NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Houston, we have a problem: NASA has lost contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft. The aerospace agency revealed the issue in a Tuesday post that explained recent telemetry from the craft suggested all its systems were working as intended. After NASA received that data, MAVEN swung behind …

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Could MAVEN have collided with the GRADLE (Ground Reconnaissance Anomaly Detection Loitering Entity) craft?

MAVEN and GRADLE camps frequently collide, on Earth

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Alternatively

GRADLE - Ground Reconnaissance Alien Detection Loitering Entity

[Empire of the Pussycat]

Martians perfected the hungry hippo aeons ago

In space, no one could hear it chomp

[seldom]

Destroyed by ET

Final proof that Comet 3I/ATLAS is really an alien spaceship.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Destroyed by ET

I knew it was an alien probe when it did a flyby of Mars and didn't bother with Earth, since there's obviously no intelligent life here.

[Evil Scot]

No one would believe

That it is possible to connect to a computer system at such a slow baud rate

[lsces]

Re: No one would believe

One just has to be patient ... don't forget that is takes up to 22 minutes for that data stream to arrive anyway.

[that one in the corner]

Re: No one would believe

It puts the recent LTT video about dialup in 2025 into proper perspective.

[Kurgan]

Re: No one would believe

Actually as a ham radio operator I believe it, because some digital protocols we use are slower than that.

And while 10 bps is indeed slow even for a pure text transmission, I reckon that 9600 is absolutely fine for a lot of applications (no multimedia of course) and that our current tera-bloated internet is the result of us being absolutely insanely stupid, because apart from applications like 4K streaming, normal web sites and apps and chat services and so on should be fine with less than 500 Kbit of bandwidth.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: No one would believe

Ten bits per second? Luxury...

We used to talk from the top of a drill string to the robot at the bottom, a mere three miles down or so, at one bit every two minutes. The message was sent by a chap with a stopwatch controlling the speed of the drilling motor...

[KayJ]

Re: No one would believe

That's slow, sure.

[Dave559]

Re: No one would believe

There can be only one conclusion as to what has happened:

No one would have believed that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

With infinite complacency men sent their machines across the gulf of space, to and fro over that red globe, going about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

Yet, those intellects, vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded these intrusions with some annoyance, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Unknown to mankind, that seemingly desolate distant planet was defended by an array of heat-rays. Abruptly, the sounds ceased, and communication from the satellite there was no more.

[With apologies to HG Wells]

[Evil Scot]

Re: No one would believe

As someone who has witnessed "Edy Hurst's comedy version of Jeff Wayne's musical of H.G. Well's literary version of 'the war of the worlds' (via Orson Welles' radio version and Steven Spielberg's film version)." as performed in the Leicester space museum's planetarium. You have nothing to apologise for.

Just glad someone got the reference.

[AndrueC]

Re: No one would believe

Steven Spielberg's film version

The only thing that I can remember about that film was a very young girl screaming non-stop. Was that the entire script?

[NorthIowan]

Re: No one would believe

I've used 300 baud. It was way faster, but it didn't seem so fast at the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No one would believe

I've used 110baud as a joke before, back in the 1980s. But I've also set my MTU to 48bytes. It was faster to locate and string a 50' cable from the firewall to my laptop and reset the port than it would have been to wait for the login banner to be delivered and a prompt presented.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: No one would believe

I once successfully connected a Commodore 4032 to the net using an IEEE4888-parallel adaptor, a parallel-RS232 adaptor and a Gandalf box on the Oxford University Computing Service system. It ran perfectly happy at 50 baud, which is about 5 characters per second.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No one would believe

That must require really efficient programming.

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and Jeff Wayne :).

[Dave559]

Definitely! I'm assuming/hoping that everyone did of course read that in Richard Burton's voice! :-)

[Evil Scot]

Maybe someone else with a particular set of skills.

He will find you.

[Neil Barnes]

It was spoiling my view of Venus

Signed, Marvin.

Damnit, we need a Marvin the Martian icon.

[AdeV]

"ALIENS!"

Thus spake Arnold J Rimmer - and this time, he wasn't wrong...

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Just Came Here To Say

"Beware Sutekh".

Where's me sonic?

[IanTP]

Have The Martians disabled it in readiness for an attack?

"The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one" he said... IYKYK :)

Icon obvs.

[Evil Scot]

Million to one shots happen 9 times out of ten.

Obligatory Pratchett (mis)quote.

Icon (bearded old fart in a hat)

[ThereBePirates]

It's looking good. It's going good. We're getting great pictures here at NASA Control, Pasadena. The landing-craft touched down on Mars 28 kilometres from the aim-point. We're looking at a remarkable landscape, littered with different kinds of rocks - red, purple... How 'bout that, Bermuda?

[("Bermuda Control")] Fantastic! Look at the dune-field

[("Pasadena Control")]

Hey, wait. I'm getting a no-go signal. Now I'm losing one of the craft. Hey, Bermuda, you getting it?

[("Bermuda Control")]

No, I lost contact. There's a lot of dust blowing up there

[("Pasadena Control")]

Now I've lost the second craft. We got problems

[("Bermuda Control")]

All contact lost, Pasadena. Maybe the antenna's-

[("Pasadena Control")]

What's that flare? See it? A green flare, coming from Mars, kind of a green mist behind it. It's getting closer. You see it, Bermuda? Come in, Bermuda! Houston, come in! What's going on? Tracking station 43, Canberra, come in, Canberra! Tracking station 63, can you hear me, Madrid? Can anybody hear me? Come in, come in!

[John Brown (no body)]

Clearly...

...Maven only just got the memo detailing the latest NASA budget proposals and is doing it's bit to help.

[It's just me]

"A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion"

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

> But when MAVEN’s orbit brought it back into view, ground stations on Earth could not detect any signal from the probe.

It came back into view and saw a large orange blob on earth that made it confuse Earth for Mars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its odometer rolled over and it crashed. It was in year 12 of a 1 year mission, right?

[Winkypop]

It’s just pining for the fjords (or Valles Marineris)

[VerySlowData]

Marvin was waiting round the back of Mars

Definitely Marvin the Martian; getting fed up with all these alien spacecraft from a neighbouring planet!

[Spherical Cow]

10 bits per second!

I can blow a raspberry* with a faster bit rate.

*not the Pi kind.