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"Splat" of Schiaparelli Mars Lander Likely Found (spaceflightnow.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Tablizer quotes Space Flight Now:
Views from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released Friday show the crash site where Europe's experimental Schiaparelli lander fell to the red planet's surface from a height of several miles, leaving a distinct dark patch on the Martian landscape...The image from MRO's context camera shows two new features attributed to the Schiaparelli spacecraft, including a large dark scar spanning an estimated 50 feet (15 meters) by 130 feet (40 meters). Schiaparelli's ground team believes it is from the high-speed impact of the lander's main body... A little more than a half-mile (1 kilometer) to the south, a bright spot appears in the image, likely the 39-foot-diameter (12-meter) supersonic parachute and part of Schiaparelli's heat shield, which released from the lander just before ESA lost contact."
on Mars today
How much did all of this mission cost? Does anyone realize how much food that money could have provided to those in need ON THIS PLANET?! We have no business looking off-planet until we learn to live in harmony with THIS planet.. and with each other.
Cleanup and harmony on this planet is furthered by our activity in space. It greatly furthered the development of solar power generation, it provides a lot of data regarding climate change, it provides some of the greatest examples of international cooperation. Space exploration has paid back its costs many times over, creating the economic activity that helps pay for so many earthbound efforts.
Kaboom. There's always a Kaboom.
On a more serious note, what's with all the anti-science prats showing up on Slashdot recently ?
At one time, the community here used to be the one championing new experiments as a positive learning curve even if the immediate experiment ended in failure.
Seems like there's a bunch of prats around here who don't realise that all the things they take for granted these days came about as the result of many experiments, including the failed experiments.
Stop the orbital bombardment of Mars! White cis-gendered males are attempting to continue their colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples! They're trying to buy Olympus Mons for a handful of beads! #martianlivesmatter
How much did all of this mission cost? Does anyone realize how much food that money could have provided to those in need ON THIS PLANET?! We have no business looking off-planet until we learn to live in harmony with THIS planet.. and with each other.
If you take the budget of ESA and divide that number by the GDP of the EU (a slightly misleading calculation, but not grossly so) you find that the EU spends less than 0.04% of its GDP on space.
You also have to keep in mine that the European economy has a tremendous amount of over-capacity in terms of unemployed people and under-utilised infrastructure and machinery. Europe would not be able to increase its production of food and other goods by anywhere near 0.004% if we stopped spending money on space. We'd just have more unemployed scientists, engineers and factory workers.
In the neighborhood of $1.3 billion.
$1.3B would buy in the timezone of 300 million big macs. Which would be enough for every poor FAMILY in the world to get a Big Mac. Hardly a significant impact on world hunger.
Note that if ALL the money ever spent on space were spent on food instead, we'd be worse off. The weather satellites alone paid for the entire world's space exploration budgets in better harvests as a result of better weather prediction....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There used to be some guys who didn't care about a space program. They just wanted to chase chicks and eat. Then one day, a rock came out of the sky and obliterated them and everybody related to them. That was 65 million years ago.
(||) Nehmo (||)
Money? I've got a 100-euro note here which says this fine genius posted the above from his smartphone.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
First of all, I don't see much mention that they still have a new satellite in orbit around Mars so the mission is at least partly successful.
But with a string of failures to land on Mars from the ESA, and a string of successes from NASA you have to start to wonder - what is it that is lacking in the ESA program that is not able to get landings right? Is it just different approaches to the problems of landing that are not panning out over a few attempts? Is it some kind of engineering process failure that they just are not accounting for some possibilities? I was wondering if anyone had any insight.
I wish the ESA the best of luck and really want to se them succeed, as the more craft studying mars the better (though they are all a handful of beans in comparison to the first human to land and study there).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's probably, because ESA uses the metric system.
You add a group of " independent contractors" to the convoy with instructions stating "You film drop off of X tons of supplies to %location" by %date% you get %payment% if the shipment is complete. If you have to defend the convoy you get %bounty% per head (with %bonus% if its a known warlord)."
then the shipments will arrive intact and early
Notice what I said about I.P. - they couldn't use the same landing system used by the NASA Viking landers either but had to have some key differences - stupid isn't it?
NASA picked up a lot of experience putting landers on the moon. The Soviets also sent a lot of moon landers, but never really ironed out the bugs (had a lot of failures). Those problems followed them to Mars where they went 0 for 6 (well, 1 for 6 but the single success ceased communicating after 14.5 seconds with no useful data received).
I think we have a couple of ULA shills posting frequently here. The ULA (Lockheed and Boeing) are cutting jobs, since their comfy monopoly on space launches involving minimal R&D costs has been broken up by SpaceX.
Sigh... It's a long time tradition here on slashdot to call anyone with a different opinion a "shill". As if paid representatives of those companies have the time to give a shit about a minor technical discussion forum like slashdot. It's an idiotic argument because what is really happening is one of two things. A) someone has a genuine difference of opinion or B) they are a troll and you shouldn't feed the trolls. The folks at ULA could not possibly care less about the opinions of some random poster here on slashdot. Anyone who thinks otherwise has an unjustifiably over inflated sense of their own importance and/or the importance of this website.
That guy with the binary username is the main one I've seen. He talks about "space nutters" a lot.
He's just an idiot. If he has a sponsored agenda he's doing a good job of hiding it under all his stupid arguments.
It doesn't even need to _hit_ to cause massive damage.
There's quite a bit of evidence that the Younger Dryas period and the sudden extinction of north american megafauna were both caused by a string of large bolides from a broken-up comet passing over the continent and impacting the northern icefields. The hot downdraft theory is supported by what happened at Tunguska.
It's a bit controversial at the moment, but so were Chicxulub and continental drift until quite recently (and the jury is still out on whether Chicxulub was the only cause of the mass extinction 65mya or simply the final straw after the Deccan Traps pushed things to the limit). Check out https://craterhunter.wordpress...