NASA Satellite Looks For Response From Dead Mars Craft 152
coondoggie writes "NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will next week make a number of passes over the presumed dead Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface of the planet and listen for what the space agency called possible, though improbable, radio transmissions. Odyssey will pass over the Phoenix landing site about 10 times this month and two longer listening tries in February and March trying to determine if the craft survived Martian winter and try to lock onto a signal and gain information about the lander’s status."
Love the space program (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Insightful)
Or there would be 50% more dead space junk on jupiter now
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Or both. No success without failures. Or are Spirit and Opportunity not worth the landers that disappeared?
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Another way to put it, since half the spacecraft disappeared, is to ask if the missions would be worth twice as much money.
I'd say yes.
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Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with your sentiment about the longevity of the rovers, I'm a little confused about your tank comment. The military has no problem using and maintaining old equipment when it's good for the job... the famous example of the B-52 comes to mind. Military equipment tends to go obsolete faster than robot probes, because it doesn't take years (sometimes decades) to deploy a new model.
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Good point. Another example: the military still uses the Browning .50 caliber machine gun, which has changed little since it first went into service in the 1920's.
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Vietnam you mean, no C-130s were built during Korea.
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When discussing the "efficiency" of NASA, consider the claimed benefits and costs of the shuttle when serious development funding began vs. what it, now in its dying days, actually delivered. As I can quickly recall, the greatest legacy of the s
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And don't forget: a massive amount of bombs and countless ways to reduce people to a bloody pile of organs! The usefulness is killing me!
Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else). The rovers were designed to last as long as possible while still fulfilling the mission goals and staying below the weight and size limits. If you need a high cost, high risk, extreme environment piece of equipment to last 90 days, you design it to last for decades. I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
As for the military not being as efficient, the space program uses one off engineering projects to solve unique challenges. Each rover and lander is designed specifically for the exact environment they will be placed in and is engineered nearly from the ground up. It produces amazing results but it is not economically efficient. The difference is, compared to the cost of getting a rover to mars, the cost of the rover itself is almost negligible so you may as well over engineer it and make sure the money you paid for the flight out there was worth it.
I'd love to see what the space program would do with twice or three times its current budget, it's a crying shame the way it's pushed to the back burner the way it is now. When was the last time a genuinely revolutionary space concept was flown by NASA? The first shuttle launch? Lots of people have ideas that can be made to work, ideas that could make space travel as cheap and common as Arthur C Clark ever envisioned it, we just haven't put the R&D into turning ideas into technology.
Re:Love the space program (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the mission was designed to last 90 days (and probably more for budgetary reasons than anything else)... I'm not saying 7 years on Mars isn't impressive, but the idea that engineers expected the rovers to drop dead after 90 days is inaccurate.
Actually it kinda is, not because they engineered the rover to only last that long (obviously you're right and they engineered it to be as robust as possible to survive on Mars), but because they thought the rover's solar panels would be too covered in dust to operate after that.
I still remember NASA putting out releasing saying how pleasantly surprised they were that the Martian wind turned out to be substantial enough to blow dust off the panels, and so the mission could extend past its original 90 day scope.
The fact that they continued the mission shows it wasn't budget constraints that limited it to 90 days... at least not the operations budget. I guess it was related to budget in the sense that this constrained them to only using solar power, and 90 days was just how long they thought a solar-powered rover could run.
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While budget constraints didn't limit it to 90 days, ongoing operations do impact the budget. The operators don't work for free, and neither do the guys supporting the specialized hardware the operators are using. The rooms the operators are in don't come free either.
All those man-hours have to be paid from somewhere, and that somewhere is the budgets of othe
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While budget constraints didn't limit it to 90 days, ongoing operations do impact the budget.
Yeah "operations budget" kinda implies that operations are not free.
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They were designed to almost certainly last 90 days, not to just last 90 days. I'm pretty sure that come day 91, they already had the budget/authorization to continue to operate the ground side, it was not a surprise that they were still going.
