There is a proposal floating (haha) about for an airplane at Mars. It was a finalist in the last Mars Scout (i.e. relatively small/cheap missions) selection but was not selected.
http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/
To put some numbers on this, the LHC will produce protons with 10^14 eV of energy. At that energy, we expect more than 1 per m^2 per year.
I haven't seen any black holes recently in the square meters of the Earth's surface I routinely interact with. You?
I wish the numerical illiterate would stop scare-mongering.
"The command and data-handling system is built around two
redundant flight computers that run in parallel."
Albee, A. et al., Overview of the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, Journal of Geophysical Research, VOL. 106, NO. E10, PAGES 23,291-23,316, OCTOBER 25, 2001
FYI, here's the original science presentation that the news reports are based on. It's an abstract from the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. This means that the work hasn't yet been peer reviewed but it's still interesting.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/1371 .pdf
1. In the original article, it states that qualifications to be an editor on Citizendium are currently being accepted on an honor basis (i.e. if you claim to be a professor they just accept that). When I signed up to be an editor, I had to send email from my @nasa.gov email and link to my CV.
2. Some comments have complained that you have register to see the articles. That's because it's not open to the general public yet. They're testing things on a closed pilot program first. So, stay tuned!
I'm a scientist that works with the MGS data so I don't know the engineering side well. However, I do know that last year NASA was strongly considering dropping all support for MGS in order to spend the limited Mars program money on newer missions (the idea being that we had gotten 90% of the useful science from MGS). Instead they decided to keep MGS funded with a bare minimum of money and hence a bare minimum number of personnel. I imagine that the poor overworked engineers running the operational show at JPL just didn't have the time to doublecheck everything as they would in an ideal world. As their end user, I'm just grateful for all the work they did over the years to keep the thing running.
For what it's worth, I should point out that this is perfectly consistent with the story that's been gradually developing over the years. We know that there are substantial amounts of hydrogen in the first few meters of most of the Martian crust (cf. the MO Gamma-ray spectrometer) and hence there is likely water ice there. We know that in the distance past large quantities of liquid water flowed on the surface to carve the fluvial geomorphological features we see (cf. MGS MOC images). We know that liquid water sloshed in at least some areas to form certain minerals (cf. MER results). We've seen gullies on the sides of craters that looked recent (cf. MGS MOC images). And now this study which shows gullies being created over the timeframe of a few Earth years. Basically, this is just one more little increment in our understanding of the distribution of water on Mars. This is how science usually works but sometimes press releases unduly hype things.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a proposal floating (haha) about for an airplane at Mars. It was a finalist in the last Mars Scout (i.e. relatively small/cheap missions) selection but was not selected. http://marsairplane.larc.nasa.gov/
To put some numbers on this, the LHC will produce protons with 10^14 eV of energy. At that energy, we expect more than 1 per m^2 per year. I haven't seen any black holes recently in the square meters of the Earth's surface I routinely interact with. You? I wish the numerical illiterate would stop scare-mongering.
"The command and data-handling system is built around two redundant flight computers that run in parallel." Albee, A. et al., Overview of the Mars Global Surveyor Mission, Journal of Geophysical Research, VOL. 106, NO. E10, PAGES 23,291-23,316, OCTOBER 25, 2001
FYI, here's the original science presentation that the news reports are based on. It's an abstract from the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. This means that the work hasn't yet been peer reviewed but it's still interesting. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/1371 .pdf
1. In the original article, it states that qualifications to be an editor on Citizendium are currently being accepted on an honor basis (i.e. if you claim to be a professor they just accept that). When I signed up to be an editor, I had to send email from my @nasa.gov email and link to my CV. 2. Some comments have complained that you have register to see the articles. That's because it's not open to the general public yet. They're testing things on a closed pilot program first. So, stay tuned!
I'm a scientist that works with the MGS data so I don't know the engineering side well. However, I do know that last year NASA was strongly considering dropping all support for MGS in order to spend the limited Mars program money on newer missions (the idea being that we had gotten 90% of the useful science from MGS). Instead they decided to keep MGS funded with a bare minimum of money and hence a bare minimum number of personnel. I imagine that the poor overworked engineers running the operational show at JPL just didn't have the time to doublecheck everything as they would in an ideal world. As their end user, I'm just grateful for all the work they did over the years to keep the thing running.
For what it's worth, I should point out that this is perfectly consistent with the story that's been gradually developing over the years. We know that there are substantial amounts of hydrogen in the first few meters of most of the Martian crust (cf. the MO Gamma-ray spectrometer) and hence there is likely water ice there. We know that in the distance past large quantities of liquid water flowed on the surface to carve the fluvial geomorphological features we see (cf. MGS MOC images). We know that liquid water sloshed in at least some areas to form certain minerals (cf. MER results). We've seen gullies on the sides of craters that looked recent (cf. MGS MOC images). And now this study which shows gullies being created over the timeframe of a few Earth years. Basically, this is just one more little increment in our understanding of the distribution of water on Mars. This is how science usually works but sometimes press releases unduly hype things.