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Space

Hope for Mars Polar Lander? 129

Posted by emmett from the all-these-worlds-are-yours-except-europa dept.
Dave writes "According to this article at MSNBC, it looks like NASA might have received faint radio signals from the Mars Polar Lander which had been assumed lost." Don't get your hopes up on this one; the signal could have come from anywhere, and they're running tests now.
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Hope for Mars Polar Lander? More

Hope for Mars Polar Lander?

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  • Don't get your hopes up. It's probably just an alien or something.
  • Perhaps these 2 signals are Martians attempting to contact us for spare parts??

    Or perhaps the Martians are attempting to build our confidence so that we'll continue sending them "souvenirs".

    Last I heard, Mars Polar Lander was fetching quite a price on Mars' Ebay.

  • The question is not whether NASA succeeds more often than it fails, but whether it is more or less likely to succeed than private space agencies. Or, put another way, whether it costs more or less for the former to succeed than the latter.

    I don't know whether lots of cheap projects beats a few expensive ones (although I suspect it does), but one of the advantages of a free market in space exploration is that those agencies with the right answer win, and those agencies with the wrong answer either cease to exist or adjust their behavior.

    I would like to add that I am not a conservative, and I don't even know what Rush Limbaugh's opinion on NASA is, let alone mindlessly agree with it. My opinion is pretty clearly a minority on SlashDot, but unlike you, I won't ask those who disagree with me to "shut up."
  • Yes..

    However, this will help less people in the end than exploring space will.

    The technologies discovered as a result of space exploration alone have made much much for our economy than the money we spent on it:
    End result: More txable income, and more money that can potentially help these individuals.

    Putting it another way:
    Would you rather spend all of the gov'ts money on the homeless, etc now, or would you rather put money into the police, congress, etc so that society can be better prepared to do this later?

  • The article indicated they were looking for really faint signals amidst the background noise, and that it might take them several days. They should hook up with SETI!

    I for one would be really psyched if SETI popped up and told me it was going to process polar lander signals. At least we know it's out there somewhere.

  • Replying to a commment buried somewhere down below.. As far as I know, the signal is a UHF (400 MHz) very low power (just a few dB above the noise floor) narrow (a few Hz) tone that slowly moves about 50-100 Hz over a about a half hour time span. It could be of earth origin or from any number of other sources. In order to determine if it is from MPL, someone will need to calculate how much doppler shift would be expected from 1) the rotation of earth (this is easy, about 511 Hz, but changing), 2) the rotation of Mars (this is not so easy, because we don't know where on Mars the transmitter is, and that affects the doppler), and the relative motion of Earth and Mars (this is fairly easy) You match up the changes in the frequency of the received signal against the expected doppler changes from relative motion. If it is reasonably close, you are in good shape. If the frequency variations don't match what's expected, you have two choices: 1) It is some other source (most likely).. 2) It IS MPL, but the transmitter on Mars is drifting in frequency (it might, say due to temperature fluctuations, etc. Pathfinder's UHF transmitter frequenciess varied quite a bit over temp) Fortunately, the receiver at Stanford is locked to an atomic reference. You also need to eliminate the possibility that it is some other source (like an out of band (normally in the 300 MHz area) garage door opener that is slowly heating up in the sun, etc. etc.

  • Distributed computing has been around for 30 years now, and all these problems have been solved, you just have to know where to look and how to apply them. Most of them aren't easy to use in a client-server environment like d.net/SETI/ECDL, and so the solutions are of limited use.

    These solutions have been brought to the attention of distributed.net and others, but they find the solutions unacceptable, so continue to use other methods, which is their choice to make. I chose to move on instead.

    There is such a project called Cosm [mithral.com] already well underway to create a system like you describe.

    As for determining "worthy", that is a choice for the user to make, and noone else.

  • See, although that 750 Billion still equates to a great deal of money, stopping the building of weapons of war will not nessarly equate with a gain of 750 Billion for social aid.

