Basically what I was saying is this:
Cost of ISS to cost of Hubble: say 5-10x; 1 order of magnitude
Scientific return from Hubble to ISS: at least 10x (elaboration below)-that is at least another order
So " bang for bucks, Hubble must be at least two orders of magnitude above the ISS in returning scientific data".
Hard as it is to quantify, Hubble has been:
(Taken from NASA)
Every day, Hubble archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world.
See science highlights. As of March 2000, Hubble has:
Taken more than 330,000 separate observations.
Observed more than 25,000 astronomical targets.
Created a data archive of over 7.3 terabytes. (That is like completely filling a PC every day for 10 years.)
Provided data for more than 2,663 scientific papers.
And that was from its launch back in 1990; while ISS missions was mostly construction - with occasional scientific works maybe a few weeks every year with a shuttle visiting.
The cost of Hubble? Initial construction has been less than the cost of 1 B2 (approx 2.2 billion according to CNN) and in its lifetime, around 6 billion, by the time it is projected (earlier) to be retired in 2010
I admire your back of envelope calculations, it is indeed very accurate for the Hubble, but quite short on the ISS (which is a very complex project). I don't have to, and didn't exaggerated on anything - these things you read about for interest and the approx figures stay in your head and if there need be, someone would have written it on some authoritative organisation that you can refer to.
The thing is, ISS was intially planned to cost around 9billion in Reagan's era. How it balloned to that is perhaps something someone would write a book about one day.
And now I have wasted another 20min on this, precious Sat time at that!
The wide-ranging RAND study urges the White House to become more engaged in scripting how best to use the ISS, tagging the Earth-circling complex as a $70 billion national investment.
So that is about $70bil from US commitment alone. International funding could go up to 35% more - read somewhere Japan alone spends 1/3. So perhaps over 100bil int total. I'll get back to this when I've more time.
Quite sad, really - that NASA choose to put all its resources on ISS first and foremost. They cite safety reasons, that they cannot create a workable safety protocol for a Hubble mission. But had they not had 4 Hubble missions - 1 for launch and 3 servicing.
It seems like it is just an excuse from the head of NASA, who was a beancounter, alone. Perhaps the most tragic thing was that Columbia was lost while on a purely-for-science mission.
The thing is, bang for bucks, Hubble must be at least two orders of magnitude above the ISS in returning scientific data. It would not have costed above 10billion, compared to the hundreds of billions the ISS sucked up, and it had given us little, or next to nothing scientific data. No permanent scientific crew, the Destiny science module not being put to good use because the barebone crew of two is too preoccupied running it. All it stands for is an ego booster - we have a permanent manned presence in space, albeit a skeletal crew stuck for years in low Earth orbit, forever tied down doing endless plumbing just to keep it there.
I am starting to doubt if we will see a Hubble successor. And the sad fact is that we will not be fully realising the potential of Hubble, a good piece of hardware that had inspired and impressed so many of us at such a bargain price of under the cost of a B2 bomber.
The main contractors for most NASA hardware will most likely be the usual suspects: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Hughes. They and their subsidiaries will get most of the rocket and spacecraft contracts. But before any real hardware that will be flown is even manufactured, there would already be billions sunk in for the research works, examples being the numerous and mostly dead projects to build the successor to the shuttle.
The same contractors also benefited from the other major endeavour of President Bush: The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, with the staggering replacement costs of cruise missiles, bombs and aircrafts/parts used.
If it takes off, yes, there will be jobs, and there will be benefits to the economy. But I don't find that the sudden enthusiasm shown by the President suprising in any way. But if increased exploration and discoveries is what will results - thank you, we will like that very much.
The economy goes up and down in regular cycle and will eventually be forgotten, but a lasting and successful effort on the final frontier will prove an enduring legacy.
