No need to be sorry, as I don't agree and thus take no offense from it

I don't find much interest watching things happen, being a spectator has little meaning to me. Instead I've gone out and am doing something about making it happen.

Of all the engineers I've met through my studies, I've yet to find many who got where they are by sitting watching others. They went out and did something about it.

The results I am interested in, and the engineering efforts leading up to that point I am interested in, but simply watching a video of a landing... not so much.

To me it's like sports. A fanatical fan of (say) Man Utd is unlikely to ever play for them. The person who goes out, misses the games on tv and instead trains, is much more likely to get there.

I see your point and see though it immediately.

You don't watch, you do. (So you say, examples would be nice.)

I am trying to highlight a programme by NASA that is the most ambitious landing on Mars that they have ever tried.

You watch.

The NASA engineers do.

And they may fail.

They will not hide behind anonymous Digital Spy accounts when they meet the public.

Though I'm sure lately....when it comes to Mars....they wish they could!

Ok, you believe what you want -.-

I'm not claming to be one of the words leading experts on aerospace engineering. I'm a student, currently studying for an MEng in Aerospace Engineering. One potential career path for me after I graduate would lead me into the space sector.

Hide? When on Earth was I meant to be hiding? I made a comment, you decided to tell me I'll never be apart of it (basing it ofcourse on nothing) and don't like the fact that I disagree.

I may not end up working for NASA, or similiar companies. I may end up working for someone like airbus. Or perhaps ford. Or any other number of possibities. But I would hope I get a job in engineering when I qualifiy, and who knows where that'll be.

If you're in an interview soon, and you try to persuade people that watching what others do isn't important, that's your CV in the waste bin straight away.

What was good/bad about that landing technique? What would you do better? How does it compare to the airbag approach? Did you notice anything unusual?

I'm no Maths expert and wonder if anybody here can tell me how long it takes for radio waves to travel from Mars to Earth at the nominal speed which I think is 186,000 miles per second? (or am I getting confused with the speed of light?)

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_far_aw..._light_minutes

https://twitter.com/msl_101/
‪#MSL‬ - Current Communications Delay: 12 Minutes 26 Seconds

I don't believe I said it's not important :/ Although... in part it's not. The data collected is far more important.

Since none of us are actually watching on the surface of Mars, all we have to "watch" is the data. Data collection is useless without data analysis, I suppose you could say watching is merely the former, but (I guess 1066 and) I think it's the latter.

Good luck with the degree. UK needs more of us making stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's no benifit of it. Nor am I saying it's silly to watch the videos. I even said I've watched some of the shuttle launches. I just disagreed with the comment from the OP that I wouldn't ammount to anything because I don't spend my spare time watching live feeds of these types of thing. I don't feel every past mission needs to be watched to be succesful in that field.

Either way, thank you for the luck, hopefully I'll be in one piece at the end of it!

Same goes for that rover on August 6th!

Aha! As long as they've stuck to metric I have faith!

After all, the "live" video feed that makes it to your screens will be A/ massaged....and of course B/ punctuated by pundits in studios, and cheering techies at mission control...remember the anticlimax on the night that was Giotto???

The REAL science will be the thousands of hours of digital video feed and data generated over the life of Curiosity....the VAST majority of which will never be seen by the public, with only edited highlights or headlining images released to the public.

The real engineering will be seven minutes of terror.

Not likely considering its an American spacecraft.

I do believe NASA swtiched to metric in the 90s

you could have bought 3 hospitals with the money that cost, yeah 3 hospitals full of polish lol


so money well worth it

You could have saved Glasgow Rangers with some of that money!

Mars is more worth it though.

We might have been jesting, phylo, but the Soviets' proposed lunar module equivalent (Lunniy Korabl*) did look like some piece of lever-operated Victorian era lander that came straight out of a Jules Verne novel. It could only take one cosmonaut down to the lunar surface and back and you had to get out of the Soyuz capsule and do a spacewalk in order to get into the Lunniy Korabl.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_Lander
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-LOK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3BHYa5wCQs

*Given the level of the technology involved, I can't help thinking that Lunar Coracle would be a better translation!


I hope that it succeeds but it is a risky decision to use such a complex arrangement of of wires, separation charges, etc. that requires a high degree of coordination and bearing in mind that this is the first time that this landing system will ever have been used.


We might see that any of Mars, Europa or Enceladus could be, or have been, home to extraterrestrial microbial life forms but only future expeditions will answer that question. Within the next three decades, telescopy should have sufficiently advanced enough so that we should be able to routinely determine the composition of an extrasolar planet's atmosphere by spectroscopy.

If, for example, a planet was found to have an atmosphere containing oxygen, water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide (like Earth) then that's an indication that that planet is conducive to life and that it has been made hospitable by the action of microbes. That event will almost certainly happen this century and quite probably in the first half too.

Here's something really astounding... as fast as Voyager 1 is moving (and it is one of the fastest man made objects), the earth still moves faster as it orbits the sun. So for part of the year, when the earth is moving toward Voyager 1, Voyager 1 actually gets closer to the earth each day.

...which brings us to a recent thread here on DS when i was "on vacation" regarding the chances of the Soviets building a moonbase in the 1970s...

Not using that technology, no. The mission profile - the extra transfers by spacewalk etc. - ALL add extra potential and very fatal "points of failure" during the mission.

I just found out about this via Reddit.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._1215_D521.jpg

Indeed, phylo, though from what I've read about the cosmonauts themselves, they would have been willing to undertake the missions despite the dangers. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov himself had a near miss on his first spacewalk and two such spacewalks would have been required for each N1 lunar mission. Incidentally, the Americans did have plans for a "Dr Strangelove" moonbase in the late 50s which could have been realisable albeit at great expense.

There's also some news about the Curiosity mission and it appears that news of the outcome of the landing might be delayed a while by technical issues:

NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity, Glitch In Aging Mars Orbiter May Make For Longer Wait To Learn Fate Of Mission
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/20...te-mission.htm

...and thus two per resupply/transit mission for a moonbase Potentially very high attrition rate among the Cosmonaut corps...


Actually - the Americans had SEVERAL during the history of spaceflight development in the U.S and thus both "forces" and NASA - some very '50s Hollywood....some, like the several versions involving stretched Apollo lander hardware, very very do-able!

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/apomtaxi.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/apoelter.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/alsrbase.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/aesrbase.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/apoolass.htm

There was also a revival of the ideas during the mid-to-late 1970s IIRC...

I seem to remember reading that methane is the key. In the type of environment that you describe I seem to remember reading that the presence of methane is almost conclusive proof of life as we know it as methane is broken down naturally.

The Kepler program is already doing better than expected in identifying exoplanets so I think the use of spectroscopy to analyse those exoplanets atmospheres will also do better than predicted. (I just hope, when the news comes in I'm still alive and sufficiently cognisant to understand it!)