NASA rover closing in on Mars to hunt for life clues
Last edited Tue Jul 31, 2012, 11:21 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover was on its final approach to the red planet on Sunday, heading toward a mountain that may hold clues about whether life has ever existed on Mars, officials said.
The rover, also known as Curiosity, has been careening toward Mars since its launch in November. The nuclear-powered rover the size of a compact car is expected to end its 352-million-mile (567-million-km) journey on August 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT.
The landing zone is a 12-mile-by-4-mile (20-km-by-7-km) area inside an ancient impact basin known as Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator. The crater, one of the lowest places on Mars, has a 3-mile-high (5-km-high) mountain of what appears to be layers of sediment.
Scientists suspect the crater may have once been the floor of a lake.
If so, they believe that sediments likely filled the crater, but were carried away over time, leaving only the central mound.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/29/us-space-mars-idUSBRE86S0OY20120729?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&dlvrit=309301
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)MindMover
(5,016 posts)Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)but I am excited.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Even a single snail shell will cause religious types to claim Mars was the Garden of Eden rather than admit life doesn't obey their dogma.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)given the amount of time we've had the other rovers rolling around there.
My hunch is that any life on Mars didn't get past the bacteria stage. Which, to be fair, is where life on Earth hung at for several billion years, so it wouldn't be that surprising.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)They popped up rather quickly prior to the Cambrian Explosion.
lastlib
(23,226 posts)Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)[img][/img]
roguevalley
(40,656 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Thanks! I'll be watching...
greiner3
(5,214 posts)"But all our rockets blow up!"
Here's to human ingenuity and perseverance.
architect359
(578 posts)This was made for the Mars Exploratory Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. I remembered that the style of the video was something that NASA had never done beyond. Anecdotally, it seemed that everyone was talking about Rover video. Anyway, for those that may not have seen it - it's on youtube:
ETA: GO CURIOSITY!! :-D
Uncle Joe
(58,361 posts)slackmaster
(60,567 posts)Last edited Sun Jul 29, 2012, 05:33 PM - Edit history (1)
Unless there is a major malfunction.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)whoever did that should be in charge of all of NASA's PR. Really cool video.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)At about 1:17 there is a spiral ramp with people walking on it. I recognize that place because it is in the lobby of one of the two main buildings of the now-defunct Convair complex in Kearney Mesa in San Diego. My dad worked there for many years. I went there on several occasions to pick him up after work.
Atypical Liberal
(5,412 posts)architect359
(578 posts)RKP5637
(67,108 posts)AdHocSolver
(2,561 posts)In twenty years, the few Americans who can afford the iPad of the future, will be able to watch the Chinese land an expedition on Mars.
Posteritatis
(18,807 posts)I spent awhile rewatching the thing after it first came out. Stuff like that's a great hook for people who think all this stuff is just boring, rarified work, too. I mean, a lot of it appears that way anyway, but you can tell the people actually in the thick of it love what they're doing.
(Ditto the producers of that video; you can just tell when people have fun making something like that.)
Blues Heron
(5,932 posts)Sky crane! That's really cool. Thanks for posting this.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)jtuck004
(15,882 posts)spot. That must take some real propulsion from the rockets, wonder if that is liquid fuel, and how long it has to make that decision?
Anyway, thank you very much for that. Will be waiting for word...
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I dont know about the propulsion in the engines. My guess is some form of liquid fuel bc solid engines would be too hard to modulate.
But i am not, as they say, a rocket scientist.
sofa king
(10,857 posts)The MSL uses monopropellant rockets, meaning that one need only blow the hydrazine through a catalyst screen and it fires. It is both powerful and highly reliable, because only the plumbing has to function for it to succeed.
http://www.spaceflight101.com/msl-descent-stage-and-sky-crane.html
And since I'm such a nerd, here's some of the sites I'll be tracking.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
http://www.universetoday.com/
And of course DU's own occasional visitor, the Phil, the Bad Astronomer:
http://www.universetoday.com/
Mars landings are a dodgy affair even on the best days, it having succeeded only about five times, and only the United States having pulled it off at all.
This particular landing is certainly the heaviest and most complex yet, and the speed of light being what it is, there is no way for humans to intervene in the automated landing process. So if some of you note an air of tension in the NASA and JPL press releases, yeah, it is definitely there. Getting this awesome machine down safely is not guaranteed at all.
But if it works, it's going to be some of the best planetary science ever returned.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I consider myself moderately well informed on matters of space exploration & NASA, but you've for sure got me beat.
DavidDvorkin
(19,477 posts)The reporter is trying too hard.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)however, it IS moving very fast.
DavidDvorkin
(19,477 posts)I just made that word up, but I'm going to use it whenever I can.
lastlib
(23,226 posts)...by remote control, I think....
DavidDvorkin
(19,477 posts)burrowowl
(17,641 posts)joshcryer
(62,270 posts)MindMover
(5,016 posts)Missycim
(950 posts)That we as a race haven't stepped onto Mars, I hope before they plant me I will see that.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Imagine a disease we have no cure for.
