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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.
We have our own LEGO machines to combat against the ones they send.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
Pretty much everyone who reads the article.
Wikipedia says she's "goddess of marriage" so the frying pan makes sense.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
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?
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.
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.
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.....
Haha.. funny that that's a real word
which is totally what she said
Great. Now get them up there.
I want a Galileo, and a Newton, and an Einstein, and a Schrodinger (but no stupid cat!), and a Hawking.
We'll combat them with toddlers who destroy their Lego machines. Of course, they will fight back with Lego mines planted all over the Earth that hurt our feet when we step on them. Wait... (checks living room where my kids were playing) the aliens have already invaded!!!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
NASA didn't fund this. The probe to Jupiter was an existing project with a real (non-Lego-related) purpose. They thought it'd be fun to toss some Lego minifigs in the probe. So they approached Lego who paid for the figures to be made. NASA had a zero net cost for including these figures versus not including them. (A few ounces of aluminum isn't going to cost much more in rocket fuel.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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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Here is your Hawking, sir!
http://helektron.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/stephenhawking.jpg
a magnifying glass, because she can "peer into the heart of Jupiter"
Then they should have made that part out of transparent aluminum. ;)