    Money has no real value. Generally, every dollar in the economy correlates to something produced. Now, suppose we stop building the aforementioned weapons. Would 750 Billion dollars worth of crops magically spring up out of the ground? Would the infertile land of impoverished nations begin producing bountiful harvests? Of course not!

    If money only is representative of goods produced and labor, then a reduction in goods produced and labor (servicemen) would result in the same amount of money representing a smaller amount of 'actual wealth'. Inflation would rise and the any gains would be lost.

    Of course, that inflation would be checked by a 750 Billion dollar slowdown in the economy. Estimates say that there are 2 Million servicemen in the United States military (I don't have any global statistics, but I'm sure it is astronomical). Then there are the companies surviving on defense contracts (Lockheed Martin would be closing its doors (that's allot of high paid engineers hitting the streets)).

    Another thing to keep in mind is all of the technological advances that sprung out of military spending that have helped the world (Microwave ovens, rockets, GPS, interchangeable parts, aircraft, and. dare I say, computers). None of this would have existed were it not for military spending.

    Stopping world hunger (which, I presume, is what you are referring to when you say the world's problems (anyhow, it is by far the most immediate and fundamental) is a much too complicated battle than could be won by 'brute force' economics. It must be won by a delicate balancing act between diversification of resources and economics.

    Sadly, there is no 'magic bullet'.

  • As the world hovers on the brink of losing a multimillion dollar space exploration vehicle, a faint signal crackles through the radios at NASA. Dan Caldwell, head of Receiving Extremely Faint Radio Signals from Millions of Miles Away, sleeps heavily by his console. His dog, Lassie, however is instantly alert to the sound, and dutifully awakens her owner with a bark. "what's that, girl?" Dan says sleepily. "WOOF, Dammit" "What's that?" "TIMMV (Terrestrial Interstellar Martian Mission Vehicle) is stuck in a one mile deep, one mile across canyon that we managed to completely not see while we were surveying the martian landscape for optimal landing sites?" The dog lays back down and goes to sleep. Do we really want these people to handle our space exploration? sheesh...im going to bed.. Meanwhile, a group of echelon scientists are working around the clock to determine where Lassie learned such colorful language.

  • ...and Nasa listens... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @08:08PM (#1335738)
    *CRACKLE* *CRACKLE* *BZZZZZZZZZZT****
    *WIRRRRRRRRRRIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIRRR*
    *DRIBLE*
    Nasa Scientist: Hmm, wait a minute
    PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTT
    PHHHHT
    FFFFFF
    FFFFFURRRRR
    Nasa Scientist: Yes! Yes! Someone write down the sounds!
    FURRRRRSSSSS
    FURSSSSSST
    PPPPPEHH
    PPPPPOOO
    POOOOOOOO
    POOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
    POOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSTT
    *CRACKLE* *CRACKLE*
    Nasa Scientist: What did they say? WHAT DID THEY SAY?!?!?!
    2nd Nasa Scientist: Uh, he said: "First Post", sir.
    Nasa Scientist: Humm.

  • Kevin! Stop spoofing NASA!

    Bander
  • MAD SCIENTIST #1: Hey. I've got an idea
    MS #2: What's that
    MS #1: Let's fake the Mrs Lander signals!
    MS #2: Yeah! That sounds great! heeheehee
    *Mad scientists tweak a few buttons and turn a few dials*
    MS #1: HEY! LOOK! We ended up on slashdot! YAY!
    *Mad scientists turn off equipment*

    See, boys and girls, someday, you'll end up, in a VAN, DOWN BY THE RIVER! (apologies to Chris Farley, oh, wait, he isn't anymore)
    If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
  • It would be nice if they could really find this thing and get some useful info or something... :)

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • I wouldn't call it hope. If its a false signal, it still is lost/crashed. If its an extremely weak signal, it means that the antenna (and most likely other components) have been heavily damaged.

