Mars Rover has managed to find a bit of sandy soil that didn't support its weight and is stuck in up to the axles. On the plus side the sandy stuff it is stuck in looked like interesting coloured sorted sands and so the geologists can have fun while the engineers try to figure out how to get the thing back out of this tank trap.
Colour pictures and other info online at:
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(follow the link for lodged in Martian soil)
It looks similar to some terrestrial wind sorted desert soils.
Political babble... let's have a closer look: First you can get - for about 10 $ or less - little remote controlled cars in the market here, next to the vegetables, made in China.
Maybe those wont run on mars, as batteries are cold, bur 4 sure NAH-SA could beam up enough power to control them over there. That brings nm to the essence of it.
Long time ago, when I was younger, Von Braun came up with a decent plan for a mars mission. Sending HUMANS.
Long time ago voyagers and pioneers were launched, with radio thermal generators as power source. Those last 20 years. Now 'faster cheaper better' is not really that, because if a mission lasts only
2 years, say on average, or less, then you have to send 10 to last that long. Multiply cheaper by 10, and it is very expensive. Now about 'faster', well it is not faster either, hey why not send a miniature ANT (nano tech should make that possible;e), and then claim you travelled
1 meter in 2 years?
What should have been, it seems, is a couple of big rovers, with normal big rubber? wheels, like the moon buggies for example, so _later_ (unfortunately) astron[a] uts could use these to get around.
Seems to me NAH-SA lost their soul when Von Braun was no more, like Apple when Jobs left, although that Jobs also has that tendency to make everything smaller and smaller, like he wants to make it small enough so he can take it along to heaven. I'v heard the last thing women ask for, is their hand bag... OK, but that is a different subject. Now about 'better': Of course it is not better as it is a political compromise, not looking for signs of life, but digging in the ground for water that we already know that is there from orbiting reconnaissance. Nothing there of interest, we KNOW life is there from the first Viking landers, those test were positive, but the religious leaders fear life elsewhere as it will make them redundant, just the idea that 'intelligence' maybe be universally present would make people look elsewhere, and end the control game the popes and khomeinis, and whatever have you, play. If that was not so then they would look at the cosmos as a way to spread the gospel. So, not faster: we are still stuck on earth since the moon landings, not cheaper: ISS and shuttle are at most a tourist attraction, and have nothing to show in the form or profits, and not better as toy cars are very limited as far as usability goes for future generations. Stuck in the sand you can practice here on earth too.
You get what you pay for. Space qualified hardware has to withstand an extreme mechanical stress environment during launch, a period in cold hard vacuum and then still work afterwards.
Several people have come up with plans to send humans. You could do it provided you don't want to bring them back safely again, and are prepared to accept the risk that they get fried by a solar flare on the way. If it was done today it would be more as a variant of "Big Brother" style edutainment rather than for the science. The long period of weightlessness leaves you with astronauts who have to be stretchered out of the landing vehicle. It won't be quite so bad on Mars but it is unlikely that the intrepid travellers could do much when they arrived.
OTOH robots provided they get a soft landing at the end are able to survive with minimal creature comforts on the journey. Unfortunnately Mars has a reputation for hard landings. Including the one caused by Imperial vs metric units mixups.
Parts of faster better cheaper are right on the nail. There is no point at all in using massive resources to build something that is already obsolete by the time it launches. The delays on the HST launch meant that the cameras on it had been surpassed by newer ground based CCD kit before the thing even flew.
It also depends whether you can find useful things to do for 10 years. Having a reliable framework that you can hang different experiments onto and send them off to test at different locations has merit.
The weight factor makes interplanetary travel expensive.
They certainly lost their best rocket designer. Nothing after his era comes close to the majesty of the Saturn V booster.
Where do you get that idea from. Several of the planned experiments in play and planned are specifically to look for signs of life using isotopically marked likely redox food species.
The Viking landers results were at best ambiguous and most likely the results of peroxides and perchlorates in the Martian soil. The latter pose the interesting possibility of liquid water existing at low temperatures and pressures in the Martian subsoil. It isn't clear if any organic life as we know it could exist in an oxidising environment.
And not even any good for science. Most of the stuff done on it would not score well at a high school science fair.
They are working on it and may have a solution. Robotic space exploration is the way forward unless and until we run into something that is too tricky for our robotics to handle. Humans are just too fragile and clumsy in space when compared to machines.