Every system is working as designed, so there won't be much to worry about. I believe they could likely solve that problem. And they still have days to test the rover before they could roll it off anyway, so even if lifting the panel doesn't work, maybe by the time they tested the system and agreed on where to go, the airbag would have deflated enough on its own in the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Drive off another ramp, if it comes to that. The rover has six wheels and was designed to worked even if the landing site didn't turn out to be as flat as it is.
It seems that despite those gorgeous panaromic pictures they have got, the boffins haven't decided on where to go. Perhaps this little inconvenince will give them a few extra days to come to a hopefully good decision.
CD-ROMS/RWs/DVD-ROMs are commodity parts right now, with speed grades mostly maxed out around 52x. And since that speed had been reached some time ago, they have been designed around the old interface. You don't want to invest a lot of money redesigining them for a really thin margin market of uncertain longevity.
Hard disk drives costs more, and you can sell the SATA ones at a premium, and yet most implementations used a bridging chip - there aren't that many native SATA disk drives yet.
DVD writes may have a greater case for going to SATA - but if you are designing one you may not want to alienate the majority of people who may buy one. The market for this is so unsaturated that a buyer is as likely to be an ungrading from CD writers as one one who is buying a new system - many of which still does not feature SATA as standard - especially those DELL-type manufacturer who wants to cut every single cent possible from the cost of their components.
Basically to do a proper SATA switch you will have to split your market, or make yourself a niche player at this moment. And unlike Hard Disks, there are far more optical drive manufacturers around a very price sensitive market.
Most manufacturers I think will just make it as it is, and let people who really want a ribbon cable free system to use a converter.
I'm not saying that we should not be focusing on Mars. It is conveniently close, as I said, and considering what people say when looking at that old, boring, disproved "face on Mars" at Cydonia - sending something like Surveyor which did and beaming back new photos to discredit that crazy old theory alone was worth the price of the entire mission - almost like "showing the better photos to the believers and seeing their reaction - priceless". And the Vikings did present some questions worth of answering once and for all.
What I was saying is that we should not be too preoccupied by it alone. Keeping in topic, if we start producing, at exponential rate - as Prof Hawkings observed - scientific journals; some of them like these kind of "habitable zones" thingy, sooner or later people, and more importantly policy makers do get into the preoccupied mode - a tunnel vision - and losing the greater picture at the periphery.
There has been two scores of missions to Mars. Jupiter, despite the complexity - was only visited by 3 crafts (2 Voyagers and Galileo), Saturn 2, Neptune and Uranus - once, and Pluto and beyond - sadly none. We are talking about an order of magnitude difference here.
The thing about Europa is that it is the place many people think to find life outside Earth, at this moment and we know that only because we had the sense to look and poke beyond the most likely targets - Mars, Mars and Mars. Cassini may find if Titan or any other Saturnian moon may be as interesting... but we will not know about the Neptunian and Uraninan moons.
I would say we should boldy explore forward... what are we doing, as humanity is that betting on only Cassini to Saturn, forgetting the rest of the Solar System beyond Mars and are very happy that somehow, against all odds, we still have Pioneers 10, Voyager 1 & 2 leaving the solar system - almost like basking in past glories - those were launched a generation ago, before the internet was unleashed on the general public. When will a man made ship pass Pluto's orbit again? When will we try to look at the Kuipers belt, if there is an Oort cloud, or try to find the termination shock? If we don't have the vision to think of going there - because it is not the most likely place to find life, as we know it-, what is the chances of securing the funding, the resources, the inspired commitment of scientists and engineers to propose, design and fight for the means to get there?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the search for extreterrestial life form - just had my SETI 4th anniversary and currently beta testing BOINC. But the search for life is only a small part of exploration of the universe as a whole, and rightly so. For if it is out there, and when we have explored far enough, long enough, no matter what form they take - we will find it.
I agree with you, totally, about returning to Mars - just not at the expense of other worthy goals.
That is, without interrupting any work for current missions, missing any favorable planetary alignments, totally blowing the budget, or rushing off without careful planning of how to avoid the ambiguous results with the next mission.
