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NASA's Curiosity Rover Celebrates One Year On Mars
An anonymous reader writes "The Curiosity rover celebrates one year on Mars today. 'The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.'"
Now you're making it too easy. And I don't mean 1091.
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And your puny terrestrial years! Curiosity has some time (322 of your weak days, or a mere 313 of our superior Martian sols) before it reaches its first Martian birthday.
And, since it is now on Mars, that is clearly the birthday that counts.
Opportunity River has been around for almost 10 (Earth) years there..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkVBXW4JeUI
https://xkcd.com/1091/
http://i.imgur.com/CPk2w.jpg
It was one Earth year. Celebrate the real anniversary when Mars completes its year after another 322 or so Earth days.
Birthdays for anthropomorphized machines is all they got? Isn't it going to be another year before it gets to where it's headed? Wake me when it finds an ancient civilization - that or a fish head.
Oblig - oh come on. This one's too obvious: http://xkcd.com/1232/
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Our clocks tick ever so slower than Mars, but only by a negligible amount in terms of counting birthdays. IIRC from a default frame of reference, a clock in a gravitational field will tick slower as the gravitational field increases in strength. And we have Mars beat pretty well in terms of gravity.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.
Such as war.
US defense budget for 2012: $1.030–$1.415 trillion (wikipedia)
NASA budget for 2012: 18.724 billion (wikipedia)
I don't have an exact number, but the Curiosity rover cost about 1.5 billion dollars. I don't know if that is just the rover itself, or the whole operation.
They still haven't made it to Mount Sharp? Holy crap, that was their destination from the moment it landed! Apparently, it's only traveled half a mile in a year and its destination is only 5 miles away. And this will take another 9-12 months with sidetrips?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Correction,
The NASA budget i said was for 2010.
2012's NASA budget was 17.770 billion, which is less than half of a percent of the federal budget.
Was it worth it? Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.
Basically MSL (aka Curiosity) was the full-employment program for JPL contractors. While everything else was being cut, all the contractors and JPL employees tried to bill as much as possible to this program to avoid redundancies (layoffs). Sadly, these kind of employees tend to be attached to expensive toys which makes the for lower efficiency when judged by the $/employed metric.
FWIW, they at least managed to land to rover on the (martian) ground. In that sense, it probably was better spent than the billons we spend on other employment programs which simply return only employment, or fund things that are actually unused (like bridges to nowhere, or airports with no scheduled flights) or actually unwanted (e.g, F35, MEADS, EFV).
Sadly, it's a pretty low bar when it comes to government spending...
Curiosity wakes up the next morning with a lampshade on its head and Martian hieroglyphics tattooed on its ass.
Have gnu, will travel.
Give an example of something that we SHOULD fix first and where the money spent on this project would have really made a huge difference.
While we are at it, we should also remove all forms of art and entertainment until we solve all problems. I am sure we could use hollywood budget for something better than a bunch of crapy movies.
Yes, the cost was worth it.
The acquisition of truth is our only intrinsically meaningful purpose for existing. Everything else is basically just a means to this end, or sheer hedonism.
I am aware of all the usual objections to this statement. They are all bunk.
We spend more on Pizza as a nation and you're asking about priorities? Seriously, the Curiosity budget works out to about $1 per person per year in the U.S.
I don't think so. In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.
Yes, the better ways seem to be blowing people up, monitoring their communications, and incarcerating the perpetrators of victimless crimes... essentially state sponsored terrorism. Wouldn't want to give any of that money to fund science when we can use it bash peoples heads in, right?
relativistic effects of Mars' orbital speed on time passage there : 0.9999999965976668868826947934
relativistic effects of Earth's orbital speed on time passage here : 0.99999999506624037797369889211
Difference between the two : 1.531426508853249e-9
So, a bit less than one second difference every twenty years.
So yep...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.
Yeah, we would probably be better off spending that $2.5 billion on another 8 or 9 days in Afghanistan (at the low, low price of just $300 million per day).
Haha, no, I'm only kidding. Only a complete idiot would think that $2.5 billion (which represents 0.06% of the US federal budget for FY 2013) to send an entire science laboratory to another planet is a waste of money. This country is full of money wasters, ground-breaking science missions are not part of those. Look at the defense budget if you want to talk about trimming the fat, not the science budget. The NSA in particular seems to have quite a lot of money that it doesn't need (or shouldn't be using).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The entire mission is cited at about $2.5 billion. The US federal budget for FY2013 calls for over $3.8 trillion in expenditures.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No one can convince you that it was worth it. That really is the problem.
http://xkcd.com/695/
And a little sad.
I'm living in the attic, you insensitive clod!
If you read the TFA, they say this is likely a mountain entirely built up by wind-borne sediment. Assuming they can access various layers of sediment, then yes, it's possible. Even still, the walls of a deep crater do sound like a better candidate to examine rock strata.
It was worth it because the technologies used in this project can be used in other forays into space. Not to mention they can actually deliver computer service packs all the way to Mars. There are people and companies that cannot even install service packs on their local network without breaking a bunch of shit.
Gold, no. Platinum, no. Unobtainium...sure.
You left out the general relativistic time dilation (mostly due to the Sun's gravity), which is GM/c^2 R. That's OK, so did the Air Force with the first GPS test satellite.
Hey! That dollar would feed a dozen starving children!
-- sigs cause cancer.
Well, just like all government programs intended to employ people, you might judge that the number of people employed vs the money spent.
Or judge it by the amazing quantity of good science it's done and the awe inspiring awesomeness of the whole thing. It's a 1 ton robot lowered by a sky crane onto another planet doing science! If you only judge such things by financial metrics then the world looks unbearable grey and dull.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's impossible to know the future value of a project like Curiosity. It would have been like trying to calculate the value of those Apollo mirrors and the extra fuel required to carry them to the surface of the moon back in the 1960s, without any knowledge of how they would be used into the next millennium. Now we use them to assist with climate and ocean models based on the movement and gravitational effects of the moon, for example. I don't know how you even begin to calculate how valuable those are to the US economy as a whole.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The lack of plate tectonics is precisely why the history is preserved. Unlike on the Earth, the crust never gets recycled.
I just wish it would stop referring to itself as Carlos Danger when it posts these.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nit alert...
Or judge it by the amazing quantity of good science it's done...
Many people mistake science and technology. *** Sure it was an amazing technical feat of engineering to land something on another planet, but that's not science. Of course there was science too, but that's not what tickles the crowd (yes we're pretty sure there was water on mars is the basic theory we are testing with MSL).
Just like the hoover dam (or the 3 gorges dam) or the various bridges or tall buildings are marvels of technology, and we can choose to spend our money on all sorts of wonders to tickle the mind, but the science aspect of most of that stuff is mostly data gathering and the bulk of the technology is really just applied engineering.
As cost overruns happened and much of the cost of the program can be attributed to keeping quite a few warm bodies fed whilst the engineering aspects of the actuators and the landing system experienced redesign and testing (the grey and dull engineering stuff).
*** I've been a judge at quite a few science fairs and often what passes for science is really just technology demos...
What makes science is theory and experiment and data gathering and analysis.
When technology is passed off as science, it's usually lacking in theory, data gathering and analysis. Also, often the "experiment" usually an exercise in engineering. The hallmark of engineering is applying well known principles and pre-tested components to acheive a systematic result. It generally saddens me when I have to judge a "science" project where someone simply assembles a remote controlled car or airplane and doesn't even understand the principles of radio or flight (which unforutnatly has happened too many times to count).