And maybe it wouldn't even attack the animal kingdom but the plant kingdom.
warrprayer
(4,734 posts)what the human race has done on and to this planet in my lifetime alone, the idea of humans trying to explore space frightens me. If a more intelligent life form has been watching what is going on here, they just may decide to stop our disease from spreading beyond our planet...
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)...in millions and millions of brains--a dream that only a few had dreamt before but that quite suddenly, it seems, "went viral"--that humankind could create its own future of social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high scientific and intellectual and artistic achievement in which all of us, without exception, can participate?
NASA was part of that Dream. It is quite wrong to say that NASA and especially its program of putting men on the moon was created to defeat the Russian communists in space. That was the motive of the war profiteers for going along with it but it was NOT the motive of the engineers who pulled it off nor the motive of the millions of people who supported the effort and the billions who were inspired by it. CURIOSITY and WONDER were the REAL motives of those who did it and those who appreciated it as the most important event of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.
Suddenly, our viewpoint changed from an ant's point of view to the point of view of the great Cosmos, almost overnight. To compare it, say, to Europe's discovery of America, is the right idea but doesn't come near to grasping the magnitude of this human achievement of stepping off our own planet!--and furthermore, doing it as a collective effort! (The movie "Apollo 13" got that right!) (Many brilliant minds, putting their own egos aside, can solve insoluble problems by collective effort, that individuals cannot solve alone.)
We now could see the Earth as "one" and the necessity of including all of humankind in the social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high achievement that millions were now dreaming of.
The bigger your Dream, the harder it is to see the "big picture," ironically. It is painful--so painful!--to see backsliding, to see war as a money sport return, to see the corruption of the rich and powerful get worse, far worse, to see democracy blockaded with items like corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, to see youngsters imitating the incredibly ugly leaders who are inflicted upon us--trying to get rich with a gun and drugs, or just going blewy and shooting people at random (how different is the Colorado shooting from the war on Iraq?). The lack of leadership. The lack of vision. The moral decrepitude. The evil. The demoralization and disempowerment of a great people--a people who did that, who put men on the moon and, at the same time, determined to end poverty and racism.
Painful, painful, painful!
But, I'll tell you, that torch--the torch of "the Dream"--has passed to a new generation elsewhere--in the unlikeliest of places, given its history. Latin America.
That is the "big picture" that is hard to see. We in the U.S. are not alone on this planet and those of us touched by "the Dream" in the 1960s are not the only dreamers. U.S. democracy may go down--we may have lost the opportunity ourselves to advance humankind to its next giant steps--of both social justice and achievement. But humankind itself will never lose those dreams. They will be reborn again and again, in inconspicuous places, and seem suddenly to burst upon humankind to renew and refresh human society and move it forward along its inevitable progressive path.
Those of us who have dreamt of peace find war so intolerable that we are almost paralyzed with anger that our "Dream" has been so violated. Those of us who have dreamt of social justice and high human achievement find the current repeat of the crimes that brought on the Great Depression so intolerable that we can barely speak for our anger and don't know where to begin to undo it. (Begin with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, is my advice!) Those of us who also perceive the catastrophe of global warming and its cause, industrial society, and see the suicidal failure of our country to address it--or even to admit it!--feel paroxysms of despair and rage. We can hardly believe the stupidity of our national discussions.
Why? Because we expect better of ourselves and our country. Why? Because we saw "the Dream" born here!--the dream of the best of humanity throughout the Ages, formulated in fits and starts, through many struggles and "dark nights" over many centuries, then blossoming, suddenly, here, for reasons unknown, in a new generation of Americans, the inheritors of the post WW II world. Widespread; shared by many--and quite unprecedented in that respect. We saw the world in a new way at the same time that our friends at Caltech and M.I.T. were putting a camera on the earth from the moon!
And if you were not born at the time--are too young to have lived through it--you certainly hear its echoes in the background of the current horrors.
The JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and the Vietnam War ended that awakening of "the Dream" quite a few decades before Bush Jr. was inflicted upon us. But "the Dream" is alive and well in Latin America--just being born--and, if the truth were known, it is still alive here in places and among people whom the corporate news monsters quite deliberately ignore. Whether we can recover our democracy--and all our hopes and dreams--I do not know. It would be unusual as an historical precedent. Once a society goes in this bad, bad direction--of rule by the few for the profit of the few--swift decline is pretty much inevitable. But then, democracy--which is still alive here at least as an idea--is designed to do just that: to correct the wrong and disastrous courses of the rulers. (Thomas Jefferson said that we would need a revolution every twenty years--boy, was he right!) Given the mechanisms designed to defeat democracy here, it will be an uphill battle to restore it--but hey, if the Latin Americans can do it--given their history--so can we!
Don't despair! Go deeper!
------------------
"If a more intelligent life form has been watching what is going on here, they just may decide to stop our disease from spreading beyond our planet...".
-------------------
That "more intelligent life form" is YOU. And the "disease" you speak of is something that YOU can help cure but NOT ALONE. And the glory of human life on Earth is that that collective "cure" is dreamable and therefore...maybe..we can never be sure...possible.
warrprayer
(4,734 posts)and inspirational. Thanks for the lift. And I once worked in aerospace.
MindMover
(5,016 posts)may3rd
(593 posts)snooper2
(30,151 posts)LOL