SniperHunter
Banned
the book is also really good
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NASA's Mars Science Laboratory |OT| 2,000 Pounds of Science!
- Thread starter DrForester
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the book is also really good
I watched the series while reading the book. My body barely could handle all that Carl Sagan goodness.
I mean, I would recon Mars soil properties must be about the same as earth soil. To get something grow naturally on mars is impossible, to get earth plants to grow on mars soil inside a greenhouse/mars station would probably be totally doable.
ClosingADoor
Member
Wow. It's amazing we (as in humanity) flew a rocket there, deployed a satellite and are transmitting pictures like this over millions of kilometers. If you can't see the beauty in that or the use of that, you must be totally without any imagination...
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
I've mentioned before but NASA funding is not really a partisan issue. There are plenty of people on both sides that are for and against more funding. And likewise, there are people on all sides of the media with the same, differing viewpoints. I'm sure you could find articles similar on Fox and MSNBC. For example, MSNBC has many positive articles about the landing, but also only dedicated about 10 minutes of live coverage of the event before going back to some prison show. Fox stuck with it for about a half hour after landing. CNN also had much wider coverage than MSNBC, yet has stories like this on their front page.
Now imagine we had a worldwide space agency on that budget per citizen
That is some depressing shit. The forward march of the human race is being actively held back by not funding importan science like this.
Humans on Mars in less than a year, I'd guess.
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
orientalNoodle
Banned
I am interested in knowing the radiation level on the ground (there is an instrument for this i think). Mars is geologically dead and has no magnetic field to deflect the sun's solar wind. If we ever to colonized Mars. Living on the surface is pretty much impossible.
It's unclear. Originally we didn't find perchlorates and then we did. One of the things Curiosity will do is hopefully clear up the question of whether perchlorates are widely dispersed and at what levels.
Curiosity will also be measuring surface radiation.
I'm quite interested in the trip to 3 of Jupiter's moons (including Europa) they have planned for 2022 (won't arrive until like 2033, though).
Even if that goes well, at the rate of travel I'll be old as fuck or dead by the time they plan a second expedition anyway, though. I wish I could just peek into like a couple hundred years in the future to see where we were at in regards to space travel and such.
Even if that goes well, at the rate of travel I'll be old as fuck or dead by the time they plan a second expedition anyway, though. I wish I could just peek into like a couple hundred years in the future to see where we were at in regards to space travel and such.
astroturfing
Member
man, it drives me absolutely nuts that i probably won't live to see what's swimming in Europas vast oceans (or other moons that potentially have oceans, Enceladus etc).
it likely has more water than our blue planet, which is just goddamn amazing.
can you imagine that much water mass having NO life whatsoever? i can't.
If I were a betting man, I'd definitely bet money that the oceans of Europa are teeming with creatures.man, it drives me absolutely nuts that i probably won't live to see what's swimming in Europas vast oceans (or other moons that potentially have oceans, Enceladus etc).
it likely has more water than our blue planet, which is just goddamn amazing.
can you imagine that much water mass having NO life whatsoever? i can't.
man, it drives me absolutely nuts that i probably won't live to see what's swimming in Europas vast oceans (or other moons that potentially have oceans, Enceladus etc).
it likely has more water than our blue planet, which is just goddamn amazing.
can you imagine that much water mass having NO life whatsoever? i can't.
I'm pretty sure we were asked to leave it alone like 2 years ago.
astroturfing
Member
definitely. maybe just single-celled micro-organisms, but even still.. that would be the most amazing scientific discovery ever.
btw does anyone know how old exactly Europa is? (wikipedia fails me, wtf). has it had billions of years of time for life to develop, as earth has? i assume so. i'm confident that is more than enough time for life to spark into existance in such a water rich and energy rich (heat from tidal flexing) environment. it happened on earth fairly fast too.
goddamn i want to see manned submarines explore the hell out of that water world. imagine the things we could encounter there... maybe there are even some intelligent beings there :O probably not, but we have to make sure! to not at least check out what's there would be an insane notion.
hah, i only recently just watched 2010
great movie IMO.Curiosity landed in site 51:
For reference, here's the HiRISE picture of the landing site again:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2012/details/cut/landing_site_annotated.jpg
For reference, here's the HiRISE picture of the landing site again:
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2012/details/cut/landing_site_annotated.jpg
This pic is straight up sex. More like this please!
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
Apparently there are no plans to visit the sky-crane wreckage for photos, as there is likely some unused rocket fuel there and they don't want to go near it.
Ether_Snake
å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®å®
Isn't it possible that if we find life elsewhere in the solar system, it may have come from Earth after asteroid/meteor impacts?