Unfortunately that is not what the "political masters" realised. Congress shifting fundings around missions as the political wind shifts. Suddenly the good idea of the International Space Station turned from an orbiting laboratory to a funding black hole, eating almost every morsels that NASA get in the current political climate. Whatever left get directed mostly at Mars. The Pluto Kuiper Express got cancelled, and when the protests came we get a promise of another, scaled down, delayed proposal. Suffering the same fate was the "Deep Space" series of New Millenium Programme that NASA started - and that was even after the spectacular sucesses of Deep Space 1.
The last thing we need to throw at the politicos is a new bunch of contradicting "this is where we should be looking at" documents - lest the start another round of their favourite shifting the funds around game, every shift wasting a few work-in-progress projects, leaving humanity stuck at low Earth orbit and diverting our eyes with periodic hyped up stories about Mars.
What we need to do is continuing looking, exploring outwards, with eyes wide open and not let "tunnel vision" blind us to what would be obvious otherwise.
The preoccupation about Mars is exactly the sort of thing that we should avoid - missions after countless missions and inconclusive results at best; and at its worse it spawned those drivels people write about on enterprisemission.com. It may be the second closest planet, conveniently so, arguably Earthlike - and that is the problem - we go there looking only for Earthlike life forms. Not that I'm saying we should not be bothered with Mars anymore, but since we spending so much money going there we shouldn't only be thinking the only form of life to expect is the complex hydrocarbon based, water dependent ones that we know.
I know what you mean, telescope time can be really, in the spirit of the moment, precioussss. Actually getting time to do any experiment on any piece of expensive equipments from academics can be very frustrating. Kind of resulting in what those SETI people do at Arecibo - stick a receiver and whatever people are looking at, record and analyse it - when you have telescope time you follow your hit list, but be prepared, in case you lucky when you are not expecting it.
I would think of classifying and concentrating our efforts on such a zone can be a little too presumptuous.
Imagine someone said 30 years ago that life is likely to be found on "terrestial planets" and we should concentrate on such and convinced key decisions makers about it: There would be no Pioneers 10 and 11, no Voyagers 1 and 2, no Galileo and no Cassini, and no one would be bold enough to even propose JIMO; and we would have no idea on the existance of "a little solar system in the solar system" in the form of the Jovian moons, and we would not have come to speculate that currently, the most likely site in our neighbourhood to find some form of life outside Earth is on the moon Europa.
Just concentrating on finding "live as we know it" might mean we may miss something right in front of our noses. Somehow it makes me think of those floating jellyfish like creature living on a habitable zone (for them, at least) at some depth on a gas giant that Dan Simmons wrote about in the Endymion books... and that real extraterrestial life, if it exists, may take forms more exotic than even what our imaginations can create. Keep an open mind, and two open eyes.
Somehow I'm drawn to the irony of it all, considering an inanimate Beagle2 got in terms of invested human emotions compared to the original Beagle - Darwin and crew who had to put their lives in the line on a far from unsinkable ship, on poorly charted waters, leaving family and friends half a world behind.
And here we have an unmaned probe receiving eulogies (albeit preemtively) that should have remained exclusively as honour reserved for those who truly gave their lives moving exploration forward - from the likes of Magellan, Scott, Cook to the more recent tragedies of the Challenger and Columbia 7s, and countless others, many who will remain unnamed despite their ultimate sacrifice.
Perhaps there was not a equivalent of reality tv even at the then zenith of the British, Spanish and Portuguese Empires to let their people to worry about the welfare of brave, living explorers when they did not call back on time (not that they have the means to); but if we are moved to grief over the failures of a cheap, and an afterthought of a lander at that - then perhaps we have let TV dumb us down too much.
Maybe we lost what was a bold gamble to begin with in this case, but please keep your emotions in perspective. Dissapointment is natural, anything more is overreaction, and for goodness sake don't even think of going into hysteria.
