New Mars Forums

I agree.  I believe that a key problem currently is that such places are much more dangerous areas to land than nice flat plains.  I imagine that as time passes we will create more intelligent vehicles that can examine their landing site as they approach and find a good spot to land, as well as simply being more amenable to trickier spots.

It's possible, too, that humans will reach Mars before any probes are rigorous enough to land anywhere rough, and then they can just walk over and take pictures themselves. 

I think what you say is true, our technology just isn't advanced enough to make a good enough Centauri probe right now.  I don't know how feasible the 'probe builds itself in space' idea is, but hey, whatever works is fine by me.

I'd like to see a probe get up to .25C (or hey, even .1C) just to see how everything looks.. flying to Alpha Centauri would be a bonus.  I have a feeling Alpha Centauri will be interesting, though, when we finally do get there one way or another.

I fail to see how the idea of extending Voyager's mission is not an idea.

Clarke's quote applies to all ideas, ever.

I believe that even if the monitoring of all our currently far-flung probes is cancelled, someone somewhere will train a receiver on them and record the data.  $10 million a year seems steep for such a simple task, I must admit..

Good question.

To me, the Voyager spacecraft is important because it is one of the most distant man-made objects ever (if not the most distant..  I don't know offhand) and still moving further away, it's still returning data, and nobody really knows what happens at the edge of our solar system.

I don't understand why it costs even $10 million a year to keep monitoring it, but that still seems like a small price to pay.  It seems like a waste to just stop looking at the data.

Both Voyager and that other probe (Pioneer?) also seem to be experiencing more gravity than they 'should' be..  Surely that's interesting enough to warrant $10 million a year.  You know, gravity, one of the fundamental forces that makes the entire universe work (as far as we can tell)?  I'll cough up the $10 million myself.  Big deal.

If Voyager were to be canceled, though, I wonder if someone else could simply monitor the data.  Would it require extremely expensive equipment, or would it be easy for some university or similarly scientifically-minded body to do?  How often does that rickety bucket of bolts even return anything?

As long as any single instrument still works, I bet NASA will still fund the rover(s)..  The worst would be if all the cameras fail, since the rover would no longer be able to rove, but were the cameras to fail, it also means that there would be far less data to process and far less to command the rover to do.  If the rovers are somehow unable to move but the cameras still work, it's a simple matter of downloading whatever images they take daily and putting them somewhere.  I have to think that planning where to direct the rover to go takes the most amount of manpower.

In short, I wager that NASA won't stop monitoring the rovers until they are clearly dead.  They're just returning too much data on a regular basis, and when instruments do inevitably fail, NASA will simply need fewer people on the mission.

How do you figure that Saturn is female?

Note carefully the first words of my first sentence. 

..."if" we were to "somehow"...

It's hard to believe that Hoagland isn't merely trying to drum up money when he's adamantly stated time and time again that the moon is surrounded by a 'crystal cathedral', which the Apollo landers weaved their way through as they touched down on the surface and then again on the way back up.  And oh yeah, NASA is hiding this amazing revelation because of uh, some reason, or another, and he has only three or four over-processed photographs as 'proof'.

It's possible that he's merely completely insane, but I must admit I am more cynical and that I lean towards the 'let's get the truly insane people to send me money' explanation..  I suppose it's possible that his impossible claims have inspired peoples' imaginations, and maybe that offsets whatever harm he's done to those who do try to put forth more plausible but still unpopular theories, but personally the guy strikes me as a complete fraud and I wouldn't mind if he got hit a bus and died instantly.

But yeah, Spirit and Opportunity.. 

Mars is much different from Earth, though.  Clearly, people can live on Mars, but they won't be walking around with just a shirt and pants on and admiring the flowers and butterflies..  at least not for a while. 

The best part of Total Recall (besides CONSIDAH DIS A DIV-AHS) is the eyes bugging out when Arnie and his gal pal are laying around on the surface of Mars.  Oh yeah, and Quatto, that guy who lived in the other guy's belly.

I'm not sure we'll know what color the sky on Mars really is until we land humans on the surface..  that said, the sky definitely looks blue in some color images.  Does it really matter what color the sky is, though, in the end?  Purple might be nice.