Funny you should mention Europa tonight.

Just as it was getting dark, I was watching Jupiter climbing from the East, with a telescope.
I noticed one of the Moons was very close-in to the planet, and a dark 'spot' on the surface of Jupiter itself - known as a 'shadow transit', when the shadow of one of the moons crosses the face of the planet - when I looked it up, it that moon was Europa.

Some rather good stop motion footage from the ISS here:

http://vimeo.com/32001208

I've been convinced there's water on Europa for years. I developed an outline of a sci-fi story along with a friend about humans discovering a very complex environment along with advanced creatures living around geo-thermal vents on the ocean floor. It got very involved in the end. Good tosee our ideas may not have beeen so fanciful after all!


This is a monster of a rover, by far the largest and most complex ever developed. It's the size of an SUV and too large for airbags so NASA have developed a 'sky-crane' landing system. The lander will be slowed by a parachute until it is just above the surface where retro-rockets will fire to slow the lander to a hover. Then the rover will be droped down to the surface on cables. How cool is that!


There's a glimmer of hope for Russia's beleagured Mars probe. ESA's radio dish in Australia has picked up some telemetry from the probe as it orbits Earth, raising the chance that communication can be re-established and the probe fixed. There is still a short amount of time for the probe to get on it's way towards Mars before the planet's orbit takes it out of range.

Well guys, the potentially good news is that there are tentative plans for an ESA/NASA Europa orbiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Europa_Orbiter to further study this world but there'll be no landing/drilling probe it seems. l hope that this project is confirmed in due course.

As for the Mars ventures, that sky crane is inovative but there's plenty to go wrong with a system like that! l would have thought that they'd have done a parachute & retro rockets landing like the two Viking landers which is a simpler system with less to go wrong.

l hope that the Phobos mission can be saved though l suspect that it'll end up as a piece of orbiting junk a bit like Mars 96 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_96 - another success for the Ghoul of Mars! http://www.economist.com/node/1811981

The funny thing is that the Soviets/Russians have had much greater success with the far more hostile Venus and yet things haven't worked out for them at Mars. Apparently, some two thirds of all missions to Mars end in failure http://www.newscientist.com/article/...s-on-mars.html.

Yes that's quite odd really. They had excellent pictures back from the surface of Venus in the early 70s.

There was a good article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago which explained the reasoning behind the Sky Crane. I think basically because of the sheer size (and therefore momentum) of the lander making a hard landing with retro-rockets carries a sizeable risk as there is little margin for error. Using the rockets to get the lander into a hover is slightly safer as they have a certain margin of error to play with in the altitude for the hover. It's not much but I guess NASA deemed it necessary. What is interesting is that using the combination of techniques to get the lander to the ground allows for a much more accurate landing (it is hoped) - something like plus or minus 6km rather than the usual 20km+. So this lander is aimed right in the middle of a crater which would never have been considered before.

I think the reason why so many Martian probes fail is because it is seen as the easiest destination. Mission designers therefore develop much more complex landers and probes which they'd never consider for other planets. There's a combination of complexity leading to things going wrong and lack of attention becaue it's deemd and 'easy' mission (comparatively). 33% success is still terrible, though.

I remember a funny story about one of the USSR's Venus probes. It carried a soil probe which was going to analyse the Venuvian soil but it's results where very strange. What they discovered was that when the probe landed and popped off the lense cap on it's camera the cap landed exactly where the soil probe was aimed. Doh! Someone spent a bit of time in Siberia for that one I think.

http://www.universetoday.com/91228/d...-hidden-ocean/

I wonder.

Water, water everywhere...

Just uner 3 hours until lift off of the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Rover at 3:02pm GMT today.

http://www.ustream.tv/nasahdtv

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

When I look at Jupiter with my new 23 x 70 bins, all I see is a very bright light. I can see the moons though.

Mars probe due away very soon.

4 minutes to launch.

T-Minus 4:00

Bon voyage!

Less than 2 minutes to go now! http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

I watched the launch on NasaTV and it was amazing.

I just hope the new fangled sky-crane works correctly. It's a hell of a gamble to take with one of the most important missions to Mars ever.

That was one of the smoothest launches I've ever seen! Bon voyage Mars lab

Spacecraft now on its way to Mars.

The DSN in Canberra has picked up the signal from the spacecraft, officialy on its way !!

Bet the Russians are currently drowning their sorrows.

Every mission is a gamble!

anything that lands on Mars will "go wrong" shortly after landing

it doesn't really, but they need to suppress the truth about Cydonia.

Just wait and see.

There are some valid points above and I share the concerns over the complex sky crane mechanism. Ideally, I'd like to see more robust and simpler space probes and landers with more inbuilt mechanical and system redundancy so that there's much more likelyhood that missions will succeed even if that's at the expense of numbers of instruments on board. Every expensive failure damages NASA and public support for it.


Those interesting features are nothing more than natural rock formations with scree slopes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheep2_small.jpg similar to many formations that can be found in desert areas on Earth. Yes, they are still of interest but only from a geological point of view.


I hope that you're getting the best out of your new binoculars, burton07, and that you've had the chance to look at star clusters and the Andromeda Galaxy http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...h-alpha%29.jpg.