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NASA Sends Lego Figures to Jupiter
bLanark writes "NASA have teamed up with Lego and will send three specially crafted, minifigures towards Jupiter in a probe to be launched on an Atlas V rocket on Friday. The figures, representing Roman gods Jupiter and Juno, and astronomer Galileo, are machined from aluminum and are the normal size for Lego minifigures. From the article: 'This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.'"
A Lego Odyssey
they should have at least thrown in a standard 8x2 thin black piece mounted vertically as a joke
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
0) NASA approached Lego
1) Lego underwrote the project; 5K per mini
2) Using identifiable objects is a great way to get kids interested in science.
But wait until it reaches some alien civilization, and then they come back and conquer us with their new Lego machines.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Looks like Juno got the short end of the design stick. Where the other two characters got custom beards, tools and whatnot...she got flowing hair and a frying pan?
Sending 3 heroes of the western world on a suicide mission where their last moments will be like in Toy Story 3 with the figures silently considering their fate as slowly approach the fiery furnace. Except that this time there is no hope of escape.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The juno mission web site is a gigantic, slothlike, steaming pile of crap. It takes forever to load, plays music, makes your computer get hot which causes the fans to crank up, forces you to read agonizingly slow text that fades in, etc... I couldn't even find what I was looking for so I just closed the tab. What a huge waste of money.
What they should next is throw a teapot
Russel will turn in his grave.
So who says we geeks don't know how to have fun?
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Especially the Galileo.
You think this giant advertisment for LEGO is going to be paid in 'taxpayer dollars' ?
How could NASA have run out of funding with projects such as these?!
are you speaking as the owner of LEGO A/S?
Sounds like it was funded by Lego. Nevertheless, while there is a certain cool/nostalgia factor, it does seem sad that we are sending toys into space at the same time as the shuttle program ends and American manned space flight enters a hiatus of unknown duration.
It is the cart before the horse - if we are taking the trouble to send toys to space, shouldn't we also be sending kids to play with those toys?
I know she is Greek but come on, we can at least PRETEND she doesn't have a beard you could loose a badger in.
And as far I know Lego doesn't do boobies. Probably to avoid boys being afraid of sharp edges or girl afraid of them falling off if you wiggle them to much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The thing is, it is often necessary to add a bit of ballast to a spaceflight in order to keep everything in balance. That can either be boring lead bars or cool lego figures. Effectively, they got Lego to subsidize the cost of some of the ballast. Cost to taxpayer: -$1.
I'm sure re-designing the entire spacecraft to shove an extra sensor in there would have been MUCH cheaper that adding a couple ounces of ballast!
aaaand, if you'd read the article, you'd know that the lego corp is paying $15,000 for it. Which, by your calculation, means that NASA is making a profit.
Also, a minifig, even if solid, is way less than a cubic inch.
How about we have NASA blast you into space and we call it even?
Gee, I wonder where such information might be found?
I understand that you might not read the article, a lot of people don't. But, really, if you wanted more detailed information, the article might be a good place to start.
And, failing that, there's a comment a little above yours (Subject="Let's knock the trolls out of the way") that also answers your question.
And, in case you got this far without looking up there out of a sense of embarrassment if nothing else, the answer to your question is yes, LEGO is paying NASA $5,000 per figure to send them to Jupiter, or about five times what you estimate it'll cost.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
next thing you know, some aliens will conclude that there were once a shriving civilization on Jupiter, but vanished abruptly...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You mean the money that you spent on Lego playsets when you were growing up? Because if you're quite done being a cynical bastard, you could RTFA and discover that Lego footed the costs, not NASA.
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Well if you're going to buy an Atlas 551 to get this spacecraft to Jupiter in the first place, and you have a little extra performance margin on the rocket that can cover the weight of adding three Lego figurines (which you do, a 551 is a damn powerful rocket, and three aluminum figures are not particularlly heavy). Then why not add something fun for the ride?
Stop wasting so much energy on being cranky. You'll give yourself an ulcer.
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Lego paid for it, sooo.....
Ironically, Juno is slated to burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere at the end of the mission to avoid contaminating any of the moons with Earth Goo...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Based on freely available specifications (http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/atlas5_specs.shtml) for the Atlas V-551 launch vehicle, the density of aluminum you stated and a best case estimation of the payload weight (just over 18,000 lbs based on the above site), I calculated $6084/lb, which comes out to $1789 to launch these little guys. HOWEVER, with the dimensions of a minifig from here (http://snively.blogspot.com/2009/04/lego-minifig-dimensions.html) and here (http://snively.blogspot.com/2009/04/lego-minifig-dimensions.html) the volume of a minifig is closer to 0.59 in^3 so the total works out to just about $1054. And by the way, you had a typo in your result up above, though your answer is correct.
The brick company even underwrote the project, at a cost of $5,000 for each of the minifigs,
How precisely do you spend $5000 on an aluminum figure about an inch and a half in size?? I could turn out all three of those on a vertical mill in one afternoon with about $5 worth of aluminum.
It is the cart before the horse - if we are taking the trouble to send toys to space, shouldn't we also be sending kids to play with those toys?
I have a couple I would considering donating to the cause. The oldest loves legos
Time to offend someone
Fixed that for you.
(Not that there is anything wrong with promoting Lego)
I did indeed read TFA, and it was rather ambiguous as to whether the $5k per figure was for the manufacture of the figure itself, or the cost of getting it into space, or both. $4k per figure to manufacture custom figures from a material Lego does not normally deal with (aluminum) is not at all out of line. So perhaps you should take your sarcastic tone elsewhere and read the article carefully. I do agree the publicity is probably a good thing. However, perhaps not so much when a lot of people are questioning the necessity of a space program at all. While we geeks understand the needs, and think this is cool, the guy on the street who lost his job last week may wish those extra dollars went his way.