  • I thought they had given up hopes of listening to that mofo. Obviously, NASA is making every attempt to recover every bit of whatever they send out there. But hey, when everything costs $150 mil, then I would be trying everything I could, too.

    This whole Mars thing is great, because out of 10 projects sent there, only 1.5 have been unsuccessful. The 0.5 left would be classified as a "successful failure" but I wonder what the Polar Lander can do now.

    Still hoping our tax dollars don't go into Martian scrap metal...
  • the signal could have come from anywhere, and they're running tests now.

    my SETI@home was the one that found it! :)

  • So you mean its exactly like "Contact"?

    The one and (thankfully) only,

    LafinJack
  • I can't see WHY this didn't work. And hey if you were an alien and you saw a big thing flying out of the sky and then crash into the ground ... would you find that welcoming?

    Me either :-)

    Glad to see it might not have been a complete failure though

  • I'm pretty sure you'll see a bunch of small green guys jumping around on the Mars Polar Lander... That'd be cool!

  • Re:URL of the original JPL PR (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, that URL should read http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mpl000125.html [nasa.gov].
  • It seems that somebody at NASA saw that ZDNet commercial.

  • The correct link to the JPL press release (Score:3)

    by yuriwho ( 103805 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @08:30PM (#1335751)
    is here [nasa.gov]

  • Re:New SETI@home task? (Score:3)

    by Johnath ( 85825 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @08:35PM (#1335752) Homepage
    OTOH...

    I wonder how much support you could garner for a kind of meta-client. Write a basic framework that could handle any kind of idle-eater, and then let users decide which ones to run. Users could, for example, be provided with a list of potential interests (e.g. Internet Prime Search, Seti, NASA stuff like this, etc.) and just tickmark the ones they wouldn't mind doing.

    Let the client grab new processing modules for any task that can be modularized, and you turn the internet into an enormous, general purpose computer.

    Of course, the potential for abuse, especially through someone sending their own processing modules, masquerading as the server, would crop up. But if, for example, each module was gpg-signed, this wouldn't be such a problem.

    All I know is that this could really open up some incredible power to all sorts of research projects that just can't happen right now for lack of resources. I know *I* would download it.

    Johnath
  • This is OT, but the money that NASA spends is a small percentage of what the US government spends. If it helps ppl on Earth (and not those in the USA as you wish) then it is money well spent. But my main point is to hopefully put things in perspective.

    We just had a good storm here on the east coast of the US. The US government closed down in DC for Tuesday (and I believe for Wednesday). The total cost for the two day shutdown for the Washington,DC area is about $120M. You could practically send up another probe for that type of money.

  • In my opinion, there should be regulations to
    restrict interstellar subspace communications to a few designatede bandwidth.

    Dude, don't get the government involved. I can see it now:

    Your Rights Online: Senator McCain Proposes Ban on Interplanetary Space Porn.

    You know what they say about those censorship folks. Once the camel gets his nose in the tent...



  • The Stanford dish (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @08:40PM (#1335756) Homepage
    It's always good to hear that the big Stanford dish is being used again. It's had long periods of downtime. I'd noticed more activity up there recently when I was up that way on horseback. So that's what they're doing.

    Most of the world's big radio telescopes are booked up long in advance, but the Stanford dish is in too RF-noisy an area for serious radio astronomy. So it's available for special projects like this.

    They're trying again Wednesday. Stay tuned.

  • MODERATORS PLEASE TELL ROB TO SUE THESE MORONS (Score:3)

    by TheDeal ( 41885 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @08:40PM (#1335757)
    hey these guys are trying to get free advertising space... hey i have a place.. and you can sign up under me... and i make money off of u... and u can make money off of other people.. uhhh hu... if(UnitekTechnicalEducation == Troll) sue(UnitekTechnicalEducation);
  • Anyone else think they shouldn't have said anything till they knew they found the lander or not?

