Slashdot Mirror
Journal of Cosmology Contributor Sues NASA To Investigate Mars "Donut"
An anonymous reader writes "Rhawn Joseph, a self-described astrobiologist involved with the infamous Journal of Cosmology, is suing NASA, demanding 100 high-resolution photos and 24 micrographs be taken of the 'donut' rock that recently appeared in front of the Opportunity rover on Mars, on the basis that it is a living organism. The remarkable full text of the complaint, which cites NASA's mineralogical analysis of the rock as evidence against it being a rock, is available to read at Popular Science."
Really, the lawsuit is worth a read.
Doh!!
Very funny, this makes my day on /.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
NASA will send Inspector Gadget up there right away
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Translation: Some attention whoring quack is going to waste taxpayer money and NASA time to no good end.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Von Braun may have designed the rockets, but Sgt. Schultz drives the rover. NASA has a history of "Look over there. Isn't that interesting!", "Lets go this way instead..."
i think it is just some gunk picked up by the rover, it was buildup of dirt probably made sticky by water or grease or oil or some other fluid and it finally fell off the rover
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Dude, that's a shroom!
its the arm off of one of my kerbals
Missions never go to the same area twice. And how can you stick to a set plan, when you don't have a clue to what's really there to begin with? It's the things they don't understand or expect that should get the most attention. Sure comparative geology is great for establishing a control baseline, but the real science is looking for the stuff that isn't expected.
The rover has a finite life until it fails. The donut has already been examined enough for NASA to think it's boring, and there are far more interesting goals further ahead that we'd like to reach before the wheels fall off, the power supply dies, or the sensors get too dusty to function.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
It cost $2.5 billion to send Curiosity up. Even assuming it gets 5 full years of operation - and something could go wrong well before that - that's over a million dollars a day. And that doesn't even consider the cost of the Earth-based teams that need to actually analyze the data. Wasting a million dollars because of some loudmouth doesn't seem like a great plan.
Dr. Squyres says that if this object has been recently flipped over, "we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."
Trouble is, unless he's proposing that the underside of this rock was somehow vacuum-sealed against atmospheric influence, it has very much been exposed to the gases of the Martian atmosphere.
The undersides of rocks experience a different environment due to less exposure to wind erosion and the UV component of sunlight. But as far as being exposed to the gases that make up the atmosphere, the undersides are about as exposed at the topsides.
Most if not all of the minerals observed on Mars have been seen before, on Earth. Can you think of a terrestrial example of a rock whose underside has a significantly different chemical composition than its topside? I can't.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Dr. Squyres and his team have already chosen to spend lots of time and effort investigating this object.
How would releasing this data to the public, through existing channels that have already conveyed thousands of photos to the public, be a waste of NASA's time?
NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties." Therefore, shouldn't it, at a matter of course, release more data about this rock than it releases about the average Mars rock?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Add the low gravity ...
Holy shit:
Mars gravity:
3.711 m/s
( Earth is 9.78 m/s)
I was under the impression that Mars was just slightly less that Earth, something like 7.5 to 8.5 just like Venus at 8.87 m/s.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
it is m/(s*s) /. ate the square symbol (2).
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Power is not a problem. Curiosity is nuke powered, not solar, so it can run for about 14 years.
http://www.about-robots.com/cu...
Why on earth would you have that impression? Venus is 0.949 Earth diamaters and 0.82 Earth masses; Mars is only 0.532 Earth diamaters and 0.11 Earth masses. More to the point, did you not read all the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom (Mars) novels by age 10?
If the thing was life, NASA would be highly secretive about it until everything has been checked and reviewed and the President make the announcement.
From the article "If the organism is biological, NASA must publicly acknowledge that the discovery was made by the Petitioner and must ensure that Petitioner appears as rst author on and has nal editorial approval of the rst 6 scientic articles published or submitted for publication by NASA employees which discuss and present this discovery." I hope this turns into something awesome, but it seems in his claim that he will get credit for the discovery even though NASA discovered the object first. I guess it's deserved if NASA really did overlook an object that proves monumental.
Power is not a problem. Curiosity is nuke powered, not solar, so it can run for about 14 years.
http://www.about-robots.com/cu...