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We're still using a bomber from 1955, [wikipedia.org] and we're planning to keep using it until 2040. Is that good?
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What are you talking about? The IraqWarII was only supposed to last 6 months and its going into year 7 too. Not to mention its sister war, AfghanistanWarI is on year 9 after being almost completely ignored. Talk about efficiency! So there!
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War was not won by producing state of art equipment. It was won by producing lost of it in fast and cheap way. T34 and Shermans were not the best tanks in WWII. State of art was Tiger 2 and Germans lost.
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WWII tanks could be in service, except they would be useless now. It's not about robustness, but about usability :P
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Would you _want_ tanks from WWII to still be in service? They'd be dropping like flies if they ever got put into a real battle.
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Yea, that'd be crazy. That would never happen. [dunkels.com]
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How can junk ever be "on" a gas giant? Isn't "in" the right preposition?
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I wish we took 50% of the money given to the military and put it into space. We would be at Jupiter right now.
TERRORIST!
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Yikes, money in space is dangerous... especially coins.
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I didn't say "dangerous to Earth". Astronauts in the shuttle and the ISS don't have an atmosphere to protect them from a few grams stamped with "In God We Trust" screaming at them at 15,000 miles per hour.
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Reading comprehension FAIL.
It's pretty obvious from the GP's post that he is referring to the concept of, for lack of a better term, " space junk [wikipedia.org]". Or in this particular example, coins whizzing about in low orbit at a liesurely 17,000 mph. Even small things like marble-sized debris can put a world of hurt on any contemporary spacecraft; stuff the size of a grain of sand could kill somebody in a spacesuit. Look up how many times NASA has had to move the shuttle due to the threat of space debris. Tracking
Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see how a rocket with a payload of nothing but dollar bills is going to get us any closer to Jupiter.
Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, sending C-130s with payloads of nothing but dollar bills [guardian.co.uk] didn't do more for success in Iraq, either.
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Have you seen how much aliens are charging for a ride nowadays???
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Easy. Declare finders keepers. First person to retrieve the half trillion from Jupiter gets to keep it.
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I don't see how a rocket with a payload of nothing but dollar bills is going to get us any closer to Jupiter.
It wont. The Great Noodly Appendage will be displeased with our offerings of wealth and will send our ships to their Jovian demise.
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It will still be more effective than spending it on millimeter wave scanners, banks, and U.S. car companies.
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No, in the US at least, Congress would have taken the majority of the money and thrown it towards welfare programs. Which is what they did that cut Apollo and limited the Manned Orbital Laboratory and limited the Shuttle, and cut all sorts of other NASA plans.
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I wish everyone would get along in the world so we didn't have to put any money into the military.
Reality sucks.
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How does that lead to the US waste on military being not far from half of planetary military budget?
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Unlike pizza, it's the sort of thing you really don't want to buy in the first place, so you're better off paying as little as possible for it.
That's quite true as well - but when you are in charge of a country hugely responsible for maintaining international stability, abstaining from warfare is a luxury you do not have.
but we wouldn't (Score:3, Insightful)
and that is the problem. I always cringe when I see people toss out IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ as if that explains the current state of NASA's budget.
Face it, NASA does not generate votes. The only science that generates votes is that which well funded special interest groups support. The US could spend ZERO on its military and the space budget would be still be shit.
If anything the real science people want is how to get something for nothing, if not that how to get more from someone else
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Jupiter isn’t solid, and wouldn’t be very hospitable to anything we sent into it.
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> I wish we took 50% of the money given to the military and put it into space.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole. It doesn't. We get two benefits from that money. First is tech, probably more tech than NASA has delivered and NASA has done some good stuff. But look how much tech came out of two World Wars and the Cold War (WWIII in everything but body count) and compare it to NASA. But by far the bigger benefit is that Western Civilizat
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Not to mention that a great of tech that NASA uses has its origins in military budgets. Pressure suits? Owe a great deal to research into sui
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You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole.
