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Old 26-11-2011, 20:30
emails
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i hope this does better than begle 2
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Old 26-11-2011, 20:41
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i hope this does better than begle 2
Well, emails, as NASA have spent $2.5 billion on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory, it should do better than the unfortunate Beagle 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 which cost a mere $120 million.
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Old 26-11-2011, 21:43
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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.
that's what they want you to think.
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Old 26-11-2011, 22:40
emails
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Well, emails, as NASA have spent $2.5 billion on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory, it should do better than the unfortunate Beagle 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 which cost a mere $120 million.
well thats a fair difference in price
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Old 26-11-2011, 22:49
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that's what they want you to think.
I certainly will never take any notice of the nonsense you peddle.
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Old 26-11-2011, 23:06
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Well, emails, as NASA have spent $2.5 billion on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory, it should do better than the unfortunate Beagle 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 which cost a mere $120 million.
I suspect that the $2.5 billion was for the whole mission whereas the $120 is just for Beagle and not the launch or orbiter. Interplanetary launches are VERY expensive
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Old 26-11-2011, 23:09
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I suspect that the $2.5 billion was for the whole mission whereas the $120 is just for Beagle and not the launch or orbiter. Interplanetary launches are VERY expensive
I never had any faith that Beagle would be successful. I though it was just one expensive publicity stunt.
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Old 26-11-2011, 23:10
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I certainly will never take any notice of the nonsense you peddle.
thank you Henry.
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Old 26-11-2011, 23:17
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I never had any faith that Beagle would be successful. I though it was just one expensive publicity stunt.
I don't agree that it was just a publicity stunt but there are some serious questions that should have been answered about the finance and management.
Hence the quote from ESA
ESA inquiry concluded that "... there were programmatic and organisational reasons that led to a significantly higher risk of Beagle 2 failure, than otherwise might have been the case

I think there was publicity stunts to try and raise funds but it was doomed by the serious mismanagement.
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Old 27-11-2011, 00:27
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that's what they want you to think.
The pictures l've seen were taken by the European Mars Express orbiter (not a US probe) and, close up, they are a bit like the worn mesas of Utah state and they are quite clearly geological in origin.

I suspect that the $2.5 billion was for the whole mission whereas the $120 is just for Beagle and not the launch or orbiter. Interplanetary launches are VERY expensive
True but the electronic turkey that was Beagle 2 actually hitched a last minute ride with the European Mars Express orbiter that already destined for Mars anyway so there was no real launch cost for Beagle 2 if you see what l mean. The former turned out to be a lamentable failure* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4542174.stm whilst the latter was a stunning success http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Express.

*The Ghoul of Mars strikes again and I'm sure that it'll take an interest in the Mars Science Laboratory aka Curiosity that's now in its way to the Red Planet! (it's already dispatched Phobos-Grunt to an early demise)
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Old 04-12-2011, 17:23
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Phobos-Grunt Mars probe is a gonner

lt is looking increasingly grim for Russia's Mars mission Phobos-Grunt, which has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November. Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16010332

Another success notched up by the Ghoul of Mars, then.

UK space radar project initiated

The UK government is to kick-start an innovative project to fly radar satellites around the Earth, with an initial investment of £21m. lt is hoped that a series of satellites could eventually be launched, enabling any place on Earth to be imaged inside 24 hours - a powerful capability.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15899186

Scientists find two giant black holes

Scientists have discovered two of the largest black holes ever located, each with a mass about 10 billion times greater than that of the sun. These black holes are so large that their “event horizons” - the region within which nothing can escape their pull, not even light - are seven times greater than our entire solar system.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226213498407
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Old 04-12-2011, 17:42
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There is a fantastic torrent of a 1984 BBC Horizon Programme about the moon landings past and (then) the future Space Station. It includes some of the audio of the BBC's live coverage of the landings with James Burke (IIRK The Video is lost after being wiped).

Follow the link below to download the programme.

http://eztv.it/ep/31579/bbc-horizon-...x-mp3-mvgroup/
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Old 09-12-2011, 20:40
Baldrick Phd
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There is a fantastic torrent of a 1984 BBC Horizon Programme about the moon landings past and (then) the future Space Station. It includes some of the audio of the BBC's live coverage of the landings with James Burke (IIRK The Video is lost after being wiped).

Follow the link below to download the programme.

http://eztv.it/ep/31579/bbc-horizon-...x-mp3-mvgroup/
Thank you for that.

Just been watching Apollo 13 and me being a total geek went to check some thing on the internet. Came across this comment

Ron Howard stated that, after the first test preview of the film, one of the comment cards indicated "total disdain"; the audience member had written that it was a "typical Hollywood" ending and that the crew would never have survived
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Old 13-12-2011, 17:27
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"To me, this is the single most powerful piece of evidence for liquid water at Mars that has been discovered by the Opportunity rover," the Cornell University researcher told journalists..."This stuff formed right here. There was a fracture in the rock, water flowed through it, gypsum was precipitated from the water. End of story. There's no ambiguity."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16082935

In other words, this Calcium Sulphate mineral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsum can only be formed by deposition from an aqueous environment and that clearly indicates that Mars had liquid water (and a thicker atmosphere) in the far past.

Mention of the far past reminds me that the Scientific American archives http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...c_id=MARKETING are now open for a short period so that you can read about a prescient prediction from 1873 http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...041873-210.pdf that Mars was a cold and barren place, the discovery of Mars' moons http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...81877-144a.pdf in 1877 and a couple of discussions about sending signals to Mars:
http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...61909-479c.pdf
http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...61909-479c.pdf
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Old 13-12-2011, 22:27
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I just had to go to the car quickly and happened to see a shooting star. I was looking at Orion and there it was.

