As you all know last night the Mars rover Curiosity landed successfully. Here’s a picture of the 3 rovers all together sent to me last year by one of the NASA scientists. Click image to enbiggen.
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What an outstanding achievement.
I watched the nearly horizontal final approach of Curiosity and the deployment of the chute and the sky crane.
Well, I didn’t actually see it, I saw the computer simulation that was tied to the telemetry relayed by Odyssey.
Kudos and congratulations to the team of stupid slaves at JPL.
A remarkable endeavor that deserves recognition, unlike the sports show at the Olympics.
way cool indeed.
Finding ANY form of life or evidence of it would cause the religo-fundies to :
(1) Go crazy
(2) Go crazy and deny it
(3) Go crazy and call it contamination
(4) All the above
Perhaps we will find intelligent life on Mars and we will be able to observe the inner workings of intelligence and try to mimic the effect.
We could then take a shortcut through evolution and achieve intelligence in say, 300,000 years or less.
The magic man that lives on a mountain might get angry that mankind tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and stamp his foot and throw a fit, but there is a good probability we may survive his temper tantrums.
Your assuming we would be intelligent enough to recognize an intelligent life form.
“So long and thanks for all the fish”
Actually, they already have teams in place to deny it.*
(Sort of like the politicians… Which if you look at it is exactly what relogions are; built on bluster and bullshit to pull in the punters.)
*) That’s why some people don’t believe we’ve ever even reached the moon.
I agree.
Finding any verifiable signs of alien life I believe will shake the church’s house of cards.
While I find it unlikely they would find anything, this landing is very significant in terms of where they landed and the advance capabilities of this robot.
Thank you Pres Obama for this significant accomplishment on your watch ! I’m not surprised if he had a hand in navigating this thing down with the presidential joystick.
Oh brother…..
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/goes_to_eleven.jpg
I’m not surprised if he had a hand in navigating this thing down with the presidential joystick.
Good punch line.
That ought to get the nigger haters and fundies all balled up inside and ready to explode in a fit of acrimonious vernacular.
There is no way that life here on earth was created by accident or by trial and error. Chaos only begits chaos. No matter how far you go no one or nothing can create something from nothing, but only GOD can. You can qoute the big bang theory all you want but it had to start with something, where did that something come from?
Cool Pic. Thx.
I think it was faked – look at the shadows, and why are their no stars in the background, and ….
And that big blue guy? Definitely not Mars.
We landed a man on Mars? Cool!
Actually, the state of the art of robotics is reaching a point in evolution where we may not need human explorers on far planets.
Humans are subject to enormous risk and danger, whereas an intelligent rover is expendable if an unforeseen crisis occurs.
Robots are easier to train and don’t have psychological issues and emotional deficits to overcome during the long and tedious trip to a far planet.
I doubt a human will ever set foot on Mars in this century because it will not be necessary.
I hope to be reincarnated in a thousand years to see the colonization of Mars, but that is my imagination running away with me.
And how exactly does a brave handsome pioneering robot then get elected to congress?
Good idea. Robots in Congress.
They can be programmed to do their job.
Have really nice fake hair.
Left to right which rover is which ?
This grouping of two test rovers and a flight spare provides a graphic comparison of three generations of Mars rovers developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The setting is JPL’s Mars Yard testing area.
Front and center is the flight spare for the first Mars rover, Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. On the left is a Mars Exploration Rover Project test rover that is a working sibling to Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004. On the right is a Mars Science Laboratory test rover the size of that project’s Mars rover, Curiosity, which is on course for landing on Mars in August 2012.
Sojourner and its flight spare, named Marie Curie, are 2 feet (65 centimeters) long. The Mars Exploration Rover Project’s rover, including the “Surface System Test Bed” rover in this photo, are 5.2 feet (1.6 meters) long. The Mars Science Laboratory Project’s Curiosity rover and “Vehicle System Test Bed” rover, on the right, are 10 feet (3 meters) long.
Sojourner, Spirit/Opportunity, Curiosity
Smartass.
I was well worth staying up ’till 02:00 watching Curiosity nail the landing better than Gaby Douglas at the olympics (degree of difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10, about a bazillion. 🙂
Technically, a bazillion is not definable. 🙂
But yes, the odds of failure were enormous.
I jumped up from my recliner and screamed like a girl when the touchdown and first image was confirmed.
It was better than sex. Well, almost. 🙂
Darn tooting. 🙂
Stayed up too … it was quite the spectacle!!!
Surprised the Banksters let them spend the 2.8 billion … a drop in the TARP/bailout bucket.
I read somewhere that the US military’s annual Air Conditioning budget alone exceeds NASA’s overall annual budget. Sick.
Awesome space achievement …. looking forward to the pics and discoveries.
Congrats to all involved.
The US spend on AC in afghanistan is greater than Nasa’s budget.