We may mourn people who die, but when an engineering project failed with no fatalities, review, learn and move on. I am sure a lot of people who worked on this project would agree that despite whatever may the fate of Beagle2 be, they have already learn a lot building an actual lander itself.
Mars Express is the major part of the European mission - Beagle was a late add-on - and will search for water, ice and key chemicals buried under the Martian surface.
That is, the lander is not the be all and end all of the ESA mission. After all, Mars Express will be looking for the potential signs of the possibility life on Mars - buried water, ice and chemicals - on a planetwide scale. Beagle will only be a stationary point sampler. I'm finding it strange that all that is being shouted about is the smaller part of the mission probably failed, while the greater whole is more or less working as planned.
I'm not arguing that surface lander is not useful, just that it is not the main focus of this mission. We still have two shots at landers - and these are rovers, not stationary samplers, arriving soon:
Spirit, the first of NASA's identical robot explorers, is expected to land Jan. 3. Its sibling, Opportunity, is scheduled to settle on the opposite side of the planet January 24.CNN
Beagle2 is kind of like the icing on the cake. Even if we lost it, but with Mars Express working we can still have our cake and eat it.
It is worrying, yes, but it really is not the end of the world.
There are already 2 functional spacecrafts - Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey in orbit. And Mars Express, Spirit, and Opportunity will be arriving soon.
Surely 5 spacecrafts will be able to pick any signal the Beagle may be broadcasting, or otherwise find signs of the wrecks.
Ironically my pc was playing Joy to the World when I read this... the downside of scheduling this kind of things around this time. WinAmp was promptly shut down.
Theres ESA's Mars Express and NASA's Spirit and Opportunity (twins in the tradition of the famed Voyagers I&II, and Pioneers 10 and 11). So that is a trio of spacecrafts.
You're right about Nozomi not making it, otherwise it would be 4.
> I love the British people; they are friendly, clever, well spoken, and generally well thought out. That said, most everything they build is always missing one key ingredient. Maybe poor interface, maybe a critical technical componenet is under-engineered.
Well, the magnificient stations and bridges that Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed/built for the Great Western Railway stood the test of time, retaining both their functionality and beauty. And if you forget the open topped tour buses of London and take a walking tour along the Thames and you'll see how so many of the graceful Victorian bridges still stands despite them not being designed to carry modern multi axled heavy vehicles.
Most British engineering today tends to be rather less assuming but mostly works. The North Sea petroleum industry is one example. The tube is a bit shite at times but you have to consider the lack of investment it had to endure for decades.
Perhaps the greatest reason why British engineering failed to produce some spectacular sucsesses to match their illustrious predecessors is the brain drain - most of the best engineering students left to work in the city for the banking and financial institutions.
At the end of the day you can't blame entire nations, be it British, American, or anyone else for mistakes made by individuals/teams, especially given the cost constraints and management meddlings.
Lets not forget the Beagle/Mars Express is only the first of a trio of spacecraft to Mars this year. Look at JPL: Where are Spirit and Opportunity right now and you can see how close the spacecrafts of the Terran armada is together. A golden opportunity for science if all of them make it.
In terms of expectations/cost factor the Beagle/Mars Express is perhaps the most ambitious one, therefore the high emphasis on what could go wrong in the Beeb article. A kind of be hopeful but keep your fingers crossed thingy.
OK, fair enough that the bug makes that particular size and it could perhaps make it smaller, if you find a way of inhibiting the growth of the proto-opal crystal. Lets just say for arguments sake that you can perfectly control the size distribution of the particles it makes, say to some miraculously small scale, order of 10 atoms across, ie. about 1nm. Now you have bioengineered a bug to make 1nm particles, say of a particular shape. Is it biotechnology? Arguably yes. But conventional scientiest would call that particle technology (making, controlling particles, sometimes to very small scale - for example to use in a slurry that you want it to be stable enough, where size distribution is very important). But is it nanotechnology? Emphatically NO. It is just probably reflecting different wavelengths now, which is more of a function of its size. To qualify as nanotechnology, if must be able to have some function as a technology tool at a nanoscale. Say a nanoscale transistor, the holy grail being a single molecules that can act as a full transistor. Or nanocalar circuitry linking molecules together. Little gears at that sort of scale. Or a molecular sieve, that allows very specific molecules to pass through.
