Curiosity drills into Mars

Nuclear-powered, laser-equipped space tank Curiosity has unveiled another of its weapons: a 2.3mm drill bit that it has used to gouge a hole 6.4 cm deep into the Martian soil. NASA has kindly furnished world+dog with the image of the drill bit below. Behold its fearsome bluntness if you dare! The drill bit wielded by the …

[tempemeaty]

Can drag the horse to water...or mars...but you can't make it find life there.

So convenient how they opened it on earth, this way even if evidence of life turns up they can still deny it. Lovely. Seems this mars mission is a pointless expedition to scoop dirt and play with rocks just like the last ones. We wont have any real progress until someone does a clandestine private expedition. Then again the Chinese will go to mars and probably tell us more than NASA would.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Can drag the horse to water...or mars...but you can't make it find life there.

Maybe Martians will make contact and/or go to China and spill the beans on existence and existentialism there, tempemeaty?!. ..... with NASA knowledge and approval of the mission which they would be unable to prevent, of course, if Curiosity is harbouring newly discovered secrets on smarter alien life phorms?

[Vladimir Plouzhnikov]

Re: Can drag the horse to water...or mars...but you can't make it find life there.

Of course, if you pass by every Martian steel-head lizard, dismissing it as "nothing to see here", you won't ever find anything...

But, finally, help is on the way and a bunch of American adventurers will help the robots to sort out all of the mess they've made with so-called "robotic exploration" once and for all: The Planets are Aligning for a Once-in-a-Generation Space Journey

Well, let's see...

[MrXavia]

Re: Can drag the horse to water...or mars...but you can't make it find life there.

Nasa has no reason to hide the truth, and while I would support a chinese mission, I think that Nasa's only failing is lack of willingness to co-operate with the new big players in manned space flight, i.e. China...

China wanted in on the ISS, Nasa said no...

[Pen-y-gors]

'Drop' blunt bits?

I hope they're going to put them in the recycling bin so the Aeolis Palus Rural District Council bin-beings can take them away. I dunno, first thing humans do on a new planet is drop litter....

[Graham Marsden]

Re: 'Drop' blunt bits?

Well exactly! Bits of parachute, heat-shields, dead landers and rovers, not to mention deflated airbags ...

Honestly, how is an alien suposed to keep their planet tidy??

[bharq]

those damned metric measurements

you got them mixed up again! A 2.3mm drill bit making a 6.4cm hole in hard rock without breaking the bit? Quite an achievement, indeed. According to NASA, it's a 1.6cm drill bit (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130209.html), quite a bit sturdier and - more importantly - doing a lot more damage! BWOUHAHAHAHAAAA

Do we have a Reg unit for small lengths? centiLinguine or something?

[nevstah]

Re: those damned metric measurements

whatever the measurements are supposed to be, the diameter certainly looks larger than the depth!!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: those damned metric measurements

I did wonder. 2.3mm is a very non-imperial size, but 1.6cm is a nice standard 5/8 inch ...

[TeeCee]

Open the box.

...... the bit-bearing-box had been opened before Curiosity left earth.

That'll be because while there was a signature on the checklist, they couldn't read it and the "Name in block caps" section was blank. So they had to recheck the contents.

Remember; No names, no pack drill.

[taxman]

Re: Open the box.

...... the bit-bearing-box had been opened before Curiosity left earth

But no mention of where the box was first closed......before it was opened. Or was that again on Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

To paraphrase (or rip off) H.G. Wells...

Who could have known that at the dawn of the 21st century, from across the vastness of space our red planet was being observed. Intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic studied the myriad comings and goings of our home as carefully as they might observe the organisms that swarm and multiply in the occasional, incredibly rare drop of liquid water that you might find. They looked upon the 4th planet from the Sun, its resources and natural history with envious eyes, and slowly they drew their plans against us.

It started with seeming innocence, with simple observational missions from high above our beloved red deserts. Then the limits of the Outsiders aggression were made clear by the orbital bombardment of our world with BEAGLEs and probes that alledgedly were meant to go into orbit if they had not been programmed with the wrong unit of measurement, but these were just the initial phases of a far more sinister conspiracy......INVASION!!!