Mars to go offline for a month as vast nuclear furnace gets in the way Spacecraft exploring and orbiting Mars will be left alone for the next month as the red planet slips behind our nearest star for a bit of a spring break. The Sun will block radio signals for a month or so, something familiar to old hands such as Mars Express, which has been happily orbiting Mars for almost a decade. It is, …
Surely the easiest way is just to move the orbit of the Earth (or Mars, if you're lazy) so it's perpendicular to the current orbital plane. Blackouts will still occur, but much less often.
While we're at it, we could re-spin the Earth putting the North Pole closer to Alaska, and thus moving blighty to warmer climes. It's been snowing all f*cking day. In f*cking April, for f*cking f*cks sake!
"It's been snowing all f*cking day. In f*cking April, for f*cking f*cks sake!"
I remember a picture on the front page of a British newspaper in 1978 or so, of a snow-covered cricket ground somewhere in England the day before. The date on the newspaper? Some time in July. The day's play was, of course, cancelled.
Dont get all the excitement myself. Snow is caused by a collision of warm and cold weather systems so you would therefore expect it to snow at the start of a winter period and at the end of one. Plus I believe its more likely to snow in March than December and since March was only last week whats the big deal.
Guess it makes for cheap, gap filling news stories though, versus the expensive smuggling a reporter into North Korea investigative journalism type stuff. Anyway off topic.. :)
>Nuclear fire, because that's pretty much what it is.
Yes total energy wise nothing we can do can touch it but but at the core of some of our tens of megaton nukes (when set off) the energy density is billions of times greater than any region in the Sun. Still what the sun lacks in energy density it makes up for in mass what with it having well over %99 of the mass in the solar system and all.
That's been thought of, of course. They'd have to be big to pick up the very weak signals and they would cost a lot of money to build and to regularly replace. I don't think that will be afforded until there are humans on Mars.
There have been tests of delay-tolerant networking protocols on the ISS. Further info at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/07/dtn_node/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/730.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
"Curiosity control: Rover reports full system functionality is restored"
"Command to move error: motors functional and responding: telemetry indicates no-go"
.
<self-portrait later shows rover on bricks with all wheels missing: chassis tagged with "Ulla, suckers..." and "Watch the skies...">
Since, as some studies have it, the universe supposedly curves back on itself in higher-dimensional space your idea most likely has some merit. However, there is the small matter of the several dozen billion years required for the signal to wrap around, and Mars will be back in contact in a month anyway!
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