There are actually 4 missions. Nozomi which is launched by the Japanese, and will reach martian orbit at a similar time to the mars express.
The amusing thing about nozomi (meaning hope) is that it was launched in 1998 - but used too much fuel and was unable to reach mars in that window - it's been bouncing off various planets including a swing by earth again to realign it with the current mars window. So there will be a japanese martian orbiter as well - just 4 years late.
I felt sorry for that one a few years back. Kind of like leaving a puppy when you move.
Part of the intention of having 2 rovers is that they can assist each other. This should make it more difficult to get a rover irreversibly stuck by a rock (as happened last time). If this happens the other rover can now be manoeuvred to nudge the stuck one free of any obstcle.
NASA is under a lot of pressure for a successful Mars mission after the recent failures on the red planet and having 2 rovers minimises the risks.
Pretty much all the space missions are collaborative now. In space science it is too small and the disadvantages too great to be anything other than collaborative. (e.g. There was some direct Canadian involvement in the ESA mars mission, and even if there wasn't direct involvement from the US labs there would have been consultation and peer review on the various instruments).
Science, post cold war, is not a competition. It's a collaboration.
NASA are considering cloning the Energia: it's called Magnum.
Part of the reason that the energia was pulled out of active service was the environmental impact of the thing. Claiming to lift up to 100 tones in to high altitude the rocket packed a huge punch in terms of fuel. So much so that it had a demonstratable impact on the launch site. This and the cost made it untenable. It's easier, less costly, lower risk to launch large structures (eg ISS) into orbit in a modular fashion.
Current space philosophy is smaller lighter faster. What's the need for 100 ton launchers if we can do the same job with smaller rockets?
It's not true that ESA is primarily a French project with some British involvement. The ESA funding comes from most of the primary participants, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark etc. The French contribute a large chunk of the funding but they also have a large role with their government funded labs working on research which compliments the ESA work which enhances their role in european space science. The British on the other hand pay propotionally much less than the other european partners (do you see a pattern here). British institutions will bid for research areas much like other european institutes but they don't contribute as much to the centralised european fund (ESA).
The lander on the current mars mission is British built - but not really as a ESA project. It was cobbled together from research funding from various british university and research labs for an obscenly small sum of money. (relative to the other lander projects) - an will be a real coupe if the scientific payload pays off.
A single Ariane 5 launch costs around $150 M which is roughly $140 MEuros, so this is good for around ten launches. Proton and Soyuz are cheaper - $80M and $40M respectively. (a table of launch vehicles costs). But of course this money won't be spent directly on launches, you have to have something to launch first.
ESA have just announced that they intend to offer Soyuz launch vehicals from the european launch site in south america. This is partly intended to bring the cost of launch down and partly to provide a small load, reliable launch vehical which fills a gap for payloads smaller than the Ariane lifters. Ariane is designed for much larger payloads - taking 2 or 3 instruments up at a time. The newest Ariane (before it's recent suspension) could lift nearly 10 tons - making the largest active lifter.
I don't think that europe is or will want a european space race. Europe should be able instigate and push some interesting projects in the next 10 years (venus express, rossetta etc) but most of these missions (if not all) are hugely collaborative and involve US, Canadian, European, Japanese, Russian and Chinese participants. The time when any individual agency wanted to go it alone are long gone.
When you guys get that sorted even reasonably well, we'll be willing to listen to criticism from you.
Totally flabbergasted by this. Where the hell does that come from? There are ongoing problems in all countries. It's your arrogance to assume that 'THEY' are obviously inferior than you that is truely breath taking.
I've no particular problem with any country but attitudes like that really get my back up. No wonder the US has a bad attitude abroad if your opinion is the one they hear.
J. R. Tolkien was certainly anti-industrialist. The whole piece about Isengard basically refers to industrailisation taking place in rural britain. Felling trees and building factories. He makes no bones about not liking the effects of the introduction of heavy industry in the uk.
The theme at the end of the last book when they return to the shire covers the same ground - battle between rural idyll and mechanisation.
Just because tolkien has an axe to grind doesn't make it any less of a good story (plenty of other authers have also had underlying messages that they want to put over eg CS Lewis and Pullman's Nothern Lights. You can take it or leave it and just enjoy the yarn)
IDE's will be a very unstable, unreliable long term future option. They are not engeneered to be usable over long periods as it is and as PC components have got cheeper and more expendable hard disks are perhaps the first part of any computer which will fail (before considering issues due to shelving discs for a number of years).
Looking for long term mediums, consider DVD's and their successors which will more rapidly keep up with data volume rates than dat tapes - be more stable over time and be more likely to be accessable in 10 years time.
