
Just in case?
"...a flight termination system battery."
Is that what we used to call surface-to-air missiles?
The launch of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which contains the Curiosity rover, has been delayed by a day to November 26. NASA said today that it was taking the extra time to allow the team to remove and replace a flight termination system battery. Liftoff will now take place sometime during the one hour and 43 minute …
But i bet they'll find evidence of and advanced hydrocarbon addicted civilisation beneath the surface, having been driven there as the atmosphere was destroyed by their love of hydrocarbon.
And while the civilisation was relatively techologically advanced, it was hampered by a corrupt and backward looking philosophical\political system that simply refused to acknowledge the irreprable damage their dalliance with HCs was doing, preferring to concentrate on the aquisition of meaningless tokens until it was too late.
Finally driven underground the civilisation died a slow and painful death as the complex interdependencies between the alpha beings of the surviving civilisation and the lesser biomass became exposed when the biomass gradualy slipped into extinction.
So different to us, theres nothing for us to learn there - seems little point in going really.
:-)
Lovely, another Register article I can't see half of - I presume the big box in the middle with the disconcerting words "Unauthorised access to inappropriate content" relate to yet another link to YooChoob?
FAIL.
I've said it before - some of us on the inside of corporate firewalls don't have access to such sites.
I'm not working at a corporate, penny-pinching, "don't spare the whip", "eyes forward" joint, but the one thing they could do when embedding YouTube stuff is to have a nice illustration for those of us not running Flash.
Even the Beeb can manage that kind of thing, scaremongerers and technophobes that they supposedly are.
agreed. starting to get a little irritated with the embedded link through content.
please can i have something i can read that looks like text which can be misconstrude as working rather than the nsfw activity of uchoobing.
many thanks, your corporate readership.
colon closebracket smiley face.
The video suggests that there are far too many moving parts for Curiosity to be reliable. Anyone care to guess at the probabilty of damage on landing, collision damage during use, damage from sand storms and/or ice, or just good old-fashioned mechanical or electro-mechanical failure?
Looking at that video, once the parachute's detached, the Sky Crane looks remarkably aerodynamically unstable. A half-decent Martian sandstorm crosswind and it'll be all over the shop! I can see Curiosity landing on its back and flailing like an upended tortoise. Haven't they watched Robot Wars? Don't they realise that all good robots need a SRIMECH*?
* I'm assuming that's how it's spelt. I've never actually seen the shortened version of "self-righting mechanism" written down before.
NASA seems to be fixated on developing "Where no-one has gone before" science robots. They would serve us better if they concentrated on robot re-useability rather than unique, state-of-the-art (=untried) singleton projects.
We'd be better off if they could drop 6 similar robots for say $2.4 billion, rather than 6 SAMs at $1.6 Billion each. Then, if they created a "bus" to carry a bunch of these robots, one launch might land them all!
We should buy everyone at NASA a LEGO for Xmas, and make them read Eli Whitney's biography on Xmas eve. It's clear they are in a space bubble, and don't understand reusable designs.
for example, the juno probe will be crashed into jupiter once its finished, with its honking great big solar panels.
Why not have a line out on the thing so a next gen probe can use it as a power supply?
Same with the ISS. (although the ISS isnt in a stable orbit)
Youd think with the enormous amount it costs to get these thing out there, people would look at re-using bits, especially when they have already gone through the expense of getting out of earths gravity well.
I thought we knew why Mars lost its atmosphere:
Small planet = not a lot of gravity so gas escapes quickly
Core cooled down so no volcanic activity and thus no fresh gas to replace the lost atmosphere. Also with a cold core the magnetosphere was lost so the solar wind blasted the gas away.
So all the light elemental gases escape while some of the heaver gaseous compounds will remain so you would expect a very thin atmosphere of mainly CO2 which is exactly what we find..
I'd be pretty pissed if somebody parachuted a nuclear-powered robot into my backyard and it started melting everything with its deathray laser....
I'm betting on a horde of tentacled invaders or zombie-creating space-virus biological attack when Mars next aligns with Earth!!