few of the photos are already up on Wikipedia though, so use that if you can't get through.
The best thing they could possibly find would be a mars bar. It would be too funny if some NASA guy threw one in so that it would pop out on landing.
I, for one, welcome our new large, complex Martian lifeform Overlords!
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
With warm regards from our oil consuming nations we will begin with a few sample excavations
They just (well around 9:45 pm EDT) had the first Mars photos come in at NASA TV. It was pretty exciting, especially for all of those engineers. The first pictures were actually of the machine parts (solar array, foot) to make sure everything had deployed correctly but they later had some shots of the Mars landscape...flat but with some interesting wave patterns in the topography. They'll get fresh images about every two hours from the orbiter above Mars so they'll probably be something exciting in tomorrow's paper. Yes, I read those paper things.
NASA has discovered that there are still rocks on Mars, plans future missions to continue to monitor the rock situation on Mars.
The lander is a $420 million dart.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/070201_phoenix_update.html
The dart was thrown at a dartboard which is unmarked. There may or may not be a bullseye on the dartboard -- we're not sure, hence why we're throwing darts at it -- but we're not exactly sure what would consitute a bullseye.
The dart throwers, in our funny dart game, do not declare certain scores for outcomes in advance and then evaluate the dart based on the outcome of throwing it. Rather, they will get the results back and then score them, based on criteria which are based on caprice and whimsy cloaked in a thin veneer of "its scientific, if you criticize us you must be against science".
I'll spoil it for you: the conclusion will be, inevitably, that this $420 million dart was "a learning experience" (a wonderful phrase, because it is true by definition and means the dart can literally never fail, because we'd learn something even if the dart crash-landed into the dartboard as darts are wont to do), but that we need to throw more and more expensive darts. Why are we throwing darts? Well, there might be a bullseye out there... and you DO support science, right?
Personally I hope they hit the FSM's Noodly Appendage one of these times. That would be kind of cool. Granted, it doesn't exist, but I've got as much reason to believe in it as I do to believe in any of the things that could plausibly be called a bullseye.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
That gave me the biggest smile I have had all day, perhaps all week.
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
Heck even if it did crash, that's got to be the fastest thing we're ever built. 120,000 km/hr? And that's without a a whalefin spoiler...
Congratulations to the team! Made it to MARS t-shirts for everyone! (or You call that FAST? t-shirts soon to follow!)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
http://fawkes1.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_364.jpg
What is that white thing in the distance?
Did they launch this thing before color photography was invented?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I wonder why they don't have colour immagers!?
Usually they use filters to provide color for space missions. The first pass is a general survey. Filter-based color requires multiple images of the same spot, which will probably come later. Plus, they will probably use "science-friendly" filters before they use human-eye-friendly filters. Science before beauty. Just be patient...
Table-ized A.I.
But the issue is can we launch it all? Good luck getting past all the legal issues. We can send up nice small packages of RTGs, that produce less than a kW per mission. But from the moon, we could send a mission out with MWs. Imagine a voyager loaded with that, and a nice fully loaded ion drive. We would out of the solar system if we had launched something like that 10 years ago. We need ENERGY. Not small kw amounts, but large amounts. That is true regardless if robotics OR human missions. And we are not going to be able to launch any real amount from Earth. Read some of the other postings that were done under mine. Several say that it is not a problem (of course, they missed all the court battles on EACH of the nuked missions). The AC NASA engineer proudly points to the MSL and does not mention (or perhaps realize) that it will have less than a KW of power. These are NOTHING. If we are going to have real science running around, then we need power. And solar will not cut it. We have been real lucky with the rovers that they are managed so well AND winds have been in our favor that during the core of winter, they are kept heated. But that was luck.
If we really want to study (or inhabit) any of these places, we will need lots of power available on demand, and that is nuclear power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
it's at http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
which gets me to
mms://63.250.197.126/bcpenc252181?StreamID=63028387&pl_auth=260dc337232994e3effab4ac6815cac2&ht=30&pl_b=00448ED8EB43295F2A427EA386483A2A83&CG_ID=1369080&Segment=149773
(you can open that in VLC, quicktime player, or just in your browser)
But I wasn't able to find anything that could save it properly. VLC was able to save it but it wasn't in a format i could play.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The summary should read 7:53PM EDT, or just plain ET. No one observes EST at this time of year in the continental US.