Biotechnology being hyped up had actually burnt a lot of investors in the pass, most memorably in the 80s. Put the two hypes of nanotech and biotech together without any sound basis and that is a recipe for disaster.
Biotech is great if you want to churn out specialty drugs, hormones and stuff like that. But assembling "hardware" there will be a long way to go before it can catch even the most low end "Classic nano-tech".
The bugs makes "nanoparticles" 250nm in size, i.e. 0.25 micron in size. In semiconductor 0.25micron is so old tech you can sell anything to China without anyone raising an eyebrow.
The current highend semiconductor manufacturing is using 0.09 micron design rules, implying gate lengths of about 45nm and they are not going around shouting "Hey we are doing nanotech!"
Biotech is great, but perhaps overhyped if people start associating it with anything. For the near future it will concentrate on and making heaps of money doing medical based and lifestyle enhancing (thing Viagra) products.
Meanwhile semiconductor people will continue pushing the barrier and makes heaps of money doing so, without needing to spin itself with terms like nano- things. But to be fair they don't need to do too much convincing sceptical venture capitalists anymore.
Perhaps organic chemists with their highly specific molecules may get to do some real results. But making proteins and complex molecules using cells is not nanotechnology. Looking at bugs who have 0.25micron particles on its back doesn't make the cut either.
Read the articles again. The discoverer did not used "nanotechnology" nor hype it as such. But after getting a paper publish on Nature, perhaps he doesn't need the hype.
Bandwidth and the state of the internet as a whole can compromise this solution. You don't want to lose your insurance at precisely the moment when you need it the most, for example during the slammer attack.
The popularity of both Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storages somehow seems to show that most organisations prefers to keep backup within their own control. And tapes are dirt cheap on today's standards.
Both tapes and solid state solutions can be have cheaply and some have great user friendliness. You get excellent bandwidth thrown in as well.
The only upside I can think of for online storage is that it is truely redundant, that is you will not lose your backups in event of a fire or other calamities.
But bear in mind that vendors do have the tendency to promise you the earth and deliver pebbles.
Slashdot Mirror
Cost of ISS to cost of Hubble: say 5-10x; 1 order of magnitude
Scientific return from Hubble to ISS: at least 10x (elaboration below)-that is at least another order
So " bang for bucks, Hubble must be at least two orders of magnitude above the ISS in returning scientific data".
Hard as it is to quantify, Hubble has been:
And that was from its launch back in 1990; while ISS missions was mostly construction - with occasional scientific works maybe a few weeks every year with a shuttle visiting.(Taken from NASA)
The cost of Hubble? Initial construction has been less than the cost of 1 B2 (approx 2.2 billion according to CNN) and in its lifetime, around 6 billion, by the time it is projected (earlier) to be retired in 2010
I admire your back of envelope calculations, it is indeed very accurate for the Hubble, but quite short on the ISS (which is a very complex project). I don't have to, and didn't exaggerated on anything - these things you read about for interest and the approx figures stay in your head and if there need be, someone would have written it on some authoritative organisation that you can refer to.
The thing is, ISS was intially planned to cost around 9billion in Reagan's era. How it balloned to that is perhaps something someone would write a book about one day.
And now I have wasted another 20min on this, precious Sat time at that!
It seems like it is just an excuse from the head of NASA, who was a beancounter, alone. Perhaps the most tragic thing was that Columbia was lost while on a purely-for-science mission.
