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Mars Deep Space 2 Crash Program
NYFreddie writes "ABCNews has an article on NASA's Deep Space 2 program where two basketball sized probes will be dropped from above the Martian atmosphere to crash into the surface at around 400 mph where they are expected to continue operating and transmitting data. "
UPI (United Press Interplanetary) - Amateur astronomers report monitoring two spacecraft obviously orignating from outside the Mars local orbit crashing into the atmosphere and landing near the remote town of Marswell, New Olympus. UMAF (United Mars Air Force) spokesmen claim to have retrieved the debris, and have issued a press release claiming that the phenomena were in fact due to two weather balloons released at high altitude during some test flights. This account is hotly disputed by three Marswell residents claiming to have reached the impact site before the UMAF.
In an interview, local resident "Creepy" Pbtbtwzxk told this reporter that the capsules had strange markings on the exterior surface resembling markings found on other artifacts previously recovered by MUFOS (Mars Unidentified Flying Object Society) which have been the subject of several denials of authenticity by the UMAF. Pbtbtwzxk, waving all six blue tentacles stated emphatically that "The UMAF knows what is going on, but they are trying to keep it secret from the honest citizens of the United States of Canopis."
Meanwhile several other residents of Marswell are in the process of constructing a small meseum and gifte shoppee to commemorate this mysterious event.
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They're crashing on purpose, right? Not like the previous metric/imperial blunder...
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of seeing all the posts berating NASA. In space exploration probably the most important factor in any mission is energy. With no energy you can't launch a probe, send it to its destination, land it, take measurements, ect. Whenever an engineer can save energy he/she will. The more energy you have the more things you can do. On a spacecraft the energy available is limited because we don't have an infinite amount of money and time to build a system with next to unlimited energy. It's MUCH more effective to use the probes momentum to bury it three feet into the ground than it would be to soft land it and then have it drill down three feet. NASA could feasibly build a space craft with huge energy reserves but that would cost a good deal of money, one thing NASA no longer has. It seems to me NASA served its political purpose, it got men to the moon and returned them safely home. After Apollo NASA saw it's funding cut more andmore. Had it not been cut we would probably have moon bases and permenant space stations by now.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm a Canadian who grew up in an imperial measurement - based society until high school, so I have a feel for miles, inches and Fahrenheit. In university I was exposed to metric (actually SI for Systeme Internationale) and Canada converted to kilometers, centimeters and Celcius. With all due respect, and having had experience with both, imperial grew while SI was planned, and it shows in terms of convenience. I don't want kids to think it sensible that there are 16 ounces to the pound, 12 inches to the foot, three feet to the yard and God knows how many feet to the mile. It's madness, pure and simple. I can explain everything you need to know about SI in five minutes, but I can't believe you're expecting anyone to remember there are 180 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water in Fahrenheit or that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees above zero. In SI, it's a hundred degrees and water freezes at zero, mass is in grams or some ten-based derivative, volume is based on the volume of a kilogram of water at sealevel and Bob's your uncle. The reason that we don't use metric time is because we do have to care about the duration of the day, month and year as these affect us directly (the week and millenium are arbitrary conventions). I expect one reliable clock to use in space will be the exact length of time in seconds since the launch of the first human in space (Gagarin Universal Time, anyone?) or the number of seconds since the first human object to reach orbit was launched (Sputnik Standard Date?) or the number of seconds since Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first humans to land on another heavenly body (no Baywatch jokes here). We only need to use nonmetric time as long as we are associated with planets rather than living in our own artificial habitats in open space. If we do this, each habitat can pick its own unique daylength. My personal day tends to run about 28 hours, which is similar to what people who lived in mineshafts for months found in their Circadian rhythm studies in the 1970's and 1980's. Metric time will come once it is useful. There is already a metric date used in spreadsheets and by timekeepers- called the Julian date if I'm not mistaken. Anyone else know?
...Off the valleys, around Mt. Olympus, over the Phobos, under Deimos, nothing but soil.
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. (Heck, I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)
... there are 2 dead robots sitting close to each other on Mars ... there are strange devices hurtling towards the stars ... whoa, lyrics!
About the only reason I log on to the various mainstream newssites these days is to catch the space news - who launched what, what blew up on the launch pad, who has the latest mass-market space stuff in experimental stages, etc.
And I love hearing about the exploration of Mars, and the moon, etc.
But one thing that keeps bugging me is that we're littering all this Earth trash all over these external bodies - there's a Hasselblad sitting on a Lunar Rover on the moon, pointed at the stars
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
What if we come to an early demise as a species, and in a few millenia the 'roaches or whatever evolve a Space-faring Caste and they start making their way out to distant rocks, and they find all this crap - and some half-wit 'roach from the Religious Caste holds it up as evidence proving that life once existed on these foreign planets!
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
In the past both the US and the USSR crashed probes or stages of spacecraft into the moon in order to obtain geological data about it. What we did IIRC was use laser interferometry to establish the distance to the moon to within a few wavelengths, then we crashed parts of the lunar landers into it and saw what kind of disturbance we got. Again IIRC it rang like a bell, indicating an essentially homogenous sphere of rock instead of a seismically active body with a molten core.
Check out the DS2 mission flipbook.
Do you think we should have a Linux installation flipbook???
-JT
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