Aces High Bulletin Board

General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Chairboy on January 24, 2004, 11:18:58 PM

Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Chairboy on January 24, 2004, 11:18:58 PM
Watching NASA TV, preliminary report is that it has landed succesfully.  They have received telemetry from it during the rolling phase.  

Way to go, guys!
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Chairboy on January 24, 2004, 11:23:27 PM
Everyone in the control room at JPL just got real quiet....   and just got the message 'We have a no-fault-tone.'.  Any everyone cheers again!  This means that the lander feels it is landed properly.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: FUNKED1 on January 24, 2004, 11:38:09 PM
Hooray for middle class welfare.  :)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Saurdaukar on January 25, 2004, 12:06:49 AM
NASA TV?  What uber cable company is this?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Chairboy on January 25, 2004, 12:17:31 AM
I was watching it online.  Some satellite companies have NASA TV, like Dish Network.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: vorticon on January 25, 2004, 12:45:32 AM
thus proving succesfully that america already has a anti-non american probe missile defence system in place on mars ;)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: SOB on January 25, 2004, 01:00:17 AM
Quote
Originally posted by Saurdaukar
NASA TV?  What uber cable company is this?

LOL, you'll generally find NASA TV broacast on your local public access station.  It's paid for by public funding, so the broadcast feed is given away, and it's used as fill.  I don't know if I've ever seen it as an actual channel by itself.  Either way it's 90% boring, 5% mildly interesting, and 5% worth watching.  :)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Bodhi on January 25, 2004, 02:34:43 AM
Quote
Originally posted by vorticon
thus proving succesfully that america already has a anti-non american probe missile defence system in place on mars ;)


:rofl :rofl :rofl :rofl :rofl

Duedel and the rest of the euro trash will be along shortly to make just that accusation!
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Tuomio on January 25, 2004, 04:46:28 AM
Whoa it seems theyre in a crater, strange place, not a single rock around.

(http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/001/1P128287426EFF0000P2303L2M1.JPG)

(http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/001/1P128287608EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Otto on January 25, 2004, 03:14:59 PM
NASA has done a great job and needs to be thanked by the World Community.   The money to fund this was well spent.   The idea that mankind can survive on Earth alone is silly.   If the ice on the Martian polar caps can be melted and the oxygen release (H2O) it's just possible that an atmosphere will be generated that can trap solar heat and warm Mars to the point where it is habitable.  After that, water will flow and plants will grow.

   I'd rather raise my head and look at the stars than lower it and hope for the best.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: majic on January 25, 2004, 03:51:46 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Otto


   I'd rather raise my head and look at the stars than lower it and hope for the best.


Nicely put.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: CyranoAH on January 25, 2004, 04:03:57 PM
WTG NASA!!

In Europe we have to learn that you can't spend 10 times less in a martian rover and expect it to have a large enough failure margin for such a demanding mission.

If we want to do something BIG, inter-agencies cooperation is vital.

Imagine the robotics/telecommand expertise of NASA combined with Energy management and Life support experience from RSA, and instruments from Europe, Japan, Canada...

The ISS is good proof of it (damn good piece of engineering), so I hope we can work together to go even further.

Daniel
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Bodhi on January 25, 2004, 04:25:30 PM
Quote
Originally posted by CyranoAH
WTG NASA!!

In Europe we have to learn that you can't spend 10 times less in a martian rover and expect it to have a large enough failure margin for such a demanding mission.

If we want to do something BIG, inter-agencies cooperation is vital.

Imagine the robotics/telecommand expertise of NASA combined with Energy management and Life support experience from RSA, and instruments from Europe, Japan, Canada...

The ISS is good proof of it (damn good piece of engineering), so I hope we can work together to go even further.

Daniel



ditto
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: lord dolf vader on January 25, 2004, 05:31:33 PM
all of us merrily holding hands and batting eyelashes at each other. what a nice delusion floyd could write a song about it its so twisted...
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Angus on January 25, 2004, 05:37:04 PM
hmm.
quote:
"NASA has done a great job and needs to be thanked by the World Community. The money to fund this was well spent. The idea that mankind can survive on Earth alone is silly. If the ice on the Martian polar caps can be melted and the oxygen release (H2O) it's just possible that an atmosphere will be generated that can trap solar heat and warm Mars to the point where it is habitable. After that, water will flow and plants will grow"

The Earth is quite a bit nicer than Mars, yet we humans are screwing it up so badly that we think we need to start terraforming another planet as a back up.
Isn't this getting the water from the other side of the pond?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 25, 2004, 05:45:29 PM
Or taking coals to Newcastle.