Very interesting info. Thanks A.C!
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I remember when the rovers landed 4 years ago, everyone at work was checking the site for the first couple of weeks. We got great pictures but what new discoveries did we make. My biggest frustration was the news that they discovered some mineral formation that if it took place on earth would mean that water had been there. hello your not on earth.
They have the equipment give me some evidence for a friggin H20 molecule, something solid. I hope they find something but I am not confident it will be anything that we matter.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
... who simulates nuclear war... for fun? ;)
(I love DEFCON, too. Its a perversely fun game. Speaking of which: You know the difference between NASA and the nuclear arms race? One of them is a way to channel billions to defense contractors by exploiting the hopes and fears of Americans... and the other one involves nuclear weapons.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic we are the ones putting 3 legged machines on Mars... ?
...didn't show a giant metal hand, then Megatron's ugly face, then static.
they landed on my sister!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
That's EASY! Take something "complex" and remove just the "imaginary" part. ;^)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is ass-backwards thinking. Policy makes public perception, not the other way around. "public perception" is only relevant if *we* make it relevant. EDUCATING the public is the proper way to think of this. If you talk to 'the public' like adults, give them accurate information, and educate about what's going on, they almost always get on board in the end.
In theory this is a nebulous, but good idea. In practice, people use this phrase to justify not doing something, when really they are just coving their ass...and in general being wimpy. For example: deciding to "err on the side of caution" and storing extra food on a mars mission = good...saying "err on the side of caution" to justify not doing something that we should but that "the people" THINK is dangerous = BAD
Managing Risk...such a nebulous concept. "It's all about" accomplishing the mission. Making "risk" avoidance the guiding precept is just an excuse for failure. Take this example: when snowboarding (or skiing) in tight tree runs, you can't think about "not hitting trees" because you unconsciously focus your attention on the trees to avoid hitting them, and therefore you're looking at trees (which you want to avoid) and neglecting focusing on the open part of the run, which you have to go through to actually get down the hill. If you focus on NOT doing bad as opposed to doing what you're trying to do, you will inevitably fail
I'm sorry, but nuke power is the best source of power. If we dedicated ourselves do doing the job right, we could take all those man-hours we've been wasting trying to come up with alternate sources of power (because we fear nukes), and use them to make nukes safer.
Thank you Dave Raggett
we can send a robotic spaceship 680 million miles through deep space, but cannot make an electric car. Hmmmmmm.
Two errors in the original post here. 1. We received the message at 7:53 EDT, not EST. 2. The misson sight says it actually takes 15 minutes for signals from Phoenix to reach earth, therefore the craft actually landed at 7:38 EDT. Congratulations all of course/
What is the vertical white object just below the horizon in this image?
http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_402.jpg
It sure looks unnatural...did something fall off during entry that landed and is in view of the lander?
Particularly this one. I can make out the flag on the next green, just below the horizon. It looks like a PAR 3 with a 7-iron.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not really. The reason it is not a rover is that it doesn't need to be. From the FAQ: While mass guidelines may be tight, they're decided upon *AFTER* they decide if they need a rover or a lander. If they needed a rover with the same science packages, they would put one together.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
How long will Phoenix hold up compared to the two rovers?
Yep - I agree - it would otherwise just be another rover mission.
..........FULL STOP.
By the way, a similar technique was used by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii to produce wonderful, early color photographs of the Russian Empire during World War I.
In theory this thing is sitting on soil composed of 80% ice. It should be able to dig far enough to find some, and the point of this mission is to figure out what level could potentially be a reserve that might still hold life - for a later rover to go look for (though this one can also detect forms of organic matter if it finds any in the samples).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is not just a thing on a string. This has a robotic arm that will gather samples and then process them in an internal chemistry lab. I am just saying that there is a lot of BS used to say that we cannot get the technology for a real electric car. If we put the same effort into getting One made as we do exploring Mars for satans sake, it would be done allready.
The initial estimate of actual landing location puts it on the very edge of the estimation ellipse. The ellipse represents a 99% confidence area. That implies it is very close to being officially "off target". They speculated its one of the reasons why some landing steps were about 5 seconds later than expected, according to the press conference. Nobody has proposed a theory yet about why it was off as far as it was, for they are just now beginning to analyze the telemetry. But its good to be on the ground either way.
Table-ized A.I.
http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/md_440.jpg
look to the right far side - there is something
like a pyramid. Or can it be a white monolith?