The thing is, bang for bucks, Hubble must be at least two orders of magnitude above the ISS in returning scientific data. It would not have costed above 10billion, compared to the hundreds of billions the ISS sucked up, and it had given us little, or next to nothing scientific data. No permanent scientific crew, the Destiny science module not being put to good use because the barebone crew of two is too preoccupied running it. All it stands for is an ego booster - we have a permanent manned presence in space, albeit a skeletal crew stuck for years in low Earth orbit, forever tied down doing endless plumbing just to keep it there.
I am starting to doubt if we will see a Hubble successor. And the sad fact is that we will not be fully realising the potential of Hubble, a good piece of hardware that had inspired and impressed so many of us at such a bargain price of under the cost of a B2 bomber.
The same contractors also benefited from the other major endeavour of President Bush: The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, with the staggering replacement costs of cruise missiles, bombs and aircrafts/parts used.
If it takes off, yes, there will be jobs, and there will be benefits to the economy. But I don't find that the sudden enthusiasm shown by the President suprising in any way. But if increased exploration and discoveries is what will results - thank you, we will like that very much.
The economy goes up and down in regular cycle and will eventually be forgotten, but a lasting and successful effort on the final frontier will prove an enduring legacy.
Every system is working as designed, so there won't be much to worry about. I believe they could likely solve that problem. And they still have days to test the rover before they could roll it off anyway, so even if lifting the panel doesn't work, maybe by the time they tested the system and agreed on where to go, the airbag would have deflated enough on its own in the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Drive off another ramp, if it comes to that. The rover has six wheels and was designed to worked even if the landing site didn't turn out to be as flat as it is.
It seems that despite those gorgeous panaromic pictures they have got, the boffins haven't decided on where to go. Perhaps this little inconvenince will give them a few extra days to come to a hopefully good decision.
Hard disk drives costs more, and you can sell the SATA ones at a premium, and yet most implementations used a bridging chip - there aren't that many native SATA disk drives yet.
DVD writes may have a greater case for going to SATA - but if you are designing one you may not want to alienate the majority of people who may buy one. The market for this is so unsaturated that a buyer is as likely to be an ungrading from CD writers as one one who is buying a new system - many of which still does not feature SATA as standard - especially those DELL-type manufacturer who wants to cut every single cent possible from the cost of their components.
Basically to do a proper SATA switch you will have to split your market, or make yourself a niche player at this moment. And unlike Hard Disks, there are far more optical drive manufacturers around a very price sensitive market.
Most manufacturers I think will just make it as it is, and let people who really want a ribbon cable free system to use a converter.
What I was saying is that we should not be too preoccupied by it alone. Keeping in topic, if we start producing, at exponential rate - as Prof Hawkings observed - scientific journals; some of them like these kind of "habitable zones" thingy, sooner or later people, and more importantly policy makers do get into the preoccupied mode - a tunnel vision - and losing the greater picture at the periphery.
There has been two scores of missions to Mars. Jupiter, despite the complexity - was only visited by 3 crafts (2 Voyagers and Galileo), Saturn 2, Neptune and Uranus - once, and Pluto and beyond - sadly none. We are talking about an order of magnitude difference here.
The thing about Europa is that it is the place many people think to find life outside Earth, at this moment and we know that only because we had the sense to look and poke beyond the most likely targets - Mars, Mars and Mars. Cassini may find if Titan or any other Saturnian moon may be as interesting... but we will not know about the Neptunian and Uraninan moons.
I would say we should boldy explore forward... what are we doing, as humanity is that betting on only Cassini to Saturn, forgetting the rest of the Solar System beyond Mars and are very happy that somehow, against all odds, we still have Pioneers 10, Voyager 1 & 2 leaving the solar system - almost like basking in past glories - those were launched a generation ago, before the internet was unleashed on the general public. When will a man made ship pass Pluto's orbit again? When will we try to look at the Kuipers belt, if there is an Oort cloud, or try to find the termination shock? If we don't have the vision to think of going there - because it is not the most likely place to find life, as we know it-, what is the chances of securing the funding, the resources, the inspired commitment of scientists and engineers to propose, design and fight for the means to get there?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the search for extreterrestial life form - just had my SETI 4th anniversary and currently beta testing BOINC. But the search for life is only a small part of exploration of the universe as a whole, and rightly so. For if it is out there, and when we have explored far enough, long enough, no matter what form they take - we will find it.