But nice to see more pictures.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Saurdaukar on January 25, 2004, 06:01:34 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Otto
NASA has done a great job, blah, blah, blah


Sorry for hijack - this just came to me.  Otto, do you own Otto's in WG?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Holden McGroin on January 25, 2004, 06:28:42 PM
700 million for a coupla' rovers on Mars.  What a waste.  Think of how many smart weapons we could have purchased, or how much money we could have poured down a hole on some pork program.

Probably could have fully funded the cow fart study.  Geez what a waste.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dinger on January 25, 2004, 07:27:30 PM
yeah, of course, international, interagency cooperation, however good it is for science, doesn't really spur funding.  International space agency?  Neither the US nor the RUssian Federation wants to spend the proper amount of cash on that.

Heck, ESA's mission to mars was as much about science as it was showing that European industry could make it to Mars without US involvement.
GWB's wanting to spend billions of dollars going to mars and the moon again isn't about science or international collaboration; it's about national prestige.

And terraforming Mars is an idea best left to the science fiction books.  If we screw up the Earth so bad it's cheaper to convert an inhospitable planet to human habitability than fix our problems here, we deserve to die as a race.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Otto on January 25, 2004, 07:41:48 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Saurdaukar
Sorry for hijack - this just came to me.  Otto, do you own Otto's in WG?


  Saur,

 Damn!  No I don't.  In fact I've never even eaten there.  But I think tomorrow I'm going up there for lunch and tell the guy that he's know around the world for posting a lot of nonsense on a BB run by guys who fly imaginary airplanes in cyber-space and call each other names.   I'm sure he'll understand.....:)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Chairboy on January 25, 2004, 08:51:55 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Dinger
And terraforming Mars is an idea best left to the science fiction books.  If we screw up the Earth so bad it's cheaper to convert an inhospitable planet to human habitability than fix our problems here, we deserve to die as a race.


If we've screwed up the mainland USA soooo much that we should make Hawaii a state, then we deserve to die as a race.

Is that what you're saying?  No, of course not.  Mars is another place to live, and we could conceivably terraform it.  You're making a stupid straw man argument by suggesting the only reason we'd terraform it is because it's cheaper then fixing pollution at home.

Here's an alternate reason we might:  Because it's ANOTHER PLACE TO LIVE.  Why did people leave europe and settle on North America?  Why did people wander across the plains, spreading humanity until it was on six of seven continents?  

For the same reason we might eventually modify Mars to be earthlike, so we can have more space.

By the way, if you feel so strongly that we still deserve to die as a race, then by all means take the first step yourself and leave the rest of us to make our own decisions about whether or not you're right.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dinger on January 25, 2004, 10:40:52 PM
First off Chairboy, "Straw Man" is where someone constructs an argument held by no one for the pure purpose of destroying it.

Should you bother to read what others actually say, you will find Otto making just the argument I was responding to.

Quote

By the way, if you feel so strongly that we still deserve to die as a race, then by all means take the first step yourself and leave the rest of us to make our own decisions about whether or not you're right


now this is a classic fallacy of complex question. I did not say I felt that we deserve to die as a race. I said that if we screwed things up so badly that terraforming seemed like a cheap solution to our environmental problems, we deserved to die. And what was that line from The Lord of the Rings, anyway?

And terraforming Mars isn't like colonizing the Americas or Hawaii. Those places already had people living in them, and thus it wasn't an impossibly expensive venture.
You can talk about terraforming all you want, and sure, it sounds cool.  When it becomes economically feasible to commission a study to see how possible it is, then we'll talk.

And by the way, here's the full logic:

Terraforming involves massive manipulation of a planet's environment to make it livable.
Mars is far away, and getting there is very expensive.
Hence, it makes more sense to use the technologies one would employ in terraforming on the earth first.

Lebensraum may be a good idea, but whenever you bring it up, you need to look at the price tag. If terraforming Mars is dirt cheap, say under a billion human lives, it may be worth it.  Odds are it's not, and pouring tons of money into some hugely expensive and impractical pipe dream instead of addressing real social and environmental problems on earth is irresponsible.
Now go take your silly fallacies into someone else's woods please.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: FUNKED1 on January 25, 2004, 10:45:07 PM
Geezus Dinger for a commie rat you sure sound a lot like Bjorn Lomborg.  :aok
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dinger on January 25, 2004, 11:05:42 PM
I dunno funked.  I gotta say, thinking about _how_ you would go about terraforming mars is pretty amusing.