    I hope NASA finds the lander but I don't like press releases of "expectations are low", this might have the effect of an failure and would hurt NASA's PR, which isn't doing to well.

    I still want them to find the lander, just hope they do
  • I hate it.. i personified that little mars lander... and i want to hear from it. that poor machine.
  • Before people engage in all out attacks on the company mentioned in this spam, stop and think that they might not be responsible for it. It could be a disgruntled customer, ex-employeee or whatever. If you feel the need to complain, please try not to flame execessively. Since it was posted by an AC, there is no way to know exactly who did it.
  • It's using General Packet Radio Service as push medium for mirroring DeCSS source code.

    Mars needs opendvd.

  • Meta client (Score:3)

    by KMSelf ( 361 ) <karsten@linuxmafia.com> on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @09:30PM (#1335764) Homepage
    You mean like, say, VMWare [vmware.com]? Hell, isn't a virtual machine the ultimate meta client? Running, of course, a streamlined Linux OS. A Java VM is another option. Both take performance hits.

    I was brainstorming around this general idea a while ago. The general problems I came up with were:

    • Security of the host system.
    • Authentication of the client application.
    • Criteria for determining "worthy" projects.
    • Billing, accounting, or payment tie-ins.

    First off, distributed computing is very successful in some closed environments -- POW (pile of workstation) clusters in campus environments are common. A friend at a New Zealand biotech firm distributes Linux boot floppies. At the end of the "work" day, their Windows boxes are rebooted with this floppy installed, a Linux machine springs into place, and a gene sequencing client starts munching away -- the real work day. Similar schemes are pretty common.

    In a broader environment with less control the problem becomes tougher. The host machine needs to have some guarantee of security. The client should also be reasonably secure and non-spoofable. There needs to be authentication.

    In order to select for worthy (or billable) projects, some sort of voting scheme needs to b e implemented. If this is based on dollars or bill-backs, the small size of the individual contributions, with per-month CPU rental rates rating < $20 for new equipment (essentially the lease cost for hardware) -- means that this is not a way to get rich.

    Factor in latency, bandwidth, lossage, and storage factors. It's a complicated problem.

    This isn't to say it's not addressable. Distributed Net [distributed.net] appears to be actively researching several of these areas. It's quite possible that all that idle CPU time will one day be put to use. But not real soon now.

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Could be coming from anywhere? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, man. I know that means potentially crossed signals from earth based transmitters, but wouldn't it be great to accidentally stumble across signals from non-human intelligence while we were listening closely for our lost spacecraft? Is it just me, or does that strike anyone else as being a GREAT way for us to make first contact? Kinda poetic.
  • Even if they can't get all the science out of it, I really hope that the root cause of the failure can be determined. I'd hate to see NASA get any more beat up over this.
  • i'm probably just missing something... what are you talking about?

  • Good News, Bad News. (Score:3)

    by MrDarkguy ( 6594 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @09:50PM (#1335768) Homepage
    Bad news is: The signals aren't coming from the Mars Polar Lander.

    Worse news: All those SETI@Home processor cycles were for naught. The signal is from aliens.

    Even worse news: They're giving us 6 months to vacate before they blow up the planet.

    Good news: They've offered to return to the Mars Polar Lander!

  • Breaking news! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A group of Hackers in Europe cracked the CSS encryption used by the Polar Lander to communicate with NASA. They started sending the weak signals to NASA since they felt bad about another failed mission. NASA will be tracking these hackers down soon and bringing them to justice. If NASA doesn't bring them to justice we could see everyone start copying their own Polar Lander's (even though the cost is high).
  • You know, if someone had a bone to pick with "Unitek", faking an ad from them on a slashdot forum as an AC might be a great way to get a lot of people pissed off at them. I find that easier to believe than that someone is seriously posting ads on these forums. Both are possible, and both are pretty damn lame, the point is you should never assume anything, especially when ACs are involved.