True, assuming there aren't any malfunctions or (solar) radiation bursts. OTOH, to return to a site already investigated would surely seem a waste of resources, would it not?
Seriously, why not get the data? It's an exploration drone, with no solid destination or timetable. If something is interesting, point every sensor you've got at it until it's boring.
If some loudmouth thinks something is interesting that you don't, it's really not like you're in a hurry, spend a day getting data and then go on your way again.
They basically already have done this and determined it was a rock. No matter how many times they send the rover back to the same spot, since the instruments on the rover haven't changed, what exactly do you expect to find different?
Did you even read the summary, never mind the article?
If so, kindly explain how a bit of the Curiosity landing system suddenly appeared in front of Opportunity.
Because it was made in the USA? I mean, how did a suitcase size piece of foam fall off the shuttle and hit a wing? It's not a smooth ride getting there or landing there and there are winds on Mars. It is quite conceivable that something was loosened and between the martian wind and the vibrations of the rover itself, it fell off.
Wouldn't that be a simpler and more reasonable explanation than NASA is covering up some huge discovery which would certainly get it all the funding it would ever want?
let me know. I'll be on the next flight out.
Hasn't that donut been eaten yet? Where are the police when you need them?
Rhawn is bullying NASA for the simple fact that he wants the data, and if NASA agrees that the item is biological in nature, then he wants the court to force NASA to have Rhawn as first author on its publications regarding this item. In other words, he wants the prestige of being a researcher in a project he had no hands in, and wants all the credit for a find he didn't find.
NASA's not taking advantage of public interest. They've obviously failed to communicate why they think it's so boring, and what the "far more interesting" goals are. They're acting like authoritarian school marms telling you what to be interested in.
I am not 10 year old yet you insensitive clod.
Maybe it is due to all all the hype and those stories about life on mars and what not while Venus seems much more interesting to me if we want to learn about our origins.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Power is still a problem for Curiosity since, the RTG does not provide the full power requirements to the rover in real-time. The rover runs off of a battery pack. The RTG is responsible for recharging the battery pack. Curiosity must periodically take breaks to allow for the RTG to catch up with the power consumed during the rover's active period. That said this is not Curiosity's problem (it is some distance away) this is Opportunity's discovery.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
If this idiotic shitstain spent more than five hard seconds looking at the processed press release images, forgetting to take his meds, and crying conspiracy, he would've discovered that the Mars Exploration Rover site on JPL actually releases every single raw image the second it gets downlinked from Mars, including photos that deny claims of not taking micrographs, and also ignorant of basic traits of the MERs (well, MER now - RIP Spirit), such as the relatively low resolution of its sensors compared to modern standards, the microscopic imager just having a resolution of 1024x1024 and a working area of 3.1cm square at operating distance, and because it doesn't have an light on it like MSL/Curiosity's MAHLI, isn't as good at taking photos of things on the ground, like a little rock on the surface of mars.
In fact, there's even hazcam images of the arm being swung into place, denying that the rover never got close, and that it's actually just the really small rock it is.
Before arm placement, and after.
Anyways - oh look, close up, in focus images of a mushroom. Not. I hope this fuck gets laughed out and never returns.
"8. The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre. Any intelligent adult, adolescent, child, chimpanzee, monkey, dog, or rodent with even a modicum of curiosity, would approach, investigate and closely examine a bowl-shaped structure which appears just a few feet in front of them when 12 days earlier they hadn't noticed it. But not NASA and its rover team who have refused to take even a single close up photo."
His claim for standing to sue is pretty funny too. It boils down to, "I did a bunch of impressive neuroscience work in the late 70s & early 80s, vanished for 20 years, and then reappeared two decades later in full Linus Pauling crank mode churning out books on astrobiology and 'proving' that the evolution of DNA predates Earth by 6 billion years, that upper atmosphere plasma are actually extremophiles, and that otherwise I'm super interested in Mars."
"Oh, and I'm a taxpayer and really interested in this rock, therefore I deserved to have control over what NASA does in regards to it since they're too boneheaded to see how important it is."
Here's one of his other books. The reviews give you an idea of how far this man has fallen as a scientist.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why are those procedures in place? It's public data, why can't the public see it as soon as NASA gets it?
The public does see it as soon as NASA gets it. All images are uploaded to marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/ as soon as they are received.
