For us geeks: The Mars Science Laboratory has successfully landed and is producing images of Mars! The sky crane technique worked wonderfully and Curiosity is safe! By tomorrow there will be a hi-res panorama image of the Martian surface taken from Curiosity!
The raw data images can be found here (the site keeps crashing because literally, everyone in the world is on it!):
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/raw/ --------- For those who have not seen the landing features of this particular rover, I urge you to look up a video. The landing was hands down one of the craziest landings you could possibly think of! Many of the procedures never worked in Earth tests and there was a very small chance of a successful landing with this previously-unproven technology. On top of the landing differences, MSL is much larger than previous rovers and is capable of performing full scientific experiments!
So whats the point, at 2.4 billion dollars i'm sure there could have been better use with the money than sticking some stupid spacecrft on another planet, really, the pointy heads and pollies have no idea.
@ Steamrolling Stan: "So whats the point, at 2.4 billion dollars i'm sure there could have been better use with the money than sticking some stupid spacecrft on another planet, really, the pointy heads and pollies have no idea."
Well, NASA is a space agency...if it is anyone's job in the US, to stick spacecraft on other planets, it does kind of fall to them. Besides, what else do you do with a spacecraft? NASA's budget is the lowest it has been in my lifetime.
Mind you....I do wonder what kind of wonderful harps we'd have now if that money had gone to Suzuki...? ;-) ---------- www.myspace.com/markburness
Yeah, NASA is a big waste of money, always has been! Translation: Ignorance means not knowing something that you should know. It's a self selected choice beyond stupid.
Last Edited by on Aug 06, 2012 7:39 AM
"So whats the point, at 2.4 billion dollars i'm sure there could have been better use with the money than sticking some stupid spacecrft on another planet, really, the pointy heads and pollies have no idea."
Every dollar that is spent in NASA's budget returns around $7 to the United States economy through new product technology. I am sorry that you do not see the benefits of funding science but, they ARE there and HAVE BEEN there for quite some time.
NASA has become one of the most reliable investments the United States has. It is because of this that I do not fully understand your position.
BTW, am I a pointy head too? Or is that just for engineers?
Last Edited by on Aug 06, 2012 9:13 AM
NASA has taken unproven technology that failed tests miserably on Earth, and has placed its trust in human knowledge of physics and mathematics, and successfully landed a moving laboratory onto another planet. If you are not excited by this, then I don't know what to say. The amount of brainpower needed to accomplish this is enough to get myself excited, let alone the accomplishment.
@miles, this technology is truly amazing and of course there are many benefits along the way, my mindset is around the millions of homeless, disabled, less fortunate folk through no fault of thier own need the funds. I just cannot see the point in going to mars. (i often think my wife would fit in there however)
It's truly an amazing accomplishment. It's also truly amazing that it only took $2.4 billion to get a craft onto Mars. By that I mean, this country has spent A LOT more money in other areas which produced MUCH FEWER tangible results.
@ Stan - Many great undertakings, whether for defence, research, sport, entertainment eat up a lot of money that could better be used elsewhere. The (or, rather "a") government decides the desired way to spend our taxes, but there is nothing to stop you as an individual directing some of your cash to an organisation that you feel can help these people. What's $2.4bn divided by the population of the US? ~$6.85 (we'll assume the project took more than a year to plan)? If you directed a dollar a week that way, you'd be making an impact now, to someone who needs it. If the government took the decision to do that for you, it wouldn't be any more popular than giving it to a space agency, with a lot of folk.
Going to Mars now, in our time, would pretty much mean a slow death, if not life long problems to any astronaut who went...and made it back....but they'll still queue several times round the block to go! ;-) In centuries to come though, Mars will be an important place...we will need somewhere to put our garbage, when we run out of room here! ;-)
In the 15th century, when exploration was sea/land based (not that either of those jobs are "finished") no one in Europe saw the point in going to the Americas (excepting the first nations, French & the vikings who had already been/settled)...they just crashed into it on their way somewhere else! ;-)
Hooray for happy mistakes & the misappropriated funding used to make them! :-)
MW, this is truly amazing and just shows that the bar will and should be constantly raised. I am proud for these people that've put this together and I am disappointed that funding for these programs have been cut. And the fact that this society continues to fund obesity, lazy and down right bullshit excuses to grab tax dollars from hard working people discust's me.
His status could be an elaborate rouse. The bowtie says fellow geek but, the Big Daddy Cane pinky ring suggests otherwise. -----------
Actually, one of the heads of the MSL mission (Adam Steltzner) wears a black pompadour! Looks like a Blues or early rock buff.
Last Edited by on Aug 06, 2012 2:26 PM
@ Honkin' on Bobo - I don't see the relevance, or the link. Are you saying they sent a "white robot" to Mars...
Rocket scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock is frequent sight on British TV screens, giving us the lowdown on astronomy and space research...I'd guess she is even more excited about the Mars landing than I am...
...as perhaps are Reva K Williams PhD, Jeanette Epps PhD...I could go on...