  • Your Rights Online: Senator McCain Proposes Ban on Interplanetary Space Porn.

    I think this is one bill that no one could justifiably support... evryone knows how cool scantily-clad sci-fi chicks are!

    Sluggy goes to outer space... [sluggy.com]

  • What your talking about is already being done.

    http://cosm.mithral.com [mithral.com]

    COSM is what distributed.net was meant to be. Adam (Distributed.net founder!) left D.net so his work on cosm would continue unhindered.

    If your a programmer, go help them out. At least check out their webpage for more detailed information.
  • I guess after the Martian High Council finished examining it and determined it was harmless they put it in the trash disposal system to be left to rust on the planet surface. "...so THAT'S what the red button does!"

  • Hmmm...challenging data...like picking out a key...yep sounds like a job for...DISTRIBUTED.NET!

    Even better - put both SETI@home AND dnet onto it.... then we'll see who has the better client!
  • Not at all. I like the raw, unpolished reports. This might take weeks to figure out, I like having the info now and following along. I wish they did this more often.
  • Here [nasa.gov] is the official Press relese from NASA giving details into the MSNBC article. But dont put too much hope into it..


    "If in fact the signal were from Polar Lander, two failures would have had to occur. First, the lander's X-band radio that it would use to transmit
    directly to Earth would have to be broken. Second, there would have to be a problem somewhere in the relay with Mars Global Surveyor that
    prevented the signal from being picked up and relayed by the orbiter. It is unlikely that a broken transmitter on the lander could be fixed, and
    unclear whether a problem with the relay could be resolved"


    Still... it would..


    "Even if the signal were coming from the lander, there is little hope that any science could be returned. However, it would give the team a few more
    clues in trying to eliminate possible failure modes.
    "


    enjoy.
    --
  • Heheh the reason why I didn't include SETI@Home was because I already know which is a better client ;)

    As we've all heard hashed over many times, SETI@Home's client isn't as well behaved.

  • The conspiracy theory presented by the Senator at the end of the movie Contact is that the extraterrestrial signals received are a product of Hadden Industries, the company funding the project. He claims that the whole thing is fake.
  • The 'state' quarters are minted in Philidelphia or Denver. We'd probably lose all the Susan B's the government stockpiled 'in case of world economic collapse.

  • artifical signal (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article says that it is definately an artifical signal, but what are the chances it isn't the probe and it also isn't some earthly explaination? That would be pretty damn cool if we have a faint artifical signal coming from Mars which is alien in origin.
  • Blast I've forgotten the article, but it compared the mars mission with a few other things, the one that really struck me is that for the price of the new hotel in Vegas we could have got 7-10 mars landers. Also for less than the price of 1 minute of time on the superbowl they could have put extra equipment on the lander to send back info as it was landing.

    NASA is so hard up it can't afford what corporations don't even think about - that fault isn't to blaim on them.

    Just remember we are talking about less than 200 Mil in a 8 TRILLION economy.

  • You're exactly right that security and authentication are some of the most signifigant hurdles between the current state of distributed computing and the future we all envision where no cycles are ever wasted.

    Jeff lawson [mailto] has put together an excellent treatise [distributed.net] on the subject, outlining the specific pitfalls and challenges we see in this area. Recommended reading if this subject interests you.

  • Or, for the cost of a few Mars Landers, we could have fed hungry people, housed children, looked for a cure for diseases that effect real people in the real world.
  • I read this and thought of the free ISP discussion a couple days back. Less than $20 a month may be no way to get rich, but could be a way to fund an Internet connection. Let the ISP sell your spare clock cycles and get free access in return. Distributed has the .net domain for it already. :)
  • Where did you get your figured from? Someone posted here a while back and included a link to a well-documented webpage that stated that fully two thirds of all missions to Mars have been failures. That's a far cry from your number.