Using ide in short timescales might be more worthwhile - short term faliures are less likely to be catastophic for both discs and you will probably find that you can fit both backups and orginanals on the new diskdrive media that is on the market in a couple of years. So maybe the long term questions don't apply so much - rely on technology catching up?
A workmate of mine had the treatment recently. He's over the moon (though I still find it difficult to place him with his glasses!).
The consequence of the treatment is that he now needs to apply eye drops 4 times a day to stop the eyes drying out. As far as he is concerned this is a small price to pay. I'm not sure however, if I would be prepared to take on the burden of doing this for the rest of my life.
Each mission you get a chance to change what you are sending up. Previous missions took basic data - photgraphs, had rovers, basic chemical sensors etc. Based on what you've learnt from the previous missions you can start to look at the details. We're interested on whether there is life on mars so this mission will be tooled up for that.
Amongst other things (recording the environmental conditions) Beagle 2 will be looking specifically for the presence of water (a keen idicator of whether life is possible). Sensors will also be measuring the abundance and complexity of organic compounds in the soils.
The probe will be equiped with an arm capable or testing and extracting sample from the rock and dust around the landing site. This is a different approach from the netlander mission (NASA based) which will launch later in 2003, which will be armed with 2 rovers.
There is much hype in the uk at least about the amount of scientific payload the machine will carry. If they pull it off, it looks set to inform on a whole new area of our knowledge of mars.
>>... patent law needs requires transnational cooperation
> No, it doesn't.
True, but a patent to be effective in this day and age needs to be accepted across the different regions, which was the point I was making. I would agree with the sentiment that diversity is a good thing but in practice this is increasingly not the case.
For instance India has liciensed a whole series of generic drugs by local companies which are subject to heavy patents in the western world. These drugs, including many which are used to fight HIV, are sold across Asia and southern Africa at a fraction of the cost of the same drugs manufactured in the west. As part of India's World Trade Agreement compliance, India has agreed to phase out the license by 2005 to bring it into line with western patents. This is an example of how the international landscape DOES effect the action and policy of individual patent boards.
The interesting question for me is how do the big players in this (Japan, the USA and the EU - who each have more weight in the patent issue) take this international landscape into account when decieding patent policy. Their decisions can't and won't be seen in isolation. Nor can a stance only taken by one group stand up on its own if there isn't simular support in other countries (even the USA would have only limited success at pushing patents which don't have more global acceptance).
The was a time when countries could define their own patent law with little impact coming in from outside. In our new globilised world effective use of patent law needs requires transnational cooperation. It is becoming increasingly difficult to consider the impact of patent law in isolation.
The European Union has a large enough R&D and manufacturing base that it can still determin it's own path on this issue. Do you see the current EU patent policy as setting the initiative or to what extent is EU patent policy having to be reactive to Patents lodged in Japan and the USA? How do you see you job changing in the increasingly globalised world?
Slashdot Mirror
The amusing thing about nozomi (meaning hope) is that it was launched in 1998 - but used too much fuel and was unable to reach mars in that window - it's been bouncing off various planets including a swing by earth again to realign it with the current mars window. So there will be a japanese martian orbiter as well - just 4 years late.
Part of the intention of having 2 rovers is that they can assist each other. This should make it more difficult to get a rover irreversibly stuck by a rock (as happened last time). If this happens the other rover can now be manoeuvred to nudge the stuck one free of any obstcle.
NASA is under a lot of pressure for a successful Mars mission after the recent failures on the red planet and having 2 rovers minimises the risks.
Science, post cold war, is not a competition. It's a collaboration.
Part of the reason that the energia was pulled out of active service was the environmental impact of the thing. Claiming to lift up to 100 tones in to high altitude the rocket packed a huge punch in terms of fuel. So much so that it had a demonstratable impact on the launch site. This and the cost made it untenable. It's easier, less costly, lower risk to launch large structures (eg ISS) into orbit in a modular fashion.
Current space philosophy is smaller lighter faster. What's the need for 100 ton launchers if we can do the same job with smaller rockets?
It's not true that ESA is primarily a French project with some British involvement. The ESA funding comes from most of the primary participants, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Denmark etc. The French contribute a large chunk of the funding but they also have a large role with their government funded labs working on research which compliments the ESA work which enhances their role in european space science. The British on the other hand pay propotionally much less than the other european partners (do you see a pattern here). British institutions will bid for research areas much like other european institutes but they don't contribute as much to the centralised european fund (ESA).
