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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.'"
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..
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
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.
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.