    We've spent billions and billions of dollars (as have the Russians) shooting stuff at Mars, with very few successes.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Unitek is asking to be mailbombed and DoS'ed?
  • Why, just think of how many starving children we could feed if we found it and were able to salvage it for scrap!

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Even if NASA does regain contact with the MPL, obviously their will not be any of the planned experiments going on because the MPL is obviously damaged in some way.

    More then likely NASA will just try to figure out what went wrong with it, in order to avoid the same problem in latter missions.

    So if NASA has a contact window today (Wednsday) at 4PM EST, how long would it take for the general public to hear the news?

    Wulgaru
  • Well, I guess that this means that the martians have finally found usable parts of the X-Band transmitter/receiver and a sizeable chunk of solar panel. Let's hope they don't pick up too many broadcasts from us - after all, if I ended up listening to Britney Spears for more than about five seconds I'D end up launching the Martian War Machines!

    --
  • NASA needs more money, failure is not for lack of commitment, it's because of extreme shortages of money. The Federal Government has gutted NASA's budget again this year. No one bats an eyelash when a coulple of 50 million dollar apache helicoptors crash in the Kentucky dirt but everyone jumps to cut NASA's funding because a 100 million dollar spacecraft that flew uncountable miles to another planet didn't work when it got there. I say take the budget for a couple of B2 bombers and send a dozen more mars missions this year, or a few really expensive ones. NASA needs more money.
  • The original mission of the 'Pathfinder' was limited in duration to its batter power. Even with the solar panels, it couldn't power the equipment and heaters to keep it running more than a month or so. If the polar lander went into standby mode, it would still need to keep its heaters running. I don't imagine that it has much power left after this long to do much of anything besides cry for help. -Unreferenced symbol? Byte me!
  • *LOL*

    That was funny!

    Never knock on Death's door:

  • I have posted a few comments on articles on this subject... stating that NASA money is a waste of money.

    I'm starting to see though, the benefits. Let's just hope that NASA can get in touch with this thing and actually use it to improve our lives, and the lives of everyone on Earth, not just citizens of the USA.

  • New SETI@home task? (Score:5)

    by hanway ( 28844 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @07:34PM (#1335807) Homepage
    According to the article, it took weeks to make out the signal because it was so weak. It may turn out to be nothing, but if extra number crunching would help, I'll bet SETI@home participants could spare a few hundred thousand CPU-years to help pick up the signal.
  • I really wouldn't call it a coplete failure. The missions were all part of NASA's "better, cheaper, faster" scheme. They managed to get several vessels to Mars cheaply and quickly. They just forgot that they only got to pick two :)

    I think this was discussed on /. a while ago. Any one remember when?

  • the article says that even if they do establish contact, little info could be sent home. It can't send the data to the Mars satellite, not easily at least.
  • Look why doesn't the bloody American Government admit that it got shot down by some pissed off Martians. Anyone know anything about cydonia the "city" on Mars. It's the most interesting feature on the surface of the planet yet they say "hmmm,shall we visit the city... or this flat bit with a few pebbles on it?" "er... the flat bit yeah?" "yeah" come on!! I'm not saying there's something there but seeing a five sided pyramid and other structures does sort of seem to indicate there could be something there rather than some flat bit of land with pebbles on. And the polar lander is probably in the belly of some polar subsurface dwelling creature ;) (well I hope so anyway... at least they'd have to make a pretty funny excuse to get out of that one!!)
  • It will take several days to determine whether or not a signal was received, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said. The data processing task is as challenging as "looking for a (particular) grain of sand on the beach," spokeswoman Mary Hardin told MSNBC.
    Hmmm...challenging data...like picking out a key...yep sounds like a job for...DISTRIBUTED.NET!
  • Check out the poll on the same page as the article. The question is, "In light of the Mars failure, what's your view on space spending?" As of this writing, 65% of the respondants voted to increase NASA's budget. Such is the nature of government.
  • According to the reports the probe entered a state of "safe mode", probably like a protection sequence in case there is an error or any damage. In all likely hood it is possible that it could come out of it at a preset time. A weak signal might just indicate damaged components, or maybe something they did not encounter at all?
    In any case, if it is the lander they could boost the gain here on earth and still make the thing useful. They might be able to figure out what went wrong.