The Exploratorium also has a feed of the raw images as soon as they come down: http://www.exploratorium.edu/m...
Just from the depths of my armchair: perhaps because the data comes in formats that are completely useless to the public, and it takes time for NASA to decompress/deconvert/decrypt/convolve/whatever them?
The raw images are uploaded within a day of when they get received. As you note, these are raw images, and there's some processing needed to make pretty images suitable for public release: flat-field corrections, photometric and geometric corrections, as well as turning the individual frames into mosaics and color-corrected images, which takes more time. (There are also sometimes some dropped packets, and if you get the images right from the raw downlink, they won't have retransmitted the dropped bits yet.)
However, you don't have to wait for NASA to do all of that: there are some amateur groups that do image processing on the raw images, and do a pretty good job of making high-quality images, too.
Maybe they can do their own analysis with the data in a raw-ish format, but to give us the real numbers and sort out the metadata flags that say "This sensor is currently busted" takes more time?
Yes; all that gets uploaded onto the planetary data system (pds.nasa.gov/), including all the metadata, but that does take a while, since this is fully calibrated data.
I am suing NASA demanding 100 high resolution photos and 24 micrographs be taken of Scarlett Johansson, at various angles, from all sides, and from above, and under appropriate lighting conditions which minimize glare, on the basis that this is a living organism.
I'm wondering if it's even worth changing the comment threshold here to 3.
Wrong machine. This finding is from Opportunity (a solar-powered rover, same design as Spirit), not Curiosity.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Trouble is that Venus is almost unreachable between the dense cloud cover the extremely high surface temperature.
So we can't really see much from above other than lots and lots of clouds.. we can't really determine what's down there in terms of landing locations and whatnot (they can get mass and composition and whatnot from external readings but specific topology is a lot harder when you can't see!)
And even if we find a landing spot, we've got the dual problems of making a rover capable of surviving and operating at over 700K and then not really being able to communicate with it because again, dense cloud cover.
I'm sure enough cleverness COULD solve all of those problems.. but I imagine the costs would be phenomenal.
Mars was chosen because its "easy" compared to pretty much everywhere else in the universe. Its still relatively close, there's not a whole lot of atmosphere to block vision/communication and most of our modern electronic gizmos tend to work better in cold than they do in hot (though the mechanical components might be a different story..? I don't know enough mechanic engineering to judge that aspect.)
I did see years ago a suggestion (how tongue-in-cheek I'm not sure) to geo-engineer Venus by seeding it with a shit ton of carbon-hungry microbes to oxygenate the planet. It would be humorously awesome if it could work but I doubt its been given enough credence to warrant the cost investment (and no idea how long it would take to achieve useful results even if it DID work. It could be on the scale of millennia or perhaps even millions of years?)
Huh. Reviewing the Wikipedia page, it seems we actually have surmounted some of those challenges and actually landed a few probes on the surface. Doesn't sound like any of them survived for very long but its more than I'd thought!
NASA's not taking advantage of public interest. They've obviously failed to communicate why they think it's so boring, and what the "far more interesting" goals are. They're acting like authoritarian school marms telling you what to be interested in.
There's public interest in this rock? Since when?
The vast majority of images acquired by space probes have been released directly to the public, not as part of a published scientific paper.
If the data weren't acquired 100% at taxpayer expense, let the owners of the data sit and ruminate on it for as long as they please. But that's not the case, so there's not much justification for no timely release of the data to the taxpayers who paid for it.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
this rock appears to be a fairly pedestrian example
There must be some planetary scientists who disagree with you, because NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Come on man! Can't you see? Venus now seems to me like the "dark" side of the moon ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
With a geode, the inside is different from the outside, which is not at all the same phenomenon as the topside being different from the underside.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The donut has already been examined enough for NASA to think it's boring
Really? Dr. Squyres says the rock has a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before... We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery."
He doesn't sound bored.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Agency management do look at how many publications cite the project when considering further funding. Allowing competing projects to beat us to publication using our own data and not our analysis is seen as detrimental to continued operations.
The obvious solution is, look at how many publications cite papers that used the data you gathered; not how many publications cite your project. That would be a meritocracy where the projects that gather the most valuable data are guaranteed to enjoy continued operations -- and there'd be no need to restrict access to said data.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.