First, you get the Oak Ridge boys to make a dozen of the biggest H-Bombs ye have ever seen....

Right now we send two overgrown golf-carts to Mars and it costs us something on the order of $3 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  All of a sudden people start talking about massive environmental manipulation of a distant planet as if were something feasible. Huh?  We couldn't even afford to nuke mars into an Asteroid, let alone convert it into a second Earth.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: FUNKED1 on January 25, 2004, 11:10:44 PM
T'was a compliment, Dingo.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: SunTracker on January 25, 2004, 11:48:53 PM
Mars cannot support an atmoshphere due to its lack of a magnetic field.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 26, 2004, 04:12:30 AM
That's not true SunTracker. The atmosphere is scoured by the solar winds - but with terraforming you have something continually producing the atmosphere that's lost.

Anyway, Mars would take thousands of years to develop a breatheable atmosphere.

It's amusing that people are willing to say environmental protectionism is all bollocks in one breath, then in another give tacit agreement to its conclusions and say 'the Earth is screwed lets move house.'
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Angus on January 26, 2004, 09:11:27 AM
Think of all the unhabitable areas of our earth. Well, each and every one of them is like Paradise compared to Mars.
However, since there has been water running on the surface of Mars, there may yet be some life there. That's gonna be the big first question!
BTW, what is the gravity of mars compared to earth?It's not that much smaller is it?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: -dead- on January 26, 2004, 10:03:12 AM
People seem to me to overlook a couple of things in the pros and cons of terraforming. Aside from the "we can't do it yet" problem, of course.

1. Other things aside from pollution could make the Earth uninhabitable - ie a great big meteor strike. I know the media likes to caricature the US population as possessing goldfish-like memory spans but surely you lot haven't forgotten those two Hollywood turkeys.. er.. I mean blockbusters, "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" that quickly!?! At least not without expensive therapy to remove the emotionally scarring. ;) It strikes me (obvious pun) that colonizing Mars would seem a pretty smart move as far as not putting all our eggs (and sperm) in one basket goes. It behoves us as a species to spread out to a few other targets in the enormous shooting gallery that is the solar system if we want to survive - a goal that after all seems like "the name of the game".

2. If we investigate terraforming Mars we might make a few technological discoveries on how to make Earth much more habitable too. Seems obvious that if you can make Mars habitable by mucking about with the atmosphere, then cleaning up a polluted Earth might get easier too.

Mind you, if there is life on Mars already, then terraforming will no doubt make it extinct. That would certainly make it a tough choice: should we extinguish the first ET lifeform we ever met or not?

Sure terraforming is a big and rather iffy project, but goals do appear to be important, and getting off this rock and onto a few others should have a fairly high priority for us as a species.
Title: Re: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Nakhui on January 26, 2004, 10:20:13 AM
Quote
Originally posted by Chairboy
Watching NASA TV, preliminary report is that it has landed succesfully.  They have received telemetry from it during the rolling phase.  

Way to go, guys!


It's AWESOME!!
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: AKS\/\/ulfe on January 26, 2004, 10:26:24 AM
Quote
Originally posted by SunTracker
Mars cannot support an atmoshphere due to its lack of a magnetic field.


This is the second or third time in a week or two I've seen this stated - and it completely baffles me how someone invented this idea.

Mars already has an atmosphere, but since the planet itself is a little over half the size of Earth and about 1/10th the mass of Earth - it won't be able to retain an atmosphere nearly as thick as Earth's. So if it were altered to have a breathable atmosphere, it'd probably be a lot like being on top of Mt. Everest.
-SW
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: FUNKED1 on January 26, 2004, 11:08:14 AM
Ppl be watchin too much Sci-Fi channel.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 26, 2004, 12:19:36 PM
It's nothing to do with size, AKSwulfe. It's to do with the fact that Mars does not have the fluid core like the Earth as. Consequently it does not have a global magnetic field producing an ionsphere which would protect the planet from the solar winds. Without that, any atmosphere would constantly degrade. There is however some localised field which is locked into parts of the surface.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Duedel on January 26, 2004, 12:45:36 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Bodhi
Duedel and the rest of the euro trash will be along shortly to make just that accusation!