  • The reason "failure is good for NASA," with regards to the poll, is because in general the only people that feel space exploration is a waste of money are the people responsible for creating the government's budget plan.

    The U.S. populace continues to support space exploration, and continues to press for further expansion of the space program, and the government promptly ignores them and slashes a few tens of millions of dollars more out of NASA's alloted budget.

    Personally, sometimes I wish a small meteor would hit Earth and wipe out Washington D.C. Giving up all the state quarters would be a small price to pay for getting rid of what is, ostensibly, the biggest problem in this country - clueless politicians.

    *sigh*
  • Oh, man. I know that means potentially crossed signals from earth based transmitters, but wouldn't it be great to accidentally stumble across signals from non-human intelligence while we were listening closely for our lost spacecraft? Is it just me, or does that strike anyone else as being a GREAT way for us to make first contact? Kinda poetic.


    Luck would have it, the signal is from mars inhabitants that repared the fragile earth craft and are sending the electronic paiement information, with a 30-day due time.
  • Oh jesus. Let's see here.
    1. Slashdot user doesn't like space program spending.
    2. Slashdot user sees poll where multiple people vote they do like space program spending.
    3. Obvious conclusion: "Stupid government!"
  • You know how much money is spent on the world's military in one year?. 750 BILLION DOLLARS! (source : CIA world factbook). That's an incredible amount. Compared to that, the space program is very good value for money.

    With $750,000,000,000/year, we could solve the world's problems.

  • bad news: win2k will be buggy as hell and sold retail anyway. good news : aliens will blow us up before a service pak hits the net.
  • Maybe the explanation is the alien virii all those Seti cpu doners are picking up from all that static out there. There just isn't any place for that here.

  • This is one of the few potentially viable options I see, though there are still a lot of questions to answer for.

    One problem is that $20/mo is about the rental cost for, again, new hardware. The average age of installed base is probably in the range of 2-4 years. My own PII/180 is adequate for my own tasks, but is about 1/3 to 1/4 the speed of a new system -- would I get only $5 to $7 per month of credit?

    The pricing angle is one that I'm not settled on -- depends on supply and demand. If companies could instantaneously add and remove compute power, the base HW costs would probably work out about right. The convenience value of being able to add and remove capacity rapidly and without physical deployment requirements might make higher rental rates possible, but you've also got to figure overhead and a percentage for the business itself. The business case is slim. Possible, but slim.

    YANI -- Yet another harebrained idea: the emerging ASP market coult be modified slightly around this concept. Essentially CoWs, but rentable. This is a more likely doable option IMO.

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Thanks. Cool reference. I'd run across the Netrek authentication concepts a while back. There's also a paper on doing authenticatable distributed computation at the COAST [purdue.edu] website somewhere. PS format, IIRC.

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Now there's an idea!! Why don't we do this on occassion? Just send everybody in D.C. home for two days without pay, and do something cool with it - send up another probe, contribute to a worthy cause, or just otherwise make a solid contribution to funding research toward making life happier. I'm sure DC would keep being DC, and the rest of the US could use a two day break from them a couple of times a year...

  • Uh, no... I would guess that some one is setting up Unitek to be mailbombed and DoS'ed.
  • FYI - this was actually funny the first time I saw it today when it was correctly formatted. This is just lame. (hint, use blockquote tags)
    so
    your indents
    keep
    in place no one likes a sloppy coder
  • One of the possible problems with the probe is it may have been too cold for the batteries to function. If that is the case, now that the pole is moving out of winter the batteries may be able to function again.
  • Wow. Your numbers must be true then. 2/3rds? What a coincidence! There's a well documented web page out there that says 2/3rds of the girls at Ohio State think I'm hot. The other third are insane. Trust me, someone posted it!