MSNBC is now showing a few color snippets:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24811991/
The bottom part might be where the landing rockets blew away rubble.
Table-ized A.I.
Those are false-color images. The real deal will be coming later.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Does this image show some part of the lander thrown out during the descent, or is just an artifact?
:)
It's fairly visible on top of the horizon, 2/3 to the right. Funny thing, it looks like a white rocket taking off
http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_440.jpg
Those are false-color images. The real deal will be coming later.
You mean tinted, or 2-filter? They don't look tinted, for I've experimented with tinting myself on other mars missions and have learned to spot the difference, barring careful retouching. It does appear that some of the originals were taken through different filters, but its not clear which filters and how many.
Table-ized A.I.
Endurium?! :P
PM
They're 2-filtered. Violet 450-nanometer filter and an infrared, 750-nanometer filter. (As stated here.)
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
I can't tell if this satire or if the local Honkey Tonk kicked out all the philosophical regulars early. Just in case it's the latter, metrics are standard in science. Yes, even for Americans.
Better check your griddle, I think your Freedom Fries are burning.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Those are really good questions. False color can mean a lot of things I realize. I should have asked for clarification on that but there wasn't time. Sorry.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
DISCLAIMER: I lived in a metricated country, so the measurements don't bother me at all.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
If you look at this hi-res image http://fawkes4.lpl.arizona.edu/images/gallery/lg_440.jpg you see a white object in the distance. Although it is out of focus, it seems rather tall and narrow, you can even see its shadow. Probably not a live Martian, but something interesting anyway. I hope they take a better picture of it, when time allows.
In Murphy We Turst
Oceans advance and recede, mountains rise, land is lost and reclaimed
Not all the historic land mass is now above water and much that is, was reclaimed relatively recently
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
The isotope used in nuclear weapons is Pu-239, not PU-238. 238 has a MUCH shorter half-life than 239 and gives off a lot of heat (and alpha particles) so it can power thermoelectric generators. 239 just sits there and absorbs an occasional neutron that happens to come near.
We landed, have received data...I think that qualifies as a point, time to update the slashdot loveable Mars Scoreboard no?
/woot! 46 years late we tie it up!
//yeah baby! Rally Monkey!!
http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/
that makes 20 to 20!
what.. 680,752,512 and a half?
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
*grin* Special relativity breaks absolute simultaneity. To say that you could account for the speed of light to calculate the precise absolute instant that the lander touched down is not even correct. An observer moving very fast towards Mars and away from Earth could make the same calculation and come to a different conclusion.
But you can say that. The whole point of GR is to provide the mathematical tools to translate from one frame to another, the idear being that I can define simultaneity in terms of a translation from another frame to my frame.
Thus, I can put a spaceship on Mars, and really can know that to this earth bound observer, what happened however many minutes ago ago is in fact what happened, AND, I can imagine myself being on Mars in a spacesuit a few minutes earlier, looking at the robot probe as it did its thing.
This is my sig.
I know that Slashdot tends to be a metric love-fest,
OH the irony on Memorial Day. Someone is complaining about metric again at the very moment 150,000 US soldiers in Iraq are using metric -all- the time.
This is my sig.
I was in a spacesuit. I just wanted to see the probe, and make sure it was ok. I just returned to my capsule a few hundred meters away from the landing site. I was tempted to drop a couple of fossils around, as a joke, but I was sorta running late, and had to get back in time to make this post.
This is my sig.
You mean George Bush Sr.? I didn't know he was missing!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The metric system is just better, get over it. While those of us in the "real world" still use imperial/english units for some things (constuction industry, like 2x4's for wood. Height, I don't know how many cm's tall I am, but I know I am 5'11"), we realize the vast upsides of having nice simple system for basically everything else, where just about everything is nice round factors of 10. Same goes for temperature, who the heck cares what temperature mercury freezes at? Celcius/Kelvin FTW!
That is my point. All of these use a lot more plutonium and creates a great deal more energy than does the small rtgs. Orion is about getting us to someplace quickly. All of these requires LOTS of plutonium.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
how come some of the planets were different colors than they are now than they were now in my 1968 encyclopedia brittanicas?
aliens in the background?
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/8715/wtfaliensmq6.gif
Don't forget about our nerd sistren on the Phoenix team...