Europa is much younger than earth and is still quite unstable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)
Not sure I'd want to live in a place that's as unstable as that - it even changes shape depending on the proximity to Jupiter. I'd say that perhaps the moon is a bit too watery.
SniperHunter
Banned
That's awesome! So far I have only seen the, "play blue dot" speech from his Cosmos television series. I love Carl Saga! BTW my dad gave me the book, it's the original/first print edition
astroturfing
Member
i believe so. the whole panspermia thing makes total sense to me.
it's also possible for example that Mars was the place in our solar system that had life first. then it spread to Earth via meteors. we could all be Martians.
worst case scenario for me would be finding life on Mars and realizing they are originally from Earth and that there is nothing particularly genetically interesting about them :/ would prove panspermia though.
Its weird because the seeding material was probably not much in such a scenario. So the pattern was Martian but its using earthly products. Its like designing something in the US and having it sent to China for manufacture.
N
NinjaFridge
Unconfirmed Member
I always thought that space should be a worldwide thing. Probably wouldn't happen though, too much cock waving to make it work.
astroturfing
Member
i noticed the bit about the surface being young yeah, but i assumed it just means the current surface. surely the whole moon is older than just 100 million years or so? my guess would be that it was formed "shortly" (in relative terms) after Jupiter, so it would have to be more than 2-3 billion years old. no idea when the oceans formed though..
and the changing shape thing, doesn't even the Earth change slightly in shape from the Moon's pull? probably so slightly that it is almost impossible to measure but still. too much tidal flexing is probably a bad thing for life though, i agree.
That's awesome! So far I have only seen the, "play blue dot" speech from his Cosmos television series. I love Carl Saga! BTW my dad gave me the book, it's the original/first print edition
Actually, that speech comes from the audiobook version of Pale Blue Dot which is also a great book.
You're really lucky, that version has a lot more images than mine.
Insane Metal
Member
Man, imagine if Curiosity finds out that actually, some millions or billions of years ago Mars was indeed covered with water (or at least had a good amount of it on the surface). That would drive many scientists nuts.
They are already pretty sure Mars had substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface a long time ago. They've found many mineral deposits that, as far as we know on Earth, only form in the presence of liquid water. They've also seen clear areas of water erosion along with dried river channels and deltas. They've also recently found a lot of water ice below the surface that melts during the Martian summer and sometimes seeps up to the surface. (That link takes you to a clip from the press conference where they announce this, with animations from HiRISE of water melting and running down a hillside. Very cool.)
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
There already is lots of evidence to suggest that Mars once had surface water. Currently the temp is too low and the atmosphere too thin to allow for liquid water on the surface, but there is evidence for frozen water at the caps and under the ground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars
Curiosity will only further build on the current evidence and is well equipped to possibly detect signs of past life.
man, it drives me absolutely nuts that i probably won't live to see what's swimming in Europas vast oceans (or other moons that potentially have oceans, Enceladus etc).
it likely has more water than our blue planet, which is just goddamn amazing.
can you imagine that much water mass having NO life whatsoever? i can't.
If its water , wouldn't it be frozen at those temps?
It could be ocean of liquid methane.
The surface is a layer of frozen water ice. Below the ice is a liquid ocean of water that is kept warm(er) by tidal forces from Jupiter and internal heat from the planet's geological activity.
This is why I'm very interested in what they find below the Arctic ice cap. It should give us an idea of what kind of life could develop on Europa.
They've found a lot of extremophiles in polar oceans that thrive off of small heat vents on the sea floor. It's very possible that the same thing is going on under the ice of Europa. Would be amazing to be able to get there and find out.
:-O
This is awesome. I've seen the panorama photo before, but not in this virtual panorama way. This is so much cooler.
wow. This is amazing.
ClovingWestbrook
Banned
So amazing. And yet so depressing at the same time. I want to personally experience what its like to step foot on another planet
From MSL site. Some of this is from this morning, so I'm not sure why they're going over it again almost 12 hours later, but it does outline plans for what we should hear about in the press conference tomorrow.
I'm interested to see what the radiation readings from the surface are like.
MagicWithEarvin
Member
Wow...
That's pretty amazing. I feel like I could almost reach out and touch it. How amazing it is to be able to sit here at my computer and view pictures of a planet that is hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
DrForester
Kills Photobucket
WX3
Member
WOW! Now that gives me a sense of what it coud be like to stand on the surface of the planet. Very cool, thanks for sharing!
Sax Russel
Banned
We should send a rover down through the Valles Marineris, imagine the views that could produce =O
Words fail me.
Absolutely stunning. And to think Curiosity's MastCam's have 3 times the resolution of the MERs.
I almost cried.
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