  • "could have come from anywhere" (Score:5)

    by konstant ( 63560 ) on Tuesday January 25, 2000 @07:44PM (#1335833)
    emmet sez..

    Don't get your hopes up on this one; the signal could have come from anywhere, and they're running tests now.

    Yes. It could be from some typically mundane source like outer space aliens. In my opinion, there should be regulations to restrict interstellar subspace communications to a few designatede bandwidth. With all the noise in this solar system I have difficulty contacting Command Zorb (weebles upon him!) in the Delta Quadrant. How am I supposed to receive my orders clearly when my brainwave transmissions are suffering from interference? For example, yesterday I was speaking with Commander Zorb (long may he froop!) in my head when an outer space alien interrupted with a comment that I should kill my family.

    -konstant
    Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
  • Go directly where it is : here [slashdot.org]
  • Suppose the main antenna and/or relay is the only broken elements.

    If we can anyway tell when there is signal/no signal, that means we can also try to set up a rough binary information transfer...

    And maybe, if that signal was really from the PL, we can get some information from it.

  • The press release from the JPL [nasa.gov] says that, now that they know what the signal should look like in the data stream, analysis should only take a few days. It would take considerably longer than that to modify the SETI@Home (or distributed.net, etc) clients and distribute them widely enough to be useful.

    This isn't a bad thought, though -- perhaps in the future, projects such as this actually could make use of distributed processing on the internet. However, this strikes me as unlikely because, considering how cheap processing power actually is these days, projects like this one don't generally spend very long on any one problem, and so benefit greatly from being able to change the running algorithms at will.

    Anyway, I wish the JPL teams the best of luck on this one. Who knows, maybe they'll even figure out a way to fix the relay to Global Surveyor. At any rate, it would be a great relief to everybody involved just to know what actually went wrong with the mission.

  • Except in our case it would be called P-ander.

    Hail P-ander!

  • Well, if the signals they recieved didn't come from the lander, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? There had to be something intelligent about the signal, or they wouldn't have announced it. Do you think that they would release a statement getting excited over static? That signal must have either had a subcarrier that they use, or some kind of intelligent data that caught their ear.
  • ....32.rf... OUCH ...3..2x.?....
  • Yeah, someone who monitors the posting of these messages ought to start a little traceroute and inform the correct authorities.
  • That is clearly not what I wrote. It must be easy for you to win debates when you get to make up bad arguments for the other side.

    A private space agency profits when it succeeds, and loses money when it fails. Would-be investors have an incentive to figure out which is more likely to occur, and the agency has an incentive to make sure it succeeds.

    NASA loses other people's money when it fails. To an individual taxpayer the cost is very small, and he has virtually no choice over how that money is spent, anyway. As a consequence, it is not worth his effort, time, or money to monitor the details of what the agency is doing.

    These are reasons to prefer shrinking NASA to growing it.
  • The Dish has a wonderfully colorful history, shrouded in the early days of the Cold War. Publicly, it was built for 6m radio occultation experiments for the Mariner Venus probes in the early 60s. The transmitter is a truly awesome entity, which was sadly rusting away the last time I saw it a decade ago. The single final amp tube was water-cooled using four truck radiators, and even the feedline was water-cooled -- as low as the losses were, there was so much power going through that waveguide that heat losses could (and did once) melt it.

    The Dish also has a long history of satellite rescues, including one of the OSCAR ham satellites. As the Valley grew up and started becoming a broadband RF noise source, the Dish fell somewhat into disuse until a group at STARLAB devised a signal washing system (nice work Ivan and Co.). It has seen quite a bit of astronomical work since.

    You can find the STARLAB Page here. [stanford.edu]

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