Unfortunately that is not what the "political masters" realised. Congress shifting fundings around missions as the political wind shifts. Suddenly the good idea of the International Space Station turned from an orbiting laboratory to a funding black hole, eating almost every morsels that NASA get in the current political climate. Whatever left get directed mostly at Mars. The Pluto Kuiper Express got cancelled, and when the protests came we get a promise of another, scaled down, delayed proposal. Suffering the same fate was the "Deep Space" series of New Millenium Programme that NASA started - and that was even after the spectacular sucesses of Deep Space 1.
The last thing we need to throw at the politicos is a new bunch of contradicting "this is where we should be looking at" documents - lest the start another round of their favourite shifting the funds around game, every shift wasting a few work-in-progress projects, leaving humanity stuck at low Earth orbit and diverting our eyes with periodic hyped up stories about Mars.
What we need to do is continuing looking, exploring outwards, with eyes wide open and not let "tunnel vision" blind us to what would be obvious otherwise.
I know what you mean, telescope time can be really, in the spirit of the moment, precioussss. Actually getting time to do any experiment on any piece of expensive equipments from academics can be very frustrating. Kind of resulting in what those SETI people do at Arecibo - stick a receiver and whatever people are looking at, record and analyse it - when you have telescope time you follow your hit list, but be prepared, in case you lucky when you are not expecting it.
Imagine someone said 30 years ago that life is likely to be found on "terrestial planets" and we should concentrate on such and convinced key decisions makers about it: There would be no Pioneers 10 and 11, no Voyagers 1 and 2, no Galileo and no Cassini, and no one would be bold enough to even propose JIMO; and we would have no idea on the existance of "a little solar system in the solar system" in the form of the Jovian moons, and we would not have come to speculate that currently, the most likely site in our neighbourhood to find some form of life outside Earth is on the moon Europa.
Just concentrating on finding "live as we know it" might mean we may miss something right in front of our noses. Somehow it makes me think of those floating jellyfish like creature living on a habitable zone (for them, at least) at some depth on a gas giant that Dan Simmons wrote about in the Endymion books... and that real extraterrestial life, if it exists, may take forms more exotic than even what our imaginations can create. Keep an open mind, and two open eyes.
And here we have an unmaned probe receiving eulogies (albeit preemtively) that should have remained exclusively as honour reserved for those who truly gave their lives moving exploration forward - from the likes of Magellan, Scott, Cook to the more recent tragedies of the Challenger and Columbia 7s, and countless others, many who will remain unnamed despite their ultimate sacrifice.
Perhaps there was not a equivalent of reality tv even at the then zenith of the British, Spanish and Portuguese Empires to let their people to worry about the welfare of brave, living explorers when they did not call back on time (not that they have the means to); but if we are moved to grief over the failures of a cheap, and an afterthought of a lander at that - then perhaps we have let TV dumb us down too much.
Maybe we lost what was a bold gamble to begin with in this case, but please keep your emotions in perspective. Dissapointment is natural, anything more is overreaction, and for goodness sake don't even think of going into hysteria.
We may mourn people who die, but when an engineering project failed with no fatalities, review, learn and move on. I am sure a lot of people who worked on this project would agree that despite whatever may the fate of Beagle2 be, they have already learn a lot building an actual lander itself.
Mars Express is the major part of the European mission - Beagle was a late add-on - and will search for water, ice and key chemicals buried under the Martian surface.