The Mars probes are a good example of how to do space exploration. I would like to see more probes go to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn where there are environments that may harbour liquid water and the various chemicals that we think are needed for life to get started.
On a sunny day (Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:01:40 +0100) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :
The goal should be: make human settlements on other planets. If Columbus had send only unmanned probes, then the US would still be bare land with indian tribes.
I would like to see a manned mission make a settlement there, powered by nuclear energy. But if you say 'nuclear' the greens will vote against it, obstruct the launch site, bomb the Saturns, what not. So to speak.
I would also like to see a probe with *nuclear* propulsion (Vasimir?) just going under constant acceleration of 1 G to see how fast we can go before Einstein rolls over.
But then, only necessity will make it all happen. And if not, then we (humanity) are doomed, as one day the sun will go out, and this planet will be a place where we can no longer live.
OK, maybe by that time we can send some DNA to the stars, to seed other planets, maybe that is how we came about in the first place, dunno, more likely life is everywhere.
Nah-SA, with its ever changing targets because of politics, will likely not lead. By the time the US lands on mars there will be Chinese restaurants there, and they will have to bring plenty of dollars too as the dollar wont be worth much because of inflation. A Chinese meal would be very expensive, but it would save then carrying that weight... Ah, I see the strategy now ;-)
You cannot achieve this goal by just wishing it to be true.
The dispossessed Indian tribes might view that as an improvement.
nuclear
The current launch vehicles would struggle to move enough mass into the transfer orbit assuming that you intended to feed your astronauts on their journey. Robotics needs no food, air, water or creature comforts.
site,
They did get a bit upset the last time a nuclear powered satellite used Earth flyby to gain speed.
going under
over.
Einstein will not roll over. ISTR at 1g acceleration it takes about 25 years each way to the centre of the galaxy in the rest frame of the spaceship but a great deal longer in our stationary frame of reference. The vehicle would be redshifted beyond our observational methods for most of its trip (probably before it reached c/10).
We don't have too much bother accelerating clumps of charged particles up to insane energies using relativistic dynamics calculations. The rules of the game even allow cunning soliton pulses to stay in shape.
GPS would fail to work if Einsteins GR & SR were inaccurate.
We will be in trouble long before the sun goes out. It necessarily gets brighter with increasing time on the scale of billions of years and so we are in trouble once it starts to boil the equatorial seas. A long while off yet before we have to worry about that.
planets,
We have already done that accidentally. Viable bacterial spores were brought back from the moon lander that Apollo visited. I expect Voyager probes are similarly endowed.
lead.
It was politics or rather a proxy for the Cold War that put men on the moon. NASA was the mechanism by which it was delivered.
I hope they do go. It would be good to have a new series of Moon missions - and bring back a couple of bits of real Apollo hardware to beat the living daylights out of the conspiracy nutters with a piece.
weight...
Space exploration to colonise other planets will be so expensive that onbly a global collaborative effort will stand any chance of success. Looking at the ISS as an early attempt I am not all that optimistic.
No small part of that is what is usable for terrestrial conditions and what is qualified/proven for space conditions, including vacuum (heat management issues), weight/mass, vibration/shock, temperature range, radiation of various kinds, and so on. The very testing itself multiplies costs by 10 to 1000 times. Moreover the fanciest ground based telescopes are often only barely matching ordinary results from HST because of the issues with earth's atmosphere. I will grant they do occasionally do better.
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HST has been doing useful things for 15 years, is your car that old? If not why?
astron[a]
there
I think that still presumes that other worldly species will be very similar to earth bound species. This may not be the case.
You have to recall that the time when the HST was designed and built coincided with an explosion in the availability of ever larger and ever more sensitive CCD arrays to the ground based professional astronomical community. The HST was sat under wraps for quite a while on the ground waiting for the Shuttle to be safe to do a launch. And then when it was put into orbit a systematic error in the mirror figuring left it myopic for 3 years until the COSTAR had been designed and fitted.
I am not a student any more. ISTR in those days my car was roughly 15 y.o.
Please don't interpret what I have posted as an attack on the HST. It is one of the most useful scientific instruments of all time and has made a huge contribution to our knowledge. It has done very well to last this long and with a bit of luck it will remain in service for a good while yet following the recent service mission to replace worn out components.
The new IR Herschel telescope is just coming onstream so additional wavelengths become accessible at high resolution with that. I wish it a long life too.
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I think Chandra is even more stunning as I know how hard Xrays are to focus at high resolution.
