Slashdot Mirror
Phoenix Mars Lander Updates
spandex_panda writes "There are a few pictures of the Mars Lander on the ground — you can see its parachute and its heat shield a few kilometers away, too. There's a very cool looking picture of it floating down, actually captured while it's in the air with its parachute out!" We also have a YouTube video all about the robot arm that will dig down and probably find a groundhog who we all hope will see his shadow.
Why have we never seen similar shots of the Apollo moon landing equipment?
nah its when the real volume of pics from the surface arrive that it gets interesting. Once again we can start looking for wee little people fishing from the rocks...
See more... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3232035.ece
Shame they did not land near the other probes, then they could have filmed each other. Yes, I know that is scientifically pointless, but you have to admit it would have been cool.
On the same note I always thought that Spirit or Opportunity should have been sent to visit Beagle crater...
This issue was discussed in a series of posts on the last Mars mission, that left me more confused than I was before: is the red color in these photos and the other Phoenix images the real color of the Mars surface (or at least an accurate reconstruction of what a human eye would see with ambient light there) or is it something NASA arbitrarily adds to impress viewers with notions about "the red planet"? Previous discussion focused more on whether the people complaining were or were not NASA-denialist kooks than on whether they were factually correct.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So now that we have landed three consecutive probes on Mars, what is the next step?
What is keeping NASA and the ESA from working together to create a tiny habitat to send to mars? I'm not talking anything fancy. How about sending a plant to Mars and keeping it alive? You have all the challenges of putting a living organism into space, getting it to mars, landing it on mars, and getting a habitat inflated, powered up, and surviving, all without having to risk the life of a human being.
Think about it. Establishing green houses on mars, while a daunting task, will be incredibly valuable, and incredibly interesting. It will challenge our ability to remotely deploy and manage habitats, and provide the appearance of starting a human habitable colony on another world (even though scientists will know, and openly and repeatedly explain that it isnt, people will still come to that conclusion and be fascinated) without having to sacrifice human life.
All we need to do is start with just 1 little plant.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Landers such as the Phoenix use thrusters to come to a safe, soft landing. Don't these thrusters blow away a lot of the useful sand and soil they are trying to collect?
That is the true advantage of Spirit and Opportunity, not only did they use airbags instead of rockets, they could drive away from the disturbed landing site.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Criminals probably aren't such a good idea, since if they're on death row already, they're probably not the kind of people you can trust.
I've often thought that offering the chance of a "one way trip" to suitably qualified people would still bring in a lot of volunteers. Some might be perfectly healthy and fine, but I expect a lot of the volunteers would be people who don't really expect to be alive much longer anyway.
Right now, personally, I wouldn't take it... but if, for example, I found out tomorrow that I have a terminal disease with only 5 years to live TOPS (but sufficiently close to 100% chance of survival within 3 years), I'd happily take a research job on Mars to live out the end of my days doing research in the most amazingly DIFFERENT place that I can imagine.
The contract could even say that when someone is too sick to work, you simply chuck them out the airlock (what's the point in prolonging their life at that point anyway)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
You don't care for bacteria? They care about you.
"Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses...."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2004/10/65252
I am WELL aware of how important the bacteria and other little organisms in my body are to my life. I'm also even well aware of how important Earth bacteria are to our entire ecosystem. However, Martian bacteria can all be blasted off the face their planet once we've studied them for all I care.
We are a conquering species, and we can "conquer" the bacteria of Mars and commit genocide if you want to look at it like that. I have no issues with this concept.
We, as a species, need to get out in the universe, and if we have to crush some bacteria in to non-existence to do it, that's fine. I only draw the line once I see creatures exhibiting intelligence (the natural "intelligent behaviour" of chemicals up to and including very complex multicellular life such as bacteria does NOT count in this case! But get much more complex than that (plants, dumb fish, etc) and at that point I wouldn't be fine with it)
(and yes, it IS an arbitrary line I'm drawing, and I'm comfortable with that too!)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan