Slashdot Mirror
ESA's ExoMars Successfuly Lifts Off From Baikonur (esa.int)
vikingpower writes: The European Space Agency's second mission to Mars, ExoMars, was successfully launched from the Baikonur launch pad today. ExoMars will search for traces of life, either past or present, on the Red Planet, and is the precursor to a more full-fledged mission to Mars in 2018, comprising a rover. It consists of an orbiter and of Schiaparelli, a lander built by European industry and scheduled to land in October this year. Both missions are cooperations between ESA and RosKosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. If one of them met their ultimate goal -- proving there is or was life on Mars — the excitement here on Earth would be unimaginable.
Mark Whittington adds a link to The Guardian's coverage and a bit of detail: The Russian-made launch vehicle lobbed a probe into space, the Trace Gas Orbiter, that will enter orbit around Mars later in 2016 and search for methane in the Red Planet's atmosphere. Methane can have a number of sources, but one of them is the waste product of microbial life. Both the Mars Express orbiter and the Mars Curiosity rover have detected some measure of methane, which could be produced by geological processes as well.
Best of luck with this mission, I will be excited to see the results of your experiments.
Aileen life from a planet in the same solar system. Now that would be interesting.
It's amazing to think that there's a chance we will find extraterrestrial life in the next few years! It seems like that would be the biggest discovery of our lifetimes, and it would answer a question humans have pondered for thousands of years.
If we have never found any life outside earth, t hen it is hard to say how common it may be. If ESA and Russia finds some life on another planet, even microbes or even signs of past microbes that have died, well it means life might be very common in the universe any time that the conditions can support that.
Go ExoMars!!!
liquid water on Mars!
What are you, an idiot ?
NASA is doing all of this and more already.
I like how you're a partisan idiot, in the middle of the shit you just spewed onto the internet.
Well, I am sure glad to know that NASA is rescuing Matt Damon.
When will the US Private Sector be able to compete for these services? Walowitz might have been on a different flight!
Falcon Heavy scheduled to launch later this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"On July 2009 NASA and ESA signed the Mars Exploration Joint Initiative, which proposed to utilize an Atlas rocket launcher instead of a Soyuz, which significantly altered the technical and financial setting of the ExoMars mission."
"Under the FY2013 Budget President Obama released on 13 February 2012, NASA terminated its participation in ExoMars due to budgetary cuts in order to pay for the cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope.[21][22] With NASA's funding for this project completely cancelled, most of these plans had to be restructured."
The success rate of Russian missions to Mars is quite low. In fact, if we don't include the launches made by the former USSR, which also had a low success rate, the success rate would be zero: two mission failures out of two launches. In contrast, India, a relative newcomer to deep space, managed to succeed with its one and only mission to Mars.
Yeah but I've seen the Bourne movies and I think we kind of owe it to him. (I've only actually also seen him in The Martian and some movie about a sniper.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
We pretty much know that there is no surface life there and nothing we're sending has much chance of observing subsurface life.
Look at you, substituting opinion for fact. You've answered your own question. We don't fucking know.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
In case you haven't noticed, Mars drains the lion's share of the exploration dollars these days.
It's kind of weird, really - we're far more obsessed with Mars now that we know it's a perchlorate-laden organics-destroying corrosive silicosis-risk hexavalent-chromium-laden dustscape than we were back when for all we knew there was life just sitting there on the surface. It's totally disproportionate to what we know of our solar system. If the goal was to find life, we'd be prioritizing Enceladus, whose oceans (containing a known potential energy source, H2) gush out into space for easy pickup by spacecraft. If the goal was to settle, we'd be priorizing Venus, which offers earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures, requires no radiation protection, provides vast amounts of living space (pressure vessels = small, cramped per unit mass), vast amounts (well surpassing Earth) of energy (solar, wind), and for which all of the components of a plastics industry (and probably small steel industry as well, based on the evidence for FeCl3/FeCl2) get blown through your engines in a highly hygroscopic form from which water and oxygen can be recovered by mere heating and filtering. Meanwhile, you're sitting over a potential treasure trove where high heat, pressure and acids have been extracting minerals for rocks and concentrating them for billions of years, a region with pressures only 8% that of the deepest oceans on Earth and temperatures that can be - and have been, on 1960s Soviet tech - withstood by simple thermal inertia - and from which dredged materials can be hauled up by phase change balloon (rigid metal, contracting metal, Zylon, possibly others).
You can't change that... by gettin' all... bendy.
OP here. Truly a shame that ESA didn't ask for your opinion before committing to this program, right ? Next time I'm in Darmstadt, Germany, I'll tell them to take any AC opinions on /. into serious account before launching, because, you know, science.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Venus, which offers earthlike gravity, earthlike pressures, earthlike temperatures
Not on the surface, though. And the atmosphere is boring.
pish posh this is all a bunch of Hollywood claptrap.
NASA has no plans to rescue Matt Damon from Mars.
Never has and never will.
Which gives me, for one, some good degree of satisfaction.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
*Whoooosh*
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
If the goal was to settle, we'd be priorizing Venus, which offers (...) temperatures that can be - and have been, on 1960s Soviet tech - withstood by simple thermal inertia
...for minutes. No probe has lasted even an hour on the surface, while Opportunity is running for the 13th year and counting on Mars. It's a lot more robot friendly which might be even more important than if it's human-friendly.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"The Russian-made launch vehicle lobbed a probe into space." No explosion, no failure to orbit. But that might be because the payload stage wasn't Russian?
And now we want them back (and have a look right where they are made why they put plastic into them). http://www.theguardian.com/lif...
What is boring about an atmosphere of a planet that contains iron in it? Venus's atmosphere is fascinating - it contains vastly more material diversity than Earth's, stratified into its different layers. Near the surface the harsh conditions extract metals as gaseous chlorides and fluorides, out of surfaces that appear as if molten rock - probably things like kimberlites and carbonatites - flowed like rivers. Most of the atmosphere is dynamically stable, like Earth's stratosphere, although the middle cloud - the habitable layer - has some degree of convection, like a mild version of Earth's troposphere. Near the poles there's a crazy freaky looking storm, although we have no clue at this point at what layers, if any, it'd be hazardous in and at what layers, if any, it'd be safe in. Lightning on Venus appears to be at least as common on Earth, but it's... weird. We're having trouble interpreting the data we've gotten so far, which has led to weird theories such as lightning bolts hundreds of kilometers long (probably not) to electrostatic "traps" that echo static from lightning around the planet, to layers of the Hadesphere that deliver a static shock to objects descending through them. But lightning flashes have never been observed, so it may not exist in the upper layers at all. Venus has crazy stratified winds that rotate much faster than the planet, leading to a "day" that's nearly an Earth week near the equator but only two days at 70 degrees latitude and even shorter the further toward the poles you go. The velocities are highly stratified by altitude, leading to great potential for wind energy. The atmosphere holds tons of mysteries still, like whether the "night glow" is real and if so what it is, or what it is that makes up the "mystery UV absorber" that soaks up most of the UV light in Venus's upper atmosphere (a benefit Martians could only wish for)
Not boring at all. It's one of if not the most interesting atmospheres in the solar system.
It would be possible to have a habitat descend below the lower cloud deck (indeed, the lower cloud layer appears to be somewhat uneven in thickness and may have gaps altogether) for short periods, wherein one could see the ground with their own eyes. Yet at the polar vortex the sky clears up at such a low height that a high colony could potentially see the stars. The ground is accessible by probes, and looks to be quite a mineral wealth - but the real life is in the clouds. Not only to fuel industry, but basically you're living in a floating Garden of Eden over Hell: vast amounts of space to live in (unlike a pressure vessel on Mars, which due to how heavy pressure vessels are, will always be very space limited), always temperate, tons of sunlight to fuel the growth of whatever tropical plants one desires, and easy buoyancy to lift a lot of them. Space on a scale that a popular recreational activity might be indoor skydiving onto the safety netting. You can even step outside and touch the atmosphere with your bare skin (just not for too long). Feel an alien wind.
For impersonal reasons, a colony there is not just appealing from the perspective of a no-mining-needed industrial basis, but also from a science basis; there's far more scientific reason to have humans on Venus than on Mars. And not just because we know far less about our "evil twin" than we do about Mars. On Mars, it makes basically no difference if you leave a robotic probe sitting around recharging its batteries in the weak sunlight while it awaits commands. You can't do that on Venus's surface. You have limited time on the surface with each dive before you have to rise to cool down and recharge; latency really does matter.
You can't change that... by gettin' all... bendy.
Wrong. Even the first one to land successfully, Venera 7, lasted for 23 minutes. And that was after a long descent. Venera 8 lasted 50 minutes. Venera 9, 53. Venera 10, 65. Venera 11, 95. Venera 12, 110 minutes. And these were rather cheap Soviet probes, hardly a dedicated system designed for long-term surface operations. Yet one doesn't need to stay on the surface for a long time if you have a local habitat. You descent, gather information and samples, return to altitude (actually to higher than when you left, to catch up), dock and deliver, then return to the surface. Each hop lets you explore a different part of the planet - something Mars rover operators could only dream of. Such a Venus program could sample and analyze the entire planet's surface.
You can't change that... by gettin' all... bendy.
Not boring at all. It's one of if not the most interesting atmospheres in the solar system.
Compared to other atmospheres yes, but not compared to walking on the ground.