Not really. The assumptions that go into these sorts of experiments now are that life will either use light to store chemical energy and/or use some redox reaction to do work.
Early ones like Viking were a bit too prone to ambiguous or false positive results with inorganic oxidants like perchlorates and peroxides which are thought to be present in Martian soils. Isotopic markers allow a mass spec to distinguish life from inorganic reactions - at least on a good day.
The same method can also distinguish between C3 and C4 photosynthesis (a lot of work done on that to catch people adulterating wine with cheap sugars).
My dad was on the failure analysis team that discovered that once again a Proxmire cost cutter cut the 64-bit mirror testing that would have prevented the problem followed by a Proxmire "whistle-blower" that massively publicized the fault but not the cause. The whole boondoggle was quite signature of the times.
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They are not so much focusing them as doing something different made possible by computational power. Rather similar to some gamma ray medical imagers.
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Experiments?? More likely gedanken.
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As more data comes in we all find out what is what.
ISTR the spare (unused) mirror was correctly figured. And that it was their obsession with a very sophisticated null tester that caused the problem. A tiny defect in its assembly skewed the wavefront error.
The systematic error in the main mirror was so gross that a simple amateur mirror makers test with a candle, pinhole and two razor blades would easily have identified the fault. They were fixated on a very high precision method and made the mirror to precisely the wrong shape with an incredibly smooth polished surface. One of the finest surfaces ever made. The failing was relying on a single test methodology and believing it to be infallible.
I know the people who determined the mirrors wavefront error from the out of focus image sets. Using technology and software borrowed from the big dish at Jodrell Bank (which also has to look after its figure).
No. It is a true grazing incidence Iridium coated Wolter type 1 X-ray focusing telescope. It is a stunning achievement especially the detail in the crab nebula. I worked on data reduction for some of the old shadow mask designs used for even higher energies a long time ago.
Their movie of the Crab nebula pulsar is simply amazing both for its fine angular detail and sensitivity.
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Details of the mirror assembly used in Chandra and its predicted and measured psf are online at:
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They are designing space qualified MS units to look for metabolic products of the most likely substrates H, C, N, S, O.
The point here is that sending robots will get the job done. People are messy fragile things that break far too easily in outer space. They are also much harder to sterilise before sending to new worlds that might already contain novel ecosystems.
Not so. At least i have word from people that were actually there. You may know of something of mirror testing methods, but i really doubt you not know the strengths and weakness of the ones used to test the HST mirror. I would have to study up to get to that level. Do you claim to know what those methods were and their strengths and weaknesses? I do not. But, i have been informed by people that were actually there.
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And it is here that you completely missed the point. There were three test methods each with flaws that the other methods did not have, so that 2 out of 3 choice could be used. Then a "cost cutter" took one away. Then another "cost cutter took another away. Leaving only the cheapest and most prone to failure method. Then the testing failed, in its characteristic way, and the "whistle blower" had a field day with the failure. Quite bluntly, politics interfering with engineering.
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(let alone at)
I will have to look this up. Sounds interesting.
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I actually agree with you here. Heck, we have not even been able to sterilize our robotic probes.
The one PerkinElmer were obliged by NASA to have Kodak make as risk mitigation for the new method of construction that they were using. NASA wanted to have a choice of two mirrors. They chose PEs as smoothest and on paper at least the most precisely manufactured. See for example:
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p 3-4 para 2.
I don't know what became of the spare.
Sadly yes. The error was a gross systematic spherical aberration in the optical figure of nearly labmda/2. A skilled amateur would have picked it up with relative ease. Aspherical RC mirrors are more of a pain to check but it should have been obvious even with a relatively crude string and sealing wax tester. The other simpler PE test jigs showed something wrong but no-one acted on the information. That is made clear in the NASA report.
It is a long time ago now. But see the report above.
That isn't how I remember it. PE basically made a very sophisticated and novel null-tester jig and placed far too much faith in it. Two other simpler tests that hinted at a problem were ignored.
Budget and time constraints did curtail testing. On the plus side they kept the null tester as built safe so that it could be tested later.
It is fabulous. X-ray vision lets you see into some very interesting places where relativistic effects are non-trivial.
It really is a quite beautiful design!
I hope they can get it right before we send one to Europa.
Did it occur to anyone that the 2.2um error in Hubble's mirror is just about what's needed to properly focus looking down towards the ground? In other words, it looks like Hubble was sent up with a spy satellite reflector, instead of the intended astronomical one.
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