Apparently some rocket scientists suggest that perhaps they could fit insulation to tents in the desert – but that’s green commie liberal eco talk
It is tragic that religious fanatics feel the need to kill people to prove that their delusion is real to them.
If the human race could expend 1/10 of the energy and resources that go into warfare and political bickering on the space program instead, our planet would be safer and a more pleasant environment.
I know. I am dreaming.
We must be in the same dream. America is tooled up to make either weapons or peaceful endeavours. I was lucky enough to have machined at least some peaceful parts. The Hubble telescope was one, and the space shuttle was another. Remember I only made one item in a thousand needed for the projects.
Unfortunately most of the parts we made were for military weapons or aircraft. Big money in the military industrial complex. Not for the machinists but for the shop owners.
Both the Shuttle and HST were originally military projects or spin-offs from military.
The shuttle’s problems were mostly due to the airforce’s requirements and HST was just a Keyhole with better instruments
It’s nuke power so that alone makes the Rover way awesome! Go hi-gain antennas, we want more pictures!
well done! Bravo!!! Nice to know the US can still on ocassion hit one out of the park….
Cheers!!!
Those rims on Curiosity are wicked looking. They appear to be machined from a billet. I wonder if any rim manufactures will machine some NASA Curiosity rims as a novelty for space nuts like myself. On second look the hubs appear to be some sort of spring and not solid all the way around the perimeter. Maybe to help the rover’s wheels absorb shocks on it’s journey.
Its partly to let sand flow out of the wheels partly to give some extra grab to the tread, partly to give the wheels some spring-loaded deformability. (With all NASA’s budgets woes, you know that there is nothing on the craft that is purely single purpose. 🙂 )
I do wonder what the “real gain” is/can be from this mission.
To find life?…. or the remains of it? //// Seems rather silly to me. Would much rather be goal/self directed: just assume the answer we want…. and what possible difference does life or no life on Mars even make? …. if you can imagine otherwise?
Religion is irrelevant.
Religion was born on the bedrock that Earth was all there was, the center and be-all of the universe. Now we walk on the Moon and land machines on Mars. What does Religion do? Ban homosexuals, genetic engineering, evolution theory, and thinking for oneself.
That will be 10% of what you made this year.
Thank you.
If anything good results, Obama will claim the credit.
If anything bad happens, Obama will blame BUSH.
Jim–as Obama did not cancel the project, why should he not get credit or blame as per custom whereas in fact he and Bush have practically nothing to do with this subject one way or the other?
As you filter your world thru your political prism, how do I know you are a “thinking republican?”
Ha, ha.
Offered Science – he wants to shit on it.
The Plutocracy marches on, over the bodies of the unthinking easily led electorate.
Silly Hooman.
Ha! Sounds like you when you make an appeal to authority based on a consensus even in the absence of the scientific method. 🙂
Bush is an idiot and everybody knows it.
Dimwits that don’t remember the sequence of events that led up to the financial crisis of 2008 are likely to insist that Obama was at the helm when TARP was initiated.
Not that I agree with the policies of the Obama administration, but he did enter office with a handicap, and that was 8 years of the Bush administration.
Hey now be nice, Bush Jr. entered with a handicap, he was Bush Jr.
Housing problems started in the 1970s under the Carter Administration and every president since then has been part of the problem (along with Congress).
So Obama inherits a bonfire of a problem and throws gas on it to put it out. In doing so, he reminds everyone to look at where we started so that he can take no responsibility for the mess he’s compounded.
This is the same guy who has outspent Bush Jr.’s 8 years of spending in only 2 years. This is the same guy who guaranteed unemployment would drop to ~ 6% after the Stimulus Plan was put in place. This is the same guy who has cost tax payers $178k for every job created / saved under the Stimulus Plan. This is the same guy who promised transparent government but organized his health care plan behind closed doors. This is the same guy who has spent millions of dollars trying to keep his college records sealed from the public. This is the same guy who only saved GM Delphi employees entire pensions if they were members of the UAW. Obama’s got lots of handicaps.
But you choose to see what you want to see.
I admit saying it would probably make a small radioactive crater on Mars, and which would be mankind’s only enduring legacy. My cat agreed with me.
That was a good probability, but they pulled it off in spite of the odds.
It almost makes me feel like there must be a God.
Key statement word, “almost”.
Will the Curiosity rover have the same fate.
http://xkcd.com/695/
In a thousand years the first Chinese colonists will arrive on Mars and discover our abandoned rovers and wonder how they got there.
Its good to see that they didn’t mix their English and Metric systems on this one.
Just keep that damn contraption away from my feline friend.
They don’t really have 9 lives.
$4 billion to put legos on Mars. Didn’t Eisenhower say something about government policy being hijacked by a technological scientific elite?
The sticker price, icluding delivery, was 2.6 not 4. The TSA spent $11 billion last year keeping shampoo off planes.
Can you get those at Best Buy?
Costco.
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