Cool video about Mars rover; landing tomorrow
By marcus Follow Sat, 4 Aug 2012, 10:34am 882 views 17 comments
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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/failure-to-reach-mars/
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Perhaps the Martians are not happy about these missions.
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Without much fanfare, the landing was a success !
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/aug/HQ_12-267_MSL_Curiosity_Lands.html
http://www.facebook.com/MarsCuriosity
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Mars Status update:
Guest are in town, the place is a dusty mess, LOL.
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Alameda, CA
I would like to point out on behalf of all the right-wingers on the board that Discovery is run by NASA, a government agency, and therefore can't possibly be a success. All government programs are wasteful and unsuccessful boondoggles by definition.
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I stayed up and watched, and was very happy of the NASA success. While I recognize NASA is full of bloat, it is ultimately one of the jewels of American advancement. My strongest criticism of Obama is precisely due to his ill-informed and rather unintelligent perspective on NASA and general space exploration. Very anti-progressive.
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Randy H says
Agreed on everything you just said.
I'm not familiar enough with the "Curiosty" mission to know whether it can be considered an engineering masterpiece (in terms of elegance), but based on the functionality alone, of what had to happen, as described in the video above, I'm blown away and very impressed that they pulled it off.
If we wanted to improve more in Math and science, why not invest way more in this type of technology. Isn't nearly everyone going to be proud to be an American when we have these kinds of successes ?
(whereas drone attacks might be pretty cool from an engineering perspective, but harder to be proud of - at least in many cases, for obvious reasons)
Have you seen this ?
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/insect-sized-spy-drone-robots-unveiled
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@marcus
I haven't seen that yet, no. Pretty cool in a very "it's a creepy time to be alive" sort of way.
Agree on everything you wrote above. We should all be proud of what's just been accomplished. One of my acid tests for separating real people from politicos is whether they're able to give credit where credit is due.
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Randy H says
What's anti-progressive about Obama when it comes to space exploration? That he presided over the ending of Shuttle that has been in the works for years? That they didn't try to force through Constellation when frankly support for Moon missions is just not there?
Frankly I don't know. Congress controls the budget. If Congress wanted us to build a moon base, they would fund it. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Much as I love and admire the Space Shuttle, it was time to retire it.
We can move on. More robotic exploration IMO is the way to go for now. Manned should stay in Earth orbit until we have man-rated VASIMR engines proven for the task. What I'd really like to see is rovers on every major rock. And about a half-dozen Keplers finding new solar systems.
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I don't get space exploration. What is the ROI of going to Mars?
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robertoaribas's website
Peter P says
funny, people asked the same about:
flight
columbus' voyage
marie curie's work
lasers
xrays
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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/curiositys-mt-sharp/
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Certainly rovers and autonomous probes are the rational, realistic way we'll end up exploring most of the solar system and beyond. But manned landings aren't just about the direct utility. They're about stirring the imagination of future generations and creating a culture of exploration and technological conquest. I think Kennedy put it best, "we do these things because they are hard".
Obama utterly fails to do anything to light the fires of scientific imagination. At least yet that I've seen, despite some early rhetoric on the subject. If he's serious about education like he claims, then the biggest PR for math, science, engineering and higher ed he could generate would be to use his bully pulpit to promote space exploration.
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@Peter
The ROI of the space program has been well documented. Derivative benefits make our rather meager investment in space exploration one of the better investments the US has ever made, right behind transportation infrastructure.
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Randy H says
I did like the Fisher Space Pen.
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Cool Video. It's like those engineers are part time game designers.
Peter P says
WE ARE DONE HERE.
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Randy H says
That's the typical justification used for a vastly more expensive and dangerous way to explore space. But rovers and autonomous probes have regularly received enough interest to crash NASA web sites whereas ISS and other manned mission related sites are barely visited by comparison. So, I wish people would stop giving the legacy aerospace industry's corporate line which is based upon statements from the recent generation of former astronauts, who of course were inspired by the early manned missions, as justification for manned missions which suck budgets dry at the expense of vastly more scientifically productive unmanned missions. Sophisticated robots with "eyes" inspire kids, too. Unmanned probes also develop extremely useful technologies for us here on Earth like robotics and artificial intelligence instead of zero-g toilets.
Here's a bit on the comparative scientific value of manned vs unmanned missions:
"Critics have long rounded on the station's record for science. Judged solely by the number of papers published, the [$150 billion] ISS certainly seems poor value: according to Christopher King, an analyst at Thomson Reuters's Web of Science database, research on the station has generated about 3,100 papers since 1998. The Hubble Space Telescope, meanwhile, has produced more than 11,300 papers in its 21 years, yet it cost less than one-tenth of the price of the space station. Even the $150 million Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, designed to measure the cosmic microwave background, has generated 5,100 papers in just over a decade."