I have tremendous respect for JPL and if the JPL crew is enthusiastic about MOXIE then I withdraw my objections to it. But couldn't you simulate the high-G launch and EDL with a centrifuge and simulate the radiation exposure and low atmospheric pressure here on earth? OK, I guess it is not the same as the real thing and it will be good for publicity so OK...
Yup. It is a stupid, idiotic waste of space, but I guess JPL has to give this concession to the manned-space porksters at NASA HQ. You just know that the engineers at JPL are rolling their eyes when presented with this plan.
Gawd, when can we get a new administration at NASA and clean out the anti-science, pro-pork, manned spaceflight lobby in the NASA HQ? I would like to see equal representation of the Science directorate in top NASA management, not yet-more ex-pilots.
Wow, this post is almost precisely the opposite of reality (you must be a NASA contractor working SLS, etc.). MOXIE is pointless but the other instruments will be very valuable in looking for past signs of life .
The MOXIE is the most idiotic experiment to fly in a long, long time. This is an experiment that could easily be done on Earth in any of a hundred University basements.
The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) experiment on MLS (Curiousity) was another concession to the all-powerful manned spaceflight lobby at NASA, but at least the RAD told us something we could not figure out here on Earth. It gave us some useful info on the radiation levels in flight and on the surface. MOXIE, on the other hand, is pointless.
What's the point of MOXIE? Sending humans to Mars is 100 times the cost of what is in the NASA budget now for Manned spaceflight so it is just not going to happen. Everything on Mars except the low gravity is easily simulate-able on Earth for a fraction of the cost. MOXIE is just plan idiotic.
It is just a stunt by the Human Spaceflight Directorate at NASA to get in on the action. They finally realized that the real excitement in spaceflight are the unmanned probes so they want a piece of the action. It was like Bolden sitting at JPL during the MSL landing pretending he had something to do with it.
As you know, Carl Sagan started the Planetary Society to stop the Human Spaceflight Directorate types from stealing money from the planetary missions to fuel their bottomless well of cost overruns. Nothing has changed. Bolden tried to kill off planetary missions and had to restore funding after a public outcry. I am sure that NASA's pointless asteriod-capture stunt will be have huge cost overruns and Bolden will use it to try to grab funds from Planetary missions. Look at the SLS and its costs. What is each launch going to cost now? Billions I assume...
I am sure the crew at JPL is rolling their eyes about the MOXIE CO2-->O2 "experiment". Here is an experiment that could easily be done at any of, say, a hundred universities here on Earth. What is the point of taking up valuable space, electricity, and engineering effort just to shlepp this stunt to the surface of another world?
The point is that JPL was probably forced to do this by the Human-exploration Directorate weasels that run NASA or JPL is doing it to appease them so they don't get their funding cut when their asteroid-capture stunt goes over-budget as it surely will.
And why split CO2 for rocket fuel when there is nothing to burn. Wouldn't be easier to split ice/H2O and you get H2 for fuel if you want, but, of course it is harder to gather and purify the ice.
But anyway I am all for it if that is what it takes to get another rover to Mars....
5 Billion pays for a Mars Sample Return mission
5 Billion pays for two Europa Clipper missions
Manned spaceflight is such a scam but NASA is hopelessly in the bag for manned pork. All the top management are ex-flyboys. Ugh. Hopeless
The orbiters do not have the fuel to move out of the way and besides it will be a big cloud of dust and vapor and ice; impossible to avoid. They best that can be done is orient the spacecraft in some way to minimize the potential damage.
As far as images, well maybe. The orbiters are designed to look down, not up so some fancy maneuvering will be needed but I think it can be done. The photos will show a fuzzy blob, but more interesting will the readings from the spectrometers and other instruments. MSL (Curiosity) will be able to take pix from the surface depending on the orientation and timing; it has taken astronomical photos before.
"By next year" sounds like a deadline and an impossible one.
I guess he felt that employees were not stressed out enough, and needed impossible deadline to whip them into shape....
Why would anyone work there now?
Of all the lame reasons, this one is the worst. The last place we have privacy, in the home, is now under attack.
I am sure that someday soon we will all be required to wire our homes and carry Stalin's Dream (a cellphone),...."for our own protection".
The is the great thing about corporations; greed has no limit.
Take the soft drink manufacturers; sugar is dirt cheap, but not cheap enough so they go for high-fructose corn juice and even that is not enough profits so they try to find the absolute cheapest crapola high-fructose garbage they can.
ACK, you are right. What I meant to say is that the total volume of land above water is a lot less than the total volume of seawater. Earth is a water world.
If it was not for plate tectonics then there would be no land masses except possibly some hotspot volcanos (i.e. like Mars) poking up to the surface, but no continents.
That proves it is wrong...
Actually Mars probably had a northern ocean but we do not know if ever supported life.
I suspect that Earth is in a delicate balancing act. Not too much and not too little water.
BTW, if you averaged all the elevations on earth, none of it would be above the level of the ocean. If plate tectonics stops, as it probably will in a billion or so years, then all the continents will be eroded to nothing and Earth will be a water world.
We need NASA (JPL specifically) for its highly-successful unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers, the Cassini Saturn orbiter, Voyager, etc.
We do NOT need a manned spaceflight program; it is an almost total waste of money
Better still if you could divert the 3b to planetary science such as the Europa mission...
The problem is that NASA is run by ex-pilots and ex-astronauts and they need to keep the manned spaceflight pork train running and to hell with real science.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Yellow Fever was the Big Problem. I think it killed the wife and daughter of the guy in charge
and it did Bankrupt the French. I hope everyone has read "A Path Between the Seas"
then this phone would really be truly wonderful
There will be a core-ing tool, at least.
