Interestingly enough, it was the editors, not I, who added the part about the watt hours, which in turn comes from the NASA press release I was referencing.
Not to heap any more crap on the editors -- I think they do a reasonably good job considering they have people like you to contend with.
You can see daily images and weekly updates about both rovers on the excellent official site.
If you'll forgive the plug, you can also keep up with all the planetary probes on my (non-commerical) site: ridingwithrobots.org.
You can see the originals, as the New Horizons team posts them, here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/. If you're interested in following the many space probes that are active right now at Venus, Mars and Saturn, you can also keep up with all of them at ridingwithrobots.org.
Exactly. I think it's a lot of fun to watch such a basic piece of information - 'where is the edge of the solar system, anyway? - in the process of being discovered.
The chief scientist for the Voyager mission told me a couple of weeks ago that he guesses Voyager 1 is more like 10 years away from the heliopause, and talked at some length about the exploration of the solar system's boundaries. You can hear the conversation in this podcast.
The interesting part of this data is not the mere presence of liquid methane, but the imagery that appears to show entire lakes. Before the Huygens probe landed, many hoped it would see such lakes - or even splash down in one (see this pre-landing article from the ESA, for example). While some evidence suggests Huygens' touch-down point may have once been covered by liquid, the lander didn't see any lakes or oceans directly. So these latest findings just make the overall nature of Titan's 'hydrologic' system more visible. It seems like each pass by Titan that Cassini makes fleshes out the picture a little more.
Re:I didn't know satellites had a schedual
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New Mars Discoveries
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· Score: 4, Informative
I tossed off that phrase maybe a little too casually as a figure of speech, but certainly the people on the project have been working overtime. Some background here.
Unmannedspaceflight is a fantastic site.
Anyone interested in the topic will also want to check out Riding with Robots, which offers free widgets and screen savers that download the latest probe imagery.
That's an interesting observation.
I don't know if there was ever life on Mars before, but there is now (at least in proxy). That rover is probably the only thing moving on that plain, perhaps ever.
It reminds me of the end of The Martian Chronicles, when the family looks into the canal to see the Martians, and their own reflections look back at them.
They tried. It crashed. They may try again.
Meanwhile, the rovers have to go to the equatorial region of the planet because they're powered by solar cells that require strong sunlight.
And, while there is probably no life on the surface now, exposed layers of rock might yield clues about past life, if it ever existed.
I can't imagine how you'd pick up the faint signal (as Rude Turnip mentioned) - but you really don't have since NASA does what I think is an amazing job in providing all the data once it's processed.
Just for one example, see: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/
I have many other examples on this little site: http://www.billdunford.com/dsd
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, it was the editors, not I, who added the part about the watt hours, which in turn comes from the NASA press release I was referencing. Not to heap any more crap on the editors -- I think they do a reasonably good job considering they have people like you to contend with.
And I should have mentioned unmannedspaceflight.org and planetary.org/blog/
The Mars Science Laboratory is slated for launch in 2009.
You can see daily images and weekly updates about both rovers on the excellent official site. If you'll forgive the plug, you can also keep up with all the planetary probes on my (non-commerical) site: ridingwithrobots.org.
Here you go: http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/hirise
You can see the originals, as the New Horizons team posts them, here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/. If you're interested in following the many space probes that are active right now at Venus, Mars and Saturn, you can also keep up with all of them at ridingwithrobots.org.
Exactly. I think it's a lot of fun to watch such a basic piece of information - 'where is the edge of the solar system, anyway? - in the process of being discovered.
The chief scientist for the Voyager mission told me a couple of weeks ago that he guesses Voyager 1 is more like 10 years away from the heliopause, and talked at some length about the exploration of the solar system's boundaries. You can hear the conversation in this podcast.
The interesting part of this data is not the mere presence of liquid methane, but the imagery that appears to show entire lakes. Before the Huygens probe landed, many hoped it would see such lakes - or even splash down in one (see this pre-landing article from the ESA, for example). While some evidence suggests Huygens' touch-down point may have once been covered by liquid, the lander didn't see any lakes or oceans directly. So these latest findings just make the overall nature of Titan's 'hydrologic' system more visible. It seems like each pass by Titan that Cassini makes fleshes out the picture a little more.
I tossed off that phrase maybe a little too casually as a figure of speech, but certainly the people on the project have been working overtime. Some background here.
Unmannedspaceflight is a fantastic site. Anyone interested in the topic will also want to check out Riding with Robots, which offers free widgets and screen savers that download the latest probe imagery.
That's an interesting observation. I don't know if there was ever life on Mars before, but there is now (at least in proxy). That rover is probably the only thing moving on that plain, perhaps ever. It reminds me of the end of The Martian Chronicles, when the family looks into the canal to see the Martians, and their own reflections look back at them.
It does: "New Spectrometer Begins Its Global Map of Mars"
They tried. It crashed. They may try again. Meanwhile, the rovers have to go to the equatorial region of the planet because they're powered by solar cells that require strong sunlight. And, while there is probably no life on the surface now, exposed layers of rock might yield clues about past life, if it ever existed.
I've often had that same thought.
I can't imagine how you'd pick up the faint signal (as Rude Turnip mentioned) - but you really don't have since NASA does what I think is an amazing job in providing all the data once it's processed. Just for one example, see: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/ I have many other examples on this little site: http://www.billdunford.com/dsd