Mars rover harangues empty landscape with loudhailer Curiosity, the nuclear-powered laser raygun rover recently landed on the surface of Mars by NASA, has begun shouting propaganda messages from Earth at the apparently empty desert which it is currently patrolling. A speaker on the car-sized robotic vehicle was used to issue a message from NASA chief Charles Bolden, a former US …
Well actually you need bugger all to find out how sound propagates on Mars. If you know what the gas mix and pressure is you can just reproduces everything right here on earth.
If you really want to run tests on Mars then a small transducer set (less than 20 grams) is enough. The physics will be the same for a small transducer or a rock concert.
As usual, it was El Reg who was wrong...
I just watched the BBC news and one of the first things the reporter said was "Although the rover doesn't have any speakers on board..."
and continues to say how this is the first audio broadcast from another planet...
basically its the first interplanetary spotify
... the words "Hello. This is Charlie Bolden, NASA Administrator, speaking to you via the broadcast capabilities of the Curiosity Rover" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Martian tongue, that was the most dreadful insult imaginable and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
So, that's it. We're all going to die.
But you forgot the outcome:
"After millennia of battle the surviving Martians realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog. "
So, quick, deploy the small dog brigade...
Any Martians who heard this advanced announcement of invasion have begun preparations. :-)
I support the exploration of space, but I find the message pointless. Hey, anyone with access to a microphone is going to use it. Next step it to pipe elevator music to the Moon.
Best wishes,
Wrong question.
If there's nobody there to hear it, how much money could you save by not launching any audio equipment and simply faking the whole silly exercise? Or perhaps even, 'am I a more deserving cause than a daft and easily faked audio broadcast on another planet?'
On a related note, any of the engineering heads recently bought themselves a new sports car?
Since time is a human invention
Yeah? Who got the patent on that then?
In human terms, the measurement of time might be a human invention, but I think we can be fairly sure that things happened in a sort of sequential order, one after another, long before humans were invented.
There's at least one tribe who have no words or even gestures to represent numbers, so they probably have a very odd, if any, concept of time. Maybe we could licence that IP to them?
Since time is a human invention
No, Time is a continuous, measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the present to the future. Stephen Hawking has stated that time actually began with the Big Bang, therefore to our limited ability to perceive things, time has always existed.
You're probably thing of the human invention of the units of temporal measurement, such as Hours, minutes etc.
Paris, 'cos I said "big bang"
Hello World!
Not being happy with having a stereo powered suvs on the planet earth we have shipped one to another planet too, did they give it spinners? why else do you think it needs a nucular reactor? it has to power the 15 inch subs, which admittedly will sound quite pathetic in the thin martian atmosphere, but the pretty blue neon tubes will look awesome..
my guess is that speaker probably has more sciency-wiency stuff behind it then a simple radio shack project speaker, however the more i see and hear of this the more i am thinking johnny 5....
The more I read about things like this the more I'm starting to suspect that they actually expect to meet extraterrestrials over there. Speakers and microphones? There are way more efficient ways of investigating the Martian atmosphere than this, and equally NASA wouldn't put this equipment on the rover just to satisfy a school experiment (back-of-envelope calculations put the cost of 1kg extra cargo at about $27m)...
"(back-of-envelope calculations put the cost of 1kg extra cargo at about $27m)..."
A 1kg speaker? Do you think they put woofers on there? I'm guessing it's probably a 3g peizo speaker. At around 900kg total weight and a cost of 2.5 billion, that would put a 3g speaker at about 8,333$. A little much, but just a bit short of 27 million.
The overt nationalism in Charles Bolden's speeches is quite sickening. No person or nation exists in separation from it's surroundings. We are all interdependent and connected.
I prefer this: "Fanatical ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars." -Carl Sagan
There is sufficient atmosphere for sound propagation. There has even been a significant amount of work investigating the use of ultrasonic anemometers to measure wind velocity on Mars initially to go on the previous NASA lander, and still being considered for the next European lander (if it ever gets off the ground as it has already been postponed numerous times).
The attenuation is higher, both due to the thin atmosphere and the absorption in carbon dioxide is higher. The acoustic velocity only depends on temperature and gas composition, pressure has no effect on velocity.
Surely the correct speech would have been:
... "Mars: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Mars rover Curiosity. Its two-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before" ...
voiced by William Shatner?
Grendel
PS. Why Paris? Because she probably things that Mars is a chocolate bar :-)
This audio announcement ( We Will be here Soon ) is probably the wildest thing we have done to date in Space Exploration by NASA...
Well, There were those Golden Records on Voyager 1 , 2 ...
I'm agreeing with Grendel= Shatner should have done it, He said it so many times, we believe him...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