You are aware that if a single one of these plutonium-powered spacecraft (like Saturn's Cassini w/ 72lbs of Pu) were ever destroyed during launch, all that Plutonium could very well be dispersed in exactly the most deadly way, causing trillions of slow, agonizing deaths among every living thing that breaths?
NASA and the US gov't are betting the health of every living thing on this globe that they can cheat the odds.
I'm not a Luddite, I very much want to explore our solar system. I just want to do it right.
Instead of lying to the Uranium miners so as to kill them all off before they ever get old enough to retire, lets pay them well and give them top-quality protective gear.
Instead of leaving huge mountains of mine tailings to leach Uranium into the ground water to poison indian reservations, let's have a plan to deal with it, somehow.
Instead of making extremely deadly material that remains so for tens of thousands of years without any clue how to secure it for that long, let us as an intelligent species FIRST learn how to deal with the mess we so recklessly have already created.
Every civilian nuclear reactor has a spent fuel pool full of the one item on the list of parts needed for a nuclear bomb that's hard to get. I would direct the US National Labs to allocate all their resources into a neutralization process, discover some way to speed up the decay time.
As you can imagine my views are frowned upon by the rest of my liberal friends.
"The right to do something does not mean doing it is right." William Safire
to think of a huge problem like this and surmount it with science.
Why not start with the huge problems that mankind has CREATED here on our home (only) planet?
- pollution, waste, overdevelopment, greed, corruption
- general failure to achieve social justice, in fact rich/poor divide is widening at an increasing rate
- corporations controlling seedstocks for human food? what kind of evil is this?
- environmental destruction increasing rapidly (Amazon, Indonesian forests, and pretty much every other snippet of old growth gone in a decade or two)
- foodstock depletion (major species of fish depleted) and species extinction (forget about meeting a Pangolin, but thousands are already gone) increasing rapidly
- waste of military spending
- the idiocy of burning non-renewable fuels like there's no tomorrow (oh wait, there IS no tomorrow!)
- cars: one of our worst ideas ever
When we can manage this planet with an iota of competence, let's talk about interfering with the rest of the solar system.
Fuck the space programme (in particular the manned space programme).
you had me at #!
2x4's havent measured 2" x 4" for many years. Technically the 2x4 measurement applies to the pre-finished size of the wood.
A 2x4 is roughly 1.5" x 3.5"
ABIL
You know, Mars started out as a GOD. An angry red god moving through the heavens. Then, we figured out it was a planet, just like ours. We saw great canals built by grand civilisations. Then, we realised that Mars didn't have canals, and that it was really dry and cold. So, we sent probes to see what it was like on the surface. What did we see: rocks and dust. So, we sent more probes to drive around. What did they find: rocks, dust, and signs that water was around in the past. So, we send another probe, this time to dig into what we think is buried ice. What will we see? Maybe, best case, chemistry that indicates microbial life exists. Probably, given Mar's history, we'll find out that there was once enough liquid water, that hung around long enough, so that life might have had a chance to evolve.
So, we've gone from God, to civilisations, to visible life, to microbial life, to past microbial life, to the conditions where microbial life might have once possibly evolved. When the Viking probes landed, we were wondering if some Martian dog would walk by and piss on the lander leg. Now, we're hoping to see chemistry that indicates microscopic fossils. It's pretty sad when you think about it. Sure, there's enough interesting stuff to keep an uber-geek scientist excited, but for the rest of us? For most of us, the most interesting things on Mars are the probes we sent. Imagine what Columbus would have thought if he came to the new world and found nothing but rocks and dust?
No wonder humans have gone from massive programs to budget exploration. The return on investment just isn't there anymore. I don't expect Mars will really be interesting again until we have the technology to lift massive amounts of material into orbit on the cheap. Then, colonising Mars will be possible; then there will be something interesting on it... Us.
But, for now, you have to admit, the probes are pretty cool.
David...
Hmmm... I read it took around 10 months for the Lander to reach Mars. If you do the math on the figures used in this article, using an average speed of 120,000km/hr it should have taken less than 8 months.
The beginning of a conspiracy plot?
Never mind the DNA, the key word here is nerd. If you watched NASA TV, you saw that the desks at JPL are labeled by function -- communications, landing, attitude control, etc. One station was labeled "Geology" -- and featured a Post-It note changing the designation to the correct "Planetology." Nerds Rule.
Jim Shilliday