You're living in the past. It's not 1969 anymore (though any excuse to listen to Gil Scott-Heron is always welcome), which is a relief for me, because if it were, I'd be wearing daipers! :-) ---------- www.myspace.com/markburness
Here is a picture of Curiosity (MSL) being compared to past rovers and a couple mortals. Note the massive size. That is one of the reasons the success of this mission was so unlikely and why the need for new landing procedures being created. MSL is a full blown experimental laboratory inside a moving vehicle on a distant planet, so heavy (literally and figuratively).
Of course, that is not actually Curiosity. MSL would never stain its wheels with petty Earth dirt!
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Steamrollin, lots of space technology makes things better here on Earth too though, and sometimes in very important ways. GPS technology is great for getting directions, but it can help ambulances find people at the other end of a 911 cellphone call. There are lots of hidden benefits like that. And at the macro level money isn't always something that you spend and then it's gone. When you create a whole new industry that industry pays taxes, which you can use in turn to fund more research AND things like homeless shelters.
Not all government spending gets really good returns, but some things, NASA being one of them, do. :)
Crikey! If all the money spent on 'defence' was spent on things more worthy, there would be no poverty, there would be more than enough food to go around, there would be far more wildlife and far less crime. Then, I guess there'd be no reason to sing the blues.
This is a truly remarkable feat. NASA and the space program, that take up maybe 1% of our budget, has been an inspiration to many young people and old, and the technology has paid us back. I do not often post here but find some of the negativity toward this to be made without knowledge of the returns we have gotten. Even without the tangible benefits, the need to explore has drive mankind for all of time.
Last Edited by on Aug 06, 2012 8:11 PM
@didjcripey, That video is chilling. The landing is just jaw-dropping (why I was on the edge of my seat all day Sunday and Monday morning). Flying saucer and sky crane?! WTF?!?!!? They did a great job with the suspense of that video.
I am a mechanical enginner during my day job. Outside of work, I enjoy music. Listening to and playing music works the other side, the right side, of my brain.
It is funny how so many people complain about the funding for our space program, but never gripe about the $154 million spent on the National Endowment of the Arts. Where else can american taxes go to waste on funding garbage like a photograph of Robert Mapplethorpe with a whip handle jammed up his ass. I really don't care what Robert does with that whip, just don't ask me to pay for it.
I agree with Noodles and Miles on the NASA discoveries that are part of our everyday life that we take for granted.
By the way, Mr. Mapplethorpe, I would rather look at photogrphs of the rocky terrain of Mars than the dirt road of Uranus...
Last Edited by on Aug 16, 2012 7:00 PM
It kills me to see complaining about the current space program being a waste of money. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had this generation of children growing up seeing Alan Shepard hitting golf balls on the moon and were like "hell yeah, we'll hit freakin' golf balls on the moon." It inspired a whole generation to excel in math and science. Now the NASA director says America can't do stuff alone. We need help. We need cooperation. Now, we can't even get people into space. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we had fire. We had determination. We had Werner Von Braun saying in the early 1960s, I can get you to the Moon by 1970 and Mars by 1975 and we could have done them BOTH. You can say a lot of bad stuff about Werner and they'd be true, but here was a guy who dreamed of space travel and while he was developing rockets to rain down on England, he was thinking of the moon - and he talked us into it when we figured out that's where the Russians were headed. After we beat the Russians to the moon - and the real reason we beat them there was not because the Soviets couldn't get there. It was because they were trying so hard for Venus, which turns out is like trying to land stuff in a vat of acid - by the time they figure this stuff out, we're planting flags on the moon. After that, we were like "we won. It's over now." We lost that fire. We gave up on the dream. The space program lost a lot of its appeal when we started sending scientists up there instead of balls-to-the-wall test and fighter pilots, when we tried to say it could be routine with the shuttle program - and there was nobody to have a space pissing match with. Everybody needs a nemesis to perform to their full potential. We did so much more when we had the Soviets to look over our shoulders at. We needed the Soviets to drive us, to give us that fire. Of course, I'm glad the wall came down. It was such a good thing. It's just that the Soviets drove us. We learn so much from space. How much mention of "greenhouse effect" did you see before the Russians started gathering data from Venus - and we realized that there had to be a reason Venus was hotter than Mercury.
Read Jules Vernes "From the Earth to the Moon" sometime. Pay attention to how he describes the moon. Egg shaped. That's right, egg shaped. Maybe an atmosphere on the far side. How did we figure out the moon wasn't egg-shaped? We went there.
You need inspirational science to inspire young people to study it.
Too much money? Hell, we haven't funded NASA enough since the early 1970s. ---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne
What some people forget is that the 2+ billion dollars spent on MSL was not shipped off to Mars but, was spent in the United States economy for US companies and workers. The raw materials that make up the entire rover cost very little but, the amount of man hours and labor is where a large amount of the costs go.
Here are a few select recent images brought to you by the many laborers of the United States:
These images were taken from the following website where the raw data images are released. Be sure to go through the "Sol" tabs to see all the images, and open the images that say "Full" or "Subframe," these will be good quality.
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