Back on Mars

[Tracer]

NASA's new rover, "Spirit" is on Mars now and has sent back some raw images. The pictures are diffrent from the ones Sojourner and Viking sent back - showing a surface with far fewer rocks. Another lander, "Oppurtunity" is also enrote to another location on Mars.

http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/p...IA04980_br.jpg

That's a panaramic mosaic of inital shots from Spirit. The terrain is flat, as NASA is wont to land on, and is also less rocky, another thing NASA likes though that part was not anticipated. The Mars rovers are there on a geological mission to "follow the water," as NASA states it. In effect, the robots are searching for more evidence of past water both ancient and recent (in a geologic time scale) and the landing sites were chosen, beyond the nessisary considerations of risk, because they looked particularly interesting in following the Martian 'water-trail.' To say my hopes were let up a bit, NASA/JPL decided against one prospective location in an equatorial region of the Valles Marineris canyon, a rift as long as the continitanl untied states far larger than the Grand Canyon. It would have been awe inspireing to see, from the red planets surface. However, Mars is a fairly trecherous place and a great many expensive orbiters and other craft have been lost unexpectedly near it. A touchdown at all on the planet is difficult and the arrival of Spirit to its destination is landmark. The science that follows may well be even more ground breaking.

[stormy]

My brother in law worked on the navigation to get it there. He has been in the control room the last few days for the landing. He was pretty excited.

[Josh]

OK... so went to Mars again, and forgot to bring color film?

Stupid.

[Drewbacca]

If you've seen one picture of mars you've seen them all.

[Tracer]

I guess most people don't care about these things anymore. Not like this sort of thing happens often. I suppose I won't even bother posting a damn thing about the Cassini/Huygens probe landing on Titan this year.

[g0zen]

NASA is renowned for their continuous stream of monumental fuck-ups. Yet amazingly, they still manage to be the best gig in the field of space tech.

[Tracer]

Amazingly many people don't know what a complex process it is, especially with so small a budget.

[Curtis]

I care. I was watching a nifty little report on it this morning that seemed to get stopped flat just so they could show an intimidating graphic and tell me we're still at level fuchsia or whatever.

The possibility of finding anything, especially any kind of bacteria fossil, gives me an absolute hard on.

[Tracer]

My brother in law worked on the navigation to get it there. He has been in the control room the last few days for the landing. He was pretty excited.

I'll bet. The amount of work put into these landers is pretty great. I imagine there was alot of relief there that the bounced landing went smoothly.

The possibility of finding anything, especially any kind of bacteria fossil, gives me an absolute hard on.

I don't know what to expect in the findings there if anything but you never know untill you look (and even then you're still not sure). Finding any direct and tangeble evidence of water at the sites will be very vindicating and would demand a very through examination of the planet as our technology progresses.

[Diff-chan]

Pfft... since when does Mars look like Utah?

Im calling conspiracy.