And you seem to be assuming that "reduce military spending by 50%" is the same as "disband the military and leave the nation unguarded".
Can you see the Thousand Year Reich sending unmanned probes to the outer solar system?
Yes, I can definitely see that. I can see them aggressively pursuing manned missions as well. Probably with the benefit of lots of knowledge of things like the effects of radiation exposure
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> The Nazis sucked, but they weren't "barbarians". Germans had a thirst for knowledge;
If it had military value. And had they won we would have quickly fallen into a Hell on Earth scenario where there wouldn't have been much pure science going on.
> Al Qaeda's attack was nasty and worthy of retribution, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation at all.
Fraid it does. They are still learning and adapting as we mostly remain on defense. Eventually they are going to learn how to really hurt us.
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You already got to Jupiter 30 years ago ... the point is to get there and have something to do besides gawking at the beautiful colors.
AFAIK, all the interesting (like those that produces more than pretty pictures in fake colors of distant gas bags) US space projects were done, or funded, by the US military; looking at what kind of projects they finance, my bet is the next big vehicle will come either from private companies, or from the US Air Force or Navy.
We'd be too busy (Score:2)
No, we'd be too busy going to the mosque 5x a day. Islamists hate the space program.
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Re:Love the space program (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? This is what you're bringing to the table? We already disrupt local economies and destroy the livelihoods of local farmers with the amount of food relief we drop into areas. The US spends more money on foreign aid than any other developed nation. We POUR food into the third world and their fucked up governments let the civilians starve while they feed their military and trade the food to other warlords for guns.
So take that bullshit and try to sell it elsewhere jackass.
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The US spends more money on foreign aid than any other developed nation.
The total may be more, but as a percentage of GDP, it's at the low end of the scale.
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But we could be producing and giving away 100x as much as the second most productive nation in the world, and it still wou
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If your world view consists of a triumphant and mighty USA, and the rest of the world largely consisting of a bunch of slackers who "just want to piss it away," then your world view is messed up and rather inaccurate. Good day to you.
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You're welcome.
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I didn't put any words in your mouth, though, you'll notice the
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http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/35 [globalissues.org] (scroll down to "Quality-adjusted aid and charitable giving/GDP (%)")
While we give a lot in absolute terms it's a pittance compared to other countries in relative terms.
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Contrary to what you seem to think, a desire for justice for the poor is not formed largely from a dislike of America, or a desire to hurt Americans. Its actually mainly focused on the people in need.
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As a percentage of GDP, the US spends LESS money on foreign aid than most other developed nations.
And so it goes (Score:2)
Aside from the craft that was splattered across the Martian Landscape, is this the shortest lived mission to Mars so far?
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You're forgetting the huge number that just plain didn't reach Mars.
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The mission wasn't THAT short lived. The lander transmitted for 125 days before it died. Compared to Spirit and Opportunity yeah, that's a brief little period, but the mission wasn't a total failure.
The first lander that the Russians sent died within 1 minute.
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Catastrophic failures during descent didn't really reach Mars...
The shortest lived mission that touched down was the very first lander - Soviet Mars 3 probe. Stopped transmitting after around 20 seconds (but the data that were sent and external observation suggest it had the misfortune of landing in extreme dust storm)
Phoenix Mars Lander is no failure. It was known it will cease operations quickly (might even have been under CO2 icecap during winter)
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Geez, I didn't say it was a failure, I just asked if it was the shortest mission.
should have send Balto! (Score:2)
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Once they discover the spice worms (Score:4, Funny)
Frank Herbert's prophecies will be seen for what they truly are, and L. Ron shall be proven false, and the Fremen formerly known as Al Qaida will start broadcasting improbable messages from Mars.
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Pun! (Score:2)
over the presumed dead Phoenix Mars Lander on the surface of the planet and listen for what the space agency called possible, though improbable, radio transmissions.