I meant $5k per figure... not $4k...
We don't send people into space, but we do send legos shaped like people!
or add some more scientific equipment so every ounce of space is used effectively and not "for fun for the children who probably wont even be told about this" bullshit
Lego paid for it.
And it doesn't literally use money as fuel.
They will use X amount of fuel with, or without this items.
And it's cost is 5 Grand, again paid for by Lego.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They could always make money on these by dropping them in a bottle of urine and selling pictures of that for $20,000 each. It works with plastic Jesus statues.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
In which they'll collide them in the hope of seeing the Higgs Mechano.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Oh yeah. Because scientific equipment that can survive the myriad of environments this spacecraft will see between here and Jupiter is just something you buy at Wal-Mart and duct tape onto you spacecraft three days before launch. It's not like any of it needs extensive, expensive calibration testing or thermal envelope testing to ensure it will work properly. Nor does scientific equipment need specialized, one-off design components built into it like rad-hardened microchips and vibration survivable optics. Nope. Scientific equipments is obviously just as cheap, simple, and easy to design as static aluminum weight balances machined to look cool. No extra cost, risk, or overhead to come along with that.
Oh, and before you say that they should have built in one more scientific instrument from the start of the mission, you need to do some research on a portion of spacecraft design known as mass margin. NASA has been accounting for a little extra mass margin in the design of this spacecraft from the get go. That margin reduces the risk of a schedule slip later in the design lifecycle. As the design matures, the margin decreases, but since launch vehicle selection occurs relatively early in a mission design lifecycle, a rocket would have been chosen that could lift that extra design margin mass. Since the expected mass was lower than the mass planned for, there was some performance that NASA could eat up with whatever they damn well pleased to slap onto their spacecraft at the last minute without further endanering the flight. Since scientific equpiment can't be will-nilly slapped onto a spacecraft, they would have had to pick something relatively safe, simple, and ultimately useless: like Lego action figures, or nothing at all (which would have been boring and generated no publicity).
Any other questions smartass? And before you ask, yes, I do spacecraft design and launch performance analysis for a living.
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Are we gullible or educated in how the launch industry works?
Rockets like the Atlas V 551 are sold at a certain price. They can lift a certain amount to a certain velocity. If your spacecraft happens to be just slightly under the mass threshold you need it to be to achieve the desired velocity, then you can pretty much put whatever you want on it as long as you remain under that mass threshold.
Believe it or not, not everything cool that happens is not a giant conspiracy by a large corporation in an attempt to pull one over on the poor, unsuspecting masses.
Or, barring the possibility that you are a tinfoil-hatter, and you really are just genuinely this pessimisitc, I will leave you with the good news that the world doesn't always suck, and you are allowed to get excited about some things. Isn't that great news?!
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thats fine but where is the scientific equipment we paid to fill this thing. obviously its not filled
its like this, if you paid for a full dump truck of gravel and later found out it was cut a little short so it can be topped off with mulch and your still paying full price of the delivery, you would be asking questions.
Terminator 6: Back from Jupiter, and madder then hell.
Robotech: Arrival of the 5' long spaceship.
Sphere: Don't touch the beebee.
Stargate: Just blast 'em.
Star Wars: Who shot first, Han Solo or the melted plastic blob?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Surely the lego going to Jupiter should be Lego Star Wars.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
a magnifying glass, because she can "peer into the heart of Jupiter"
Then they should have made that part out of transparent aluminum. ;)
So fuck it lets remove every chunk of scientific equipment and send a fucking garbage can of higest bidders trinkets and toys, there was room to put metal legos there was room for 1 more fucking sensor that could have done something other than go along for the ride
yea thats what we need, more politics in nasa
You had to post this on a day where I had no mod points. :(
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Just to let those Jovian bitches know we're coming to take over!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
LEGO is probably paying something, otherwise I agree.
Yep, because that's not emotional hyperbole or anything.
How about this? How about you give me a link to a company that makes a sensor, or a link to the sensor itself, that weighs about as much as the Lego figurines, that requires no additional calibration or testing, that could survive within the environmental envelope this spacecraft will see, and that costs less than $15,000. Go ahead, I'll wait.
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What can I say? I have great timing. :D
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welcome our new Lego overlords! Sounds like a great plot for a movie/game! Legos sent out to other planets evolve into sentient super-Legos and return to destroy the Earth.
These LEGO figurines look awesome! My hat's off to the JUNO team!
We sent (flattened) LEGO figurines aboard the MER landers, too (not on the rovers proper). Their names were Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust, if I recall correctly. See my blog for a terrific color picture of Spirit's LEGO figurine before she drove away.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
The BATS get everywhere!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Jupiter, Juno and Galileo - sounds like those type of jokes where you ask: which one doesn't fit.
I didn't know the Roman mythical dress code included pants.
Also, I think those Nasa people must be chuckling with glee at the thought of some space-faring civilisation, perhaps even human-descended, discovering the figures in some far-away future and using them as a basis from which to deduce the appearance of the "extinct dwarf races of Mars", and wondering about the purpose of the tools they hold in their ("there" in /.speak) pincher claws.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
on hearing about these figures and their names, some evangelicals will loose the slight hold they have on thier minds and again charge the US gubbiment with promoting un-Christian values and the worship of false idols. Seriously.