I just looked online to see if anything is happening tonight and there is a meteor shower so that explains it. Lol
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Old 13-12-2011, 22:31
RobinOfLoxley
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Santa Claus on a practice run
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Old 14-12-2011, 00:07
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I just had to go to the car quickly and happened to see a shooting star. I was looking at Orion and there it was.

I just looked online to see if anything is happening tonight and there is a meteor shower so that explains it. Lol
Yep, StarSupernova, it could indeed have been a meteor from the current Geminid meteor shower: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/gem...ry?id=15148018
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Old 14-12-2011, 00:59
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Yep, StarSupernova, it could indeed have been a meteor from the current Geminid meteor shower: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/gem...ry?id=15148018


I thought so.
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Old 14-12-2011, 20:25
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An abundance of medium-sized worlds is challenging planet-formation models...Their very existence upsets conventional models of planetary formation and, furthermore, most of them are in tight orbits around their host star, precisely where the modellers say they shouldn’t be.
http://www.nature.com/news/super-ear...eadache-1.9636

This new set of planets sized between Earth and Neptune is certainly upsetting the existing theories of solar system formation which will now have to be revised in that light of recent planetary discoveries.

If you look closely at the Super-Earths Rising diagram in that article and click on it, you'll see that Earth is still in a class of its own and that no real matches have been found yet. That's not because Earth-sized planets aren't out there but because the detection methods and analyses have to be refined and further developed so that they can actually start picking up planets that are roughly the same mass as Earth and Venus.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before that happens and only a few years ago, it was only planets with the mass of Jupiter or above that were capable of being discovered.
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Old 17-12-2011, 17:27
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...in our very own galaxy

Researchers have spotted a giant gas cloud spiralling into the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's centre. Though it is known that black holes draw in everything nearby, it will be the first chance to see one consume such a cloud.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16178112

Russian Soyuz launches six satellites from ESA's launchpad in South America

A Russian Soyuz rocket has launched from French Guiana - only the second such vehicle to fly out of the territory's new Sinnamary spaceport. The Soyuz put six satellites in orbit, including France's new Pleiades-1 high-resolution imaging spacecraft.

Comet crashes into neutron star...and doesn't survive

A spectacular light show on Christmas day 2010 may have been the first detection of a comet crashing into a neutron star.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ight-show.html
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Old 18-12-2011, 11:29
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Tonight on BBC2 @ 9:00pm

A Night with the Stars

For one night only, Professor Brian Cox goes unplugged in a specially recorded programme from the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In his own inimitable style, Brian takes an audience of famous faces, scientists and members of the public on a journey through some of the most challenging concepts.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018nn7l
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Old 18-12-2011, 13:02
gemma-the-husky
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[partial quote]

Phobos-Grunt Mars probe is a gonner

lt is looking increasingly grim for Russia's Mars mission Phobos-Grunt, which has been stuck circling the Earth since its launch in early November. Apart from some brief radio contact with the wayward probe just over a week ago, there has been total silence from the spacecraft.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16010332

Another success notched up by the Ghoul of Mars, then.
told you, but I was rubbished. It's probably got there, or on it's way - but they want to keep it all secret.

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Spoiler

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Old 18-12-2011, 14:04
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told you, but I was rubbished. It's probably got there, or on it's way - but they want to keep it all secret.

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Spoiler

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Ahem, that's an astronautical joke really - there is no "Ghoul of Mars" trying to hide Mars from Earth's prying ptobes. As with with the recently deceased Phobos-Grunt probe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16221975, it was engineering failure that did that one in and it was sheer bungling incompetence that killed off the Mars Climate Orbiter probe:

NASA lost a 125 million Mars orbiter because a Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agencys team used the more conventional metric system for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.

http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/t...tem?_s=PM:TECH

So far, none of the high resolution images from either NASA or ESA orbiters or landers have shown any signs of canals, habitations, etc. What they have indicated is that Mars was warmer, wetter and had liquid water on the planet's surface in the far past but that through a series of circumstances, Mars became a colder, dryer and inhospitable place unsuited to life.
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Old 20-12-2011, 19:17
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Just noticed that they've discovered two Earth sized rocky planets, Kepler 22e and Kepler 22f. The first two extrasolar planets the size of Earth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16268950
http://www.space.com/13990-2-earth-s...st-worlds.html

Very promising news indeed.
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Old 21-12-2011, 19:24
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Just noticed that they've discovered two Earth sized rocky planets, Kepler 22e and Kepler 22f. The first two extrasolar planets the size of Earth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16268950
http://www.space.com/13990-2-earth-s...st-worlds.html

Very promising news indeed.
These two new broadly Earth-sized exoplanets have been found within the same solar system although they might be a bit more massive than Earth and so the surface gravity might be stronger.

The unfortunate thing is that they are Mercury "roasters" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_planet very close to their parent star and well outside the ecosphere habitable zone so the chances of life are potentially remote.

Despite all the previous hype, we are only now at last getting down to the level of terrestrial planets that are Earth-sized. Even though these two planets aren't in themselves likely abodes of life, it is now only a matter of time before Earth-sized planets are found in the middle of their solar system's ecospheres.

There are additional articles here:
http://www.nature.com/news/kepler-di...planets-1.9688
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture10780.html
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