In other words, since its presumed dead, they're listening for the PULSE Beacon!
Haha, Aren't I clever?
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No.
It has come to this. (Score:2)
Great. Now we're flying over alien planets looking for signs of artificial terrestrial life.
Only one thing left to do... (Score:2)
Go get it.
Marvin the Martian (Score:3, Funny)
...going to blow up Earth. It obstructs my view of Venus!
That headline... (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA Satellite Looks For Response From Dead Mars Craft
If they knew it was dead, they wouldn’t be looking for a response from it.
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I'm not dead yet....
I think I'll go for a walk!
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Every word in every sentence doesn't have to be 100% grammatically correct you joyless waste of empty space... Everyone, everywhere, perfectly understood what the headline meant (if they know ANY background about the situation at all, that is).
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Every word in every sentence doesn't have to be 100% grammatically correct
It wasn’t a grammatical mistake.
travelling (Score:1)
Most likely Message (Score:2)
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Is a gigantic "desert" seriously that interesting?
What’s so interesting about the top of Mt. Everest, that a couple hundred people have died trying to reach it?
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Or what is useful about a newborn child? It can't survive without special care even for a few days.
Re:What is the point in studying Mars? (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely one of the points about Mars and other places outside of Earth. Without reaching to them, life will die out. We're in the phase of first small steps in ensuring it won't.
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Arrogant Earthist!
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I would say that's a natural property of the life that survives ;p
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Precisely one of the points about Mars and other places outside of Earth. Without reaching to them, life will die out. We're in the phase of first small steps in ensuring it won't.
That's one side, the other is that this is a bit like putting a newborn on a treadmill to teach it to run as fast as possible. Near as we can tell Earth has been quite hospitable for the last 65 million years or so, it'll quite probably last another million. Can you imagine year 1002010 AD? The whole of human history is only 100,000 years old, the earliest writings are 6000 years old and we've only been doing proper science since the Scientific Revolution some 500 years ago. If we can figure out how to not
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Of course there's plenty of time. But that's OK, after all the funds going towards space exploration are almost negligible on the scale of the world economy. But doing this little things, practicing, gaining knowledge will prove fruitful.
So no, this isn't like putting a newborn on a treadmill. It's like wiping his ass from time to time.
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What's useful about a newborn child is the fact that life will continue to go on.
So what? What use is it to me that life continues when I'm gone?
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What's useful about a newborn child is the fact that life will continue to go on.
So what? What use is it to me that life continues when I'm gone?
Its not about you.
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Nor would I want to be. Kids are a huge drain on your financial, emotional, and temporal resources. I like having time to do adult things, pursue the things that interest me, instead of changing diapers, ferrying them to soccer practise, etc. Studies show that non-parents are measurably happier than parents, no matter what the evolutionary advantageous hormone driven delusion tells them. And it makes sense, raising kids is obviously very stressful. No thanks.
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They’re not just going off and dying on a mountain. They’re testing the limits of human endurance in high-altitude, low-pressure, arctic, and generally inhospitable conditions. They’re developing better, stronger, and safer gear and equipment. If it wasn’t for human ambition, and most of all, our curiosity and desire to learn and to build bigger and better things, our species wouldn’t accomplish much.
We do explore space in part for the thrill of it, and also to test our limits
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Mars is so interesting because of all the rocks out there, Mars would be shit-easy to terraform in comparison. Basically we'd pump out a whole bunch of CO2 (something we're already doing on earth, albeit as a byproduct) until the atmosphere gets a bit thicker. A thicker atmosphere traps heat better. Then we introduce vegetation to convert said CO2 into Oxygen (lots and lots and lots of algae really, that way when they die and decompose, it can be use
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Mars would be shit-easy to terraform in comparison.
It even comes with a handy step-by-step manual [philosophicalzombie.net]. It's even got a little more of a human element than most technical documentation.