The lander on the current mars mission is British built - but not really as a ESA project. It was cobbled together from research funding from various british university and research labs for an obscenly small sum of money. (relative to the other lander projects) - an will be a real coupe if the scientific payload pays off.
A single Ariane 5 launch costs around $150 M which is roughly $140 MEuros, so this is good for around ten launches. Proton and Soyuz are cheaper - $80M and $40M respectively. (a table of launch vehicles costs). But of course this money won't be spent directly on launches, you have to have something to launch first.
ESA have just announced that they intend to offer Soyuz launch vehicals from the european launch site in south america. This is partly intended to bring the cost of launch down and partly to provide a small load, reliable launch vehical which fills a gap for payloads smaller than the Ariane lifters. Ariane is designed for much larger payloads - taking 2 or 3 instruments up at a time. The newest Ariane (before it's recent suspension) could lift nearly 10 tons - making the largest active lifter.
I don't think that europe is or will want a european space race. Europe should be able instigate and push some interesting projects in the next 10 years (venus express, rossetta etc) but most of these missions (if not all) are hugely collaborative and involve US, Canadian, European, Japanese, Russian and Chinese participants. The time when any individual agency wanted to go it alone are long gone.
Totally flabbergasted by this. Where the hell does that come from? There are ongoing problems in all countries. It's your arrogance to assume that 'THEY' are obviously inferior than you that is truely breath taking.
I've no particular problem with any country but attitudes like that really get my back up. No wonder the US has a bad attitude abroad if your opinion is the one they hear.
Looking at the website it would appear that the coupon is not valid for sales items, which this PDA is. No no further reduction - $198 it is!
The theme at the end of the last book when they return to the shire covers the same ground - battle between rural idyll and mechanisation.
Just because tolkien has an axe to grind doesn't make it any less of a good story (plenty of other authers have also had underlying messages that they want to put over eg CS Lewis and Pullman's Nothern Lights. You can take it or leave it and just enjoy the yarn)
IDE's will be a very unstable, unreliable long term future option. They are not engeneered to be usable over long periods as it is and as PC components have got cheeper and more expendable hard disks are perhaps the first part of any computer which will fail (before considering issues due to shelving discs for a number of years).
Looking for long term mediums, consider DVD's and their successors which will more rapidly keep up with data volume rates than dat tapes - be more stable over time and be more likely to be accessable in 10 years time.
Using ide in short timescales might be more worthwhile - short term faliures are less likely to be catastophic for both discs and you will probably find that you can fit both backups and orginanals on the new diskdrive media that is on the market in a couple of years. So maybe the long term questions don't apply so much - rely on technology catching up?
The consequence of the treatment is that he now needs to apply eye drops 4 times a day to stop the eyes drying out. As far as he is concerned this is a small price to pay. I'm not sure however, if I would be prepared to take on the burden of doing this for the rest of my life.
Amongst other things (recording the environmental conditions) Beagle 2 will be looking specifically for the presence of water (a keen idicator of whether life is possible). Sensors will also be measuring the abundance and complexity of organic compounds in the soils.
The probe will be equiped with an arm capable or testing and extracting sample from the rock and dust around the landing site. This is a different approach from the netlander mission (NASA based) which will launch later in 2003, which will be armed with 2 rovers.
There is much hype in the uk at least about the amount of scientific payload the machine will carry. If they pull it off, it looks set to inform on a whole new area of our knowledge of mars.
>> ... patent law needs requires transnational cooperation
> No, it doesn't.
True, but a patent to be effective in this day and age needs to be accepted across the different regions, which was the point I was making. I would agree with the sentiment that diversity is a good thing but in practice this is increasingly not the case.
For instance India has liciensed a whole series of generic drugs by local companies which are subject to heavy patents in the western world. These drugs, including many which are used to fight HIV, are sold across Asia and southern Africa at a fraction of the cost of the same drugs manufactured in the west. As part of India's World Trade Agreement compliance, India has agreed to phase out the license by 2005 to bring it into line with western patents. This is an example of how the international landscape DOES effect the action and policy of individual patent boards.
The interesting question for me is how do the big players in this (Japan, the USA and the EU - who each have more weight in the patent issue) take this international landscape into account when decieding patent policy. Their decisions can't and won't be seen in isolation. Nor can a stance only taken by one group stand up on its own if there isn't simular support in other countries (even the USA would have only limited success at pushing patents which don't have more global acceptance).
The European Union has a large enough R&D and manufacturing base that it can still determin it's own path on this issue. Do you see the current EU patent policy as setting the initiative or to what extent is EU patent policy having to be reactive to Patents lodged in Japan and the USA? How do you see you job changing in the increasingly globalised world?