I have tremendous respect for JPL and if the JPL crew is enthusiastic about MOXIE then I withdraw my objections to it. But couldn't you simulate the high-G launch and EDL with a centrifuge and simulate the radiation exposure and low atmospheric pressure here on earth? OK, I guess it is not the same as the real thing and it will be good for publicity so OK...
Which experiment got bumped in favor of MOXIE?
Yup. It is a stupid, idiotic waste of space, but I guess JPL has to give this concession to the manned-space porksters at NASA HQ. You just know that the engineers at JPL are rolling their eyes when presented with this plan. Gawd, when can we get a new administration at NASA and clean out the anti-science, pro-pork, manned spaceflight lobby in the NASA HQ? I would like to see equal representation of the Science directorate in top NASA management, not yet-more ex-pilots.
Wow, this post is almost precisely the opposite of reality (you must be a NASA contractor working SLS, etc.). MOXIE is pointless but the other instruments will be very valuable in looking for past signs of life .
The MOXIE is the most idiotic experiment to fly in a long, long time. This is an experiment that could easily be done on Earth in any of a hundred University basements. The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) experiment on MLS (Curiousity) was another concession to the all-powerful manned spaceflight lobby at NASA, but at least the RAD told us something we could not figure out here on Earth. It gave us some useful info on the radiation levels in flight and on the surface. MOXIE, on the other hand, is pointless.
What's the point of MOXIE? Sending humans to Mars is 100 times the cost of what is in the NASA budget now for Manned spaceflight so it is just not going to happen. Everything on Mars except the low gravity is easily simulate-able on Earth for a fraction of the cost. MOXIE is just plan idiotic. It is just a stunt by the Human Spaceflight Directorate at NASA to get in on the action. They finally realized that the real excitement in spaceflight are the unmanned probes so they want a piece of the action. It was like Bolden sitting at JPL during the MSL landing pretending he had something to do with it. As you know, Carl Sagan started the Planetary Society to stop the Human Spaceflight Directorate types from stealing money from the planetary missions to fuel their bottomless well of cost overruns. Nothing has changed. Bolden tried to kill off planetary missions and had to restore funding after a public outcry. I am sure that NASA's pointless asteriod-capture stunt will be have huge cost overruns and Bolden will use it to try to grab funds from Planetary missions. Look at the SLS and its costs. What is each launch going to cost now? Billions I assume...
I am sure the crew at JPL is rolling their eyes about the MOXIE CO2-->O2 "experiment". Here is an experiment that could easily be done at any of, say, a hundred universities here on Earth. What is the point of taking up valuable space, electricity, and engineering effort just to shlepp this stunt to the surface of another world? The point is that JPL was probably forced to do this by the Human-exploration Directorate weasels that run NASA or JPL is doing it to appease them so they don't get their funding cut when their asteroid-capture stunt goes over-budget as it surely will. And why split CO2 for rocket fuel when there is nothing to burn. Wouldn't be easier to split ice/H2O and you get H2 for fuel if you want, but, of course it is harder to gather and purify the ice. But anyway I am all for it if that is what it takes to get another rover to Mars....
> the suits at Warner Brothers That would be leisure suits, sunglasses and gold chains, right?
5 Billion pays for a Mars Sample Return mission 5 Billion pays for two Europa Clipper missions Manned spaceflight is such a scam but NASA is hopelessly in the bag for manned pork. All the top management are ex-flyboys. Ugh. Hopeless
The orbiters do not have the fuel to move out of the way and besides it will be a big cloud of dust and vapor and ice; impossible to avoid. They best that can be done is orient the spacecraft in some way to minimize the potential damage. As far as images, well maybe. The orbiters are designed to look down, not up so some fancy maneuvering will be needed but I think it can be done. The photos will show a fuzzy blob, but more interesting will the readings from the spectrometers and other instruments. MSL (Curiosity) will be able to take pix from the surface depending on the orientation and timing; it has taken astronomical photos before.
Where are the pictures of Kimberly?
"By next year" sounds like a deadline and an impossible one. I guess he felt that employees were not stressed out enough, and needed impossible deadline to whip them into shape.... Why would anyone work there now?
Of all the lame reasons, this one is the worst. The last place we have privacy, in the home, is now under attack. I am sure that someday soon we will all be required to wire our homes and carry Stalin's Dream (a cellphone), ...."for our own protection".
There is sure to be a Dead Sea effect and MS's long-term prospects cannot be great if they have lost / will lose their best people
All the tin-pot dictators wanted it...
The is the great thing about corporations; greed has no limit. Take the soft drink manufacturers; sugar is dirt cheap, but not cheap enough so they go for high-fructose corn juice and even that is not enough profits so they try to find the absolute cheapest crapola high-fructose garbage they can.
Could it be used for de-salination
ACK, you are right. What I meant to say is that the total volume of land above water is a lot less than the total volume of seawater. Earth is a water world. If it was not for plate tectonics then there would be no land masses except possibly some hotspot volcanos (i.e. like Mars) poking up to the surface, but no continents.
That proves it is wrong... Actually Mars probably had a northern ocean but we do not know if ever supported life. I suspect that Earth is in a delicate balancing act. Not too much and not too little water. BTW, if you averaged all the elevations on earth, none of it would be above the level of the ocean. If plate tectonics stops, as it probably will in a billion or so years, then all the continents will be eroded to nothing and Earth will be a water world.
We need NASA (JPL specifically) for its highly-successful unmanned probes such as the Mars rovers, the Cassini Saturn orbiter, Voyager, etc. We do NOT need a manned spaceflight program; it is an almost total waste of money
Better still if you could divert the 3b to planetary science such as the Europa mission... The problem is that NASA is run by ex-pilots and ex-astronauts and they need to keep the manned spaceflight pork train running and to hell with real science.