That is, the lander is not the be all and end all of the ESA mission. After all, Mars Express will be looking for the potential signs of the possibility life on Mars - buried water, ice and chemicals - on a planetwide scale . Beagle will only be a stationary point sampler. I'm finding it strange that all that is being shouted about is the smaller part of the mission probably failed, while the greater whole is more or less working as planned.
I'm not arguing that surface lander is not useful, just that it is not the main focus of this mission. We still have two shots at landers - and these are rovers, not stationary samplers, arriving soon:
Spirit, the first of NASA's identical robot explorers, is expected to land Jan. 3. Its sibling, Opportunity, is scheduled to settle on the opposite side of the planet January 24. CNN
Beagle2 is kind of like the icing on the cake. Even if we lost it, but with Mars Express working we can still have our cake and eat it.
There are already 2 functional spacecrafts - Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey in orbit. And Mars Express, Spirit, and Opportunity will be arriving soon.
Surely 5 spacecrafts will be able to pick any signal the Beagle may be broadcasting, or otherwise find signs of the wrecks.
Ironically my pc was playing Joy to the World when I read this... the downside of scheduling this kind of things around this time. WinAmp was promptly shut down.
You're right about Nozomi not making it, otherwise it would be 4.
Well, the magnificient stations and bridges that Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed/built for the Great Western Railway stood the test of time, retaining both their functionality and beauty. And if you forget the open topped tour buses of London and take a walking tour along the Thames and you'll see how so many of the graceful Victorian bridges still stands despite them not being designed to carry modern multi axled heavy vehicles.
Most British engineering today tends to be rather less assuming but mostly works. The North Sea petroleum industry is one example. The tube is a bit shite at times but you have to consider the lack of investment it had to endure for decades.
Perhaps the greatest reason why British engineering failed to produce some spectacular sucsesses to match their illustrious predecessors is the brain drain - most of the best engineering students left to work in the city for the banking and financial institutions.
At the end of the day you can't blame entire nations, be it British, American, or anyone else for mistakes made by individuals/teams, especially given the cost constraints and management meddlings.
In terms of expectations/cost factor the Beagle/Mars Express is perhaps the most ambitious one, therefore the high emphasis on what could go wrong in the Beeb article. A kind of be hopeful but keep your fingers crossed thingy.
Biotechnology being hyped up had actually burnt a lot of investors in the pass, most memorably in the 80s. Put the two hypes of nanotech and biotech together without any sound basis and that is a recipe for disaster.
The bugs makes "nanoparticles" 250nm in size, i.e. 0.25 micron in size. In semiconductor 0.25micron is so old tech you can sell anything to China without anyone raising an eyebrow. The current highend semiconductor manufacturing is using 0.09 micron design rules, implying gate lengths of about 45nm and they are not going around shouting "Hey we are doing nanotech!"
Biotech is great, but perhaps overhyped if people start associating it with anything. For the near future it will concentrate on and making heaps of money doing medical based and lifestyle enhancing (thing Viagra) products.
Meanwhile semiconductor people will continue pushing the barrier and makes heaps of money doing so, without needing to spin itself with terms like nano- things. But to be fair they don't need to do too much convincing sceptical venture capitalists anymore.
Perhaps organic chemists with their highly specific molecules may get to do some real results. But making proteins and complex molecules using cells is not nanotechnology. Looking at bugs who have 0.25micron particles on its back doesn't make the cut either.
Read the articles again. The discoverer did not used "nanotechnology" nor hype it as such. But after getting a paper publish on Nature, perhaps he doesn't need the hype.
The popularity of both Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storages somehow seems to show that most organisations prefers to keep backup within their own control. And tapes are dirt cheap on today's standards.
Both tapes and solid state solutions can be have cheaply and some have great user friendliness. You get excellent bandwidth thrown in as well.
The only upside I can think of for online storage is that it is truely redundant, that is you will not lose your backups in event of a fire or other calamities.
But bear in mind that vendors do have the tendency to promise you the earth and deliver pebbles.