
Metallica
"ChemCam fires a green laser at objects to stimulate elections"...
Oops, slightly mis-read that at first - silly me.
The Curiosity rover has discovered what appears to be a partially melted meteorite and has been testing it out with its on-board laser. The golf ball-sized nugget, dubbed Egg Rock, was spotted on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp in an area called the Murray formation, a dried-out lake bed on the Red Planet. After the control …
You beat me to it,
I am so impressed, so proud of my fellow commentards. Two posts into a thread involving lasers and Mars, and we haven't had any quotes from WotW, no Richard Burton or Jeff Wayne references, and no Captain Scarlet or Mysterons.
I suppose this outbreak of sanity is only to balance the universe given the lunacy in the High Court today, where rich lawyers funded by rich (and bizarrely left wing) bankers have taken on democracy, and (apparently) won. That must leave the pro-EU liberal left a bit conflicted....actually no it won't, democracy was never their bag anyway.
Sorry, sorry, didn't mean to mention the B word, see repeat icon.
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As the risk of a B-word tangent, I'm finding it ironic that Brexiteers are unhappy about parliament asserting its sovereignty - isn't that exactly what you wanted?
On a more serious note, the referendum asked if people wanted to leave the EU - not the EEA, which is a much worse proposition. The government does *not* have the mandate to do just what the **** it wants because it's interpreted the result of the referendum as 'do anything to keep out the darkies'. It needs oversight from all of our elected representatives.
LOL all the rocket "science" was done by Newton and then von Braun control-system types.
Most of 'practical rocketry' is engineering.
And perhaps some interesting business models.
For fun, look up Goddard's very common misconceptions about rocket stability and the
amusing demos it produced...
V2 had gyros and vane-control. Modern rockets tend to use gimbals. YMMV.
Rocket science is actually just regular chemical / mechanical / electrical / materials engineering with a very large budget and very large reliability requirements. Its all good engineering, eventually boring, despite the application-domain, iff you will eventually find engineering boring; and if not, engineering dishwashers provides the same satisfaction. Perhaps less brilliant colleages some times.
But much of the hype is well-earned: JPL/Caltech are awesome.
So is MIT :-P
Announcing the NASA car!
- Reliable
- Sturdy
- Robust
- Nuclear powered
- Multi-planet sat nav
- Highly adaptable to many terrains
- Rocket pack (option)
Cost $67,234,987.23 per unit, delivery changes apply.
But seriously, good job NASA!
I know you're joking, but... the reason a lot of devices need to be replaced is simply because the manufacturer stops providing them with software updates that keep them relevant. The Samsung Galaxy S2 is a great case in point. Official Samsung updates would leave your S2 running Android KitKat IIRC. Step forward the CyanogenMod community who have the device running Android Marshmallow. If a person can do that, without the source code to the device drivers and so forth, why the hell can't Samsung who do have the code and significantly more resources!?
"But it was back in 2005 that the first metallic meteorite was spotted by the Opportunity rover, which then nearly destroyed one of its drill heads trying to penetrate the object."
You then link to an article which states this is totally untrue!! They simulated it in a lab and didn't destroy anything on the actual rover. Even before clicking the link I was highly doubtful someone would be allowed to trash a drill on the Mars rover just for idle curiousity - unless their name was Howard Wolowitz :D
I can't say I'm totally sold on the general concept of having NASA order robots to shoot lasers at random crap on other planets. I mean, if we start something, we're sort of screwed. We had a shuttle-thingy we could have strapped some guns to but we retired them.......we might as well fire Gumby up there with a rubber-band.