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NASA's Mars Science Laboratory |OT| 2,000 Pounds of Science!

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V

verbum

Member
Quazar said:
Has this been posted here yet? From Neil deGrasse Tyson's facebook

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Censored by NASA: The actual first image taken by the Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars.

558275_4385171666995_1844775119_n.jpg
Click to expand...

So the aliens left their floor lamp behind?
 
N

Neuromancer

Member
Smiles and Cries said:
have you guys seen CNN's front page? damn I am not even going to read that story the title is upsetting enough

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/07/us/mars-unmanned-versus-manned-exploration/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
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It's actually a halfway decent article despite the dumb title and the needless quoting of an internet moron.

Here I picked out the good bits:

In a sense, Curiosity is performing a scouting mission for a manned U.S. mission to Mars that President Barack Obama predicts will happen in his lifetime.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden gets even more specific: Manned missions to Mars are at least 18 years away -- sometime in the 2030s.

But first, mission planners need more information about the Martian surface so they can choose the best landing sites.

"We don't want astronauts to be surprised," says (Curiosity team member James) Bell. Robot missions, such as Surveyor, preceded the Apollo moon landings, and these Martian probes are performing similar tasks.

Putting a monetary value on space exploration is impossible, experts say, because there are too many unanswered questions, such as whether Mars, the moon or asteroids hold precious minerals, water and cheap energy resources that could be mined and brought back to Earth.

"The reason to send humans will be because we have to," Bell says. "If some things can be done by robots, they should be done by robots. But sending a drill rig to Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa to tap into an aquifer that may have living organisms in it -- those kinds of things will require people."

Then there's the unknown value of newly discovered knowledge. Scientists want to know what Mars can tell us about our own planet's climate and geology. That knowledge, experts say, could help solve difficult environmental problems on Earth.

"It's human nature to explore," says Bell. "By going to difficult or dangerous places, we carry the rest of our species along with us. These stories become part of part of our culture, part of our heritage, part of our shared need to explore the worlds around us. it's a human endeavor that is part science, part inspiration."

By the way, Curiosity has fostered jobs, says NASA; more than 7,000 people have worked on the project across 31 states.
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But robot missions are just stepping stones to what many experts say is a foregone conclusion.

"Humans are going to live on Mars in the president's expected lifetime," says commercial space consultant Charles Miller, a former NASA executive. "It will happen as a partnership between U.S. entrepreneurs and private industry and NASA."
Click to expand...
 
Forsete

Forsete

Member
maquiladora said:
They said that later they are going to increase the bandwidth to get to around 2mb per second if they can with one of the satellites, can't remember which.
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2 Megabytes?

Faster than my connection, 1.8Megabytes per second.

Good job NASA. :p

Edit: Ah, megabit. Still not bad, faster than my first ADSL connection which was 512kbit. Or who can forget 33.6kbits? ;)
 
A

asa

Member
What's funny about all those "X costs so much" pictures/comments, is that they completely ignore the fact that the money spent always stays on earth, not a penny is wasted.
 
C

CFMOORE!

Member
i know all the kickstart NASA stuff is half in jest, but, can the agency actually accept a donation like one that were to come from something like kickstarter or an insane billionaire who wants to give to science? i get they're a gov't agency so there is red tape and all, but I can see how worldwide, people could probably make a difference in their funding if such ways of injecting money into them were possible. take NASA public!
 
K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
asa said:
What's funny about all those "X costs so much" pictures/comments, is that they completely ignore the fact that the money spent always stays on earth, not a penny is wasted.
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Yep. That's the hilariously sad thing about that attitude. People act like the money itself is being shot off into space. It's not like so many people are employed, so much industry is served and grown, by pushing technological envelopes to build interplanetary rocket cranes.

I guess it's the result of so many having an opinion about economics and spending without having a clue about how those things actually work. At best, it seems many people just have a series of disconnected sound bites of which they understand not the context.
 
O

owlbeak

Member
CFMOORE! said:
i know all the kickstart NASA stuff is half in jest, but, can the agency actually accept a donation like one that were to come from something like kickstarter or an insane billionaire who wants to give to science? i get they're a gov't agency so there is red tape and all, but I can see how worldwide, people could probably make a difference in their funding if such ways of injecting money into them were possible. take NASA public!
Click to expand...
Sadly, since it's a government organization I don't believe you are allowed to donate. All you can do is pay more on your taxes and hope that some of that extra makes it their way. (LOL)
 
LightofRohan

LightofRohan

Member
Zebra said:
$100 billion? :lol

In my dreams.

We could have 50 rovers running around all at once with that kind of budget.
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We could Battle Rovers on Mars... ANYTHING GOES! Arm them w/ nukes, who cares!

Oh god, I want this to happen.

Izayoi said:
In 20 years we might be doing one-way trips, but return trips won't start happening for another 50+ at this rate.
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Could you imagine? Being so pumped up to do it. 2 weeks into it, "Hey guys... can I come home now?"
 
U

Utako

Banned
speculawyer said:
Not much to hear . . . just the wind of a thin atmosphere. Someone could synthesize that and add it to the video. I guess the whirring of the motors should be added as well but it is not very interesting.
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Still, 1080p video from the surface of Mars would be unbelievably cool.
 
O

owlbeak

Member
fallout said:
So, that's about 700 m by 415 m? Seems a little too small, but maybe not.
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Edit : Nevermind, no that scale is correct for the JPG. Total scale of the image is around 938.34 x 558.48 meters (3078.5ft x 1832ft for us Americans), according to the scale they give. HiRISE scientist said the distance from MSL to the heatshield was something like 615 meters, so that scale seems correct.
 
F

fallout

Member
birdcity said:
Edit : Nevermind, no that scale is correct for the JPG. Total scale of the image is around 938.34 x 558.48 meters (3078.5ft x 1832ft for us Americans), according to the scale they give. HiRISE scientist said the distance from MSL to the heatshield was something like 615 meters, so that scale seems correct.
Click to expand...
Very cool, thanks. Interesting that the sky crane is only a few hundred metres away.

I'm assuming that the angle of descent kind of follows a line from the heatshield toward the parachute backshell.
 
M

Monty Mole

Member
Darknessbear said:
Keeps gettin' better doesn't it.

I hate how so many people take FUCKING SPACE so lightly. I'd gladly donate a chunk of my pay check every week to NASA or take a 50% tax increase to help fund their missions. I know people aren't as enthusiastic as me, but come on! At least be encouraging.

Can we make a goddam kickstarter for them yet?
Click to expand...

I think people need to be forced to watch Brian Cox's Wonders of the Solar System / Universe. Then they'll realise just how intrigued they should be about what's out there.

With so many people living in cities these days, they don't even get to see the stars. They don't get to look up and wonder what's out there. People are so caught up in their own daily troubles that they don't see any further than their own little world.

I'd imagine stress and depression would be lower if people realised just how trivial their problems are in the grand scale of the universe. Somehow when I learn more and more about what's out there, and how completely vast it is, my problems never seem so big. I'm just a tiny microscopic blip in a potentially infinite universe. That actually makes me feel better, not worse. I can't help but wonder what's out there and I can't thank the US and NASA enough for all the research they do in this area.

EDIT: Another problem with "space" is it's called "space". The uninformed just think it's a bunch of rocks floating around in nothingness. What they don't seem to properly understand is that Earth itself is one of those very rocks floating around in nothingness. And there's billions of stars with billions of planets floating about them. How can people not be intrigued about what's out there? Not what might be out there, but what is out there?
 
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