New Mars Forums

While we're at it, NASA could very well be issuing panicky statements if they were in the same boat... Lately they use to warn everyone how difficult all this stuff is, ever since Columbia... They're still a bit shell-shocked...

(Damn... the mere thought of Columbia breaking up makes me sad...)

i found the first on Everything Space Messageboards in spaceflight/The Mars race... then messed a bit with the link to see where it came from, and found the second one. (there are two more, but not sso interesting...)

Darn, i won't be able to sleep tonight... Beagle beagle beagle....

Aetus, you sure? The driller on Beagle 2 was invented by a dentist, would be a serious 'dentist renaissance' in space exploration if this one was also coming out of the dentist's lab

"We won." might be a bit overoptimistic, but... IF the landers do ok (15% chance, duh) then hing look good.

in other news (Aviation weekly): OSP has been indefinitely postponed! GOOD! Finally people are starting to realise it would be a dead end road.

Some comments on this new development: thespacereview

The problem with planes on Mars... is that there are no runways...

*every* single picture you see, be it Viking, Sojourner, and let's hope: Beagle 2 and the two Rovers... shows thre's millions of small rocks, strewn around the surface. Don't see how a plane could land there...

What we could do is launch a 'bulldozer-rover' that makes a landing and take-off strip... But i don't see that happen in the near future. Verical take-off and landing is a solution: balloons, helicopters, the 'insectbots' ...

Planes would just be doing suicide-missions, now.

The X-plane simulator is cool, they keep upgrading it, hours of fun to be had (you can build your own stuff also)

Frankly, I don't like the whole 'plane-on-Mars' idea, for the same reason as Mad Grad Student: a mission that lasts one hour? Crazy...
It SOUNDS cool but it's idiocy, sorry for the bright minds working on it, but i guess there's a good reason that at least one of them started looking into alternatives, as Shaun's submitted link shows... in another thread... (In: Acheron Labs/Unmanned probes/another reason to send people  Sciencenews

i was going to reply that i thought they already announced something like that, years ago...

Shaun, that's a relatively old article you dug up...  Wonder if their claims still stands, today

Everytime NASA attempts a launch somewhere, the comments/jokes about the English/metric thing resurface... I guess they're really tired hearing it.

To their defence: it was bound to happen sometime... Since engineering largely uses the English system, and the scientific communty the metric... that's simply asking for trouble.
Then again, the "faster,cheaper,better" idea was inherently flawed, If you want to build something, EVERYBODY knows you can pick two of those three qualities, but not all three. I guess this time they wanted to go too fast. It should've been : slower, cheaper, better.... (slower: more testing)

Spaceref

Very simple: lock all but one of the wheels, let the remaining one spin freely, et voila!

plus the fact that a human geologist/scientist works *much* faster than a robot: looking around, intuitively knowing where to go, what to pick up... Robots have to be commanded, and with the time-lag even simple things like going from A to B becomes hopelesly complicated, so i think humans are even more efficient...

Hmmm... NASA should do a 'contes' on earth, they have an engineering model of the rovers if i am not mistaken... Just let i do a mission in some desert, then a scientist in a suit, and compare what they accomplish in a given time...

One more thing: HELICOPTERS? you thin that'd be possible in such a low pressure?

Slowly coming down towards Mars, by space-elevator... No *That* would be cool...

And visiting a planet in a more central part of our Milky Way... You'd see much more stars than on earth...

It gets updated every 10 minutes! Great show!