Bodhi, Bodhi, Bodhi sometimes u could be so mean: "Euro trash".
Thats really evil.
Everybody knows that the USA is on Mars to find WMD and to free the little red stones from the evil big Saddamstone.

BTW WTG Nasa!!! Great that both roboters landed succesfully. No go and find Beagle :D
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: AKS\/\/ulfe on January 26, 2004, 01:34:48 PM
The mass has to do with it retaining an atmosphere, and an active core would have to do with it producing more atmosphere through volcanic eruptions.

The magnetic core primarily creates the magnetosphere which in turn creates the Van Allen Radiation belts, shielding us from harmful radiation, and it also redirects charged particles to the N and S poles (Auroras). I haven't seen any correlation between a magnetic core and retaining an atmosphere in my readings.
-SW
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 26, 2004, 02:02:50 PM
Without a liquid core, you can't have a magnetic field. Without the magnetic field, the ionosphere is battered by the solar winds and you have no atmosphere. This explains it.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast31jan_1.htm

The relationship between fluid core and magnetism on mars is talked about here.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/12/15_mars.html
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: AKS\/\/ulfe on January 26, 2004, 02:06:32 PM
I already know that the liquid iron core causes the magnetic field, I just didn't know it was needed to retain an atmosphere because I hadn't seen that mentioned anywhere before.

Thanks for the link(s) Dowding.
-SW
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 26, 2004, 02:10:15 PM
No problem. I like the mrblack avatard. :aok
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Vulcan on January 26, 2004, 02:15:02 PM
Are we taking bets on how long it takes lil Marvin Martian to disconnect the solar panel?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Rude on January 26, 2004, 02:29:58 PM
Quote
Originally posted by lord dolf vader
all of us merrily holding hands and batting eyelashes at each other. what a nice delusion floyd could write a song about it its so twisted...


Darn tootin!!!

That money should have been given to unemployed folks to sit on their arses until the cab paid for by the DNC comes by to take them to the polling booth.

Outrageous!!!
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: AKS\/\/ulfe on January 26, 2004, 07:44:26 PM
Thanks Dowding. Would you like to see the cat's DD-214? (http://cmw.dailymoviereviews.com/cwm/cwm/freak3.gif)
-SW
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Dowding on January 27, 2004, 05:57:13 AM
No, we have photographic evidence of the cat at work. We don't need supporting documentation. ;)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Duedel on January 27, 2004, 06:09:45 AM
What the hell is a DD-214?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Ping on January 27, 2004, 06:23:36 AM
I gather that a DD214 is a military record of an individual.
In the case of MrBlack a DD=Doctored Document. :D
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: SunTracker on January 27, 2004, 07:19:12 AM
There was a show on The Learning Channel about Mar's lack of a magnetic field.  The hypothesis is that Mar's core cooled too much, which turned it from liquid to solid.  This in turn caused the protective magnetic fields to cease, and solar wind and radiation somehow destroyed the atmosphere.  Mars still has an atmosphere, about 1% as dense as Earth's.

But its not Mars we need to worry about.  Another hypothesis states the Earth's core is cooling.  Something like 20 degrees celcius since the 1500s.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Ping on January 27, 2004, 07:28:30 AM
I'm gathering that to have tornadoes and extreme sand storms it would have to have some form of atmosphere. Does anyone know what its composed of? Links that could detail it?
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Nakhui on January 27, 2004, 08:25:05 AM
Quote
Originally posted by Ping
I gather that a DD214 is a military record of an individual.
In the case of MrBlack a DD=Doctored Document. :D


A DD214 is your discharge papers from the military.
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Nakhui on January 27, 2004, 08:31:55 AM
Quote
Originally posted by -dead-
People seem to me to overlook a couple of things in the pros and cons of terraforming. Aside from the "we can't do it yet" problem, of course.



You're making it way toooo complicated...

If there was life on Mars.... that means billions and billions of years ago... Mars was covered with life... teaming with flora, fona, dinosaurs....

And the churning and burning of a bazillion years... that flora, fona, dinosaur was compacted, pressurized, turned into juice and squeezed into black gold!

Why do you think we're going to Mars, because Bush thinks there's OIL there!!!

OIL don't need no atmospere!

It's below the ground!

Take another look at that Rover arm! It's an OIL Derek with a diamond head drill bit!
Seismagraph!
Sonar!
And a built in Gas Chromatograph to measure Butaine, Aromatics and BTUs!

Come on boyz! We got some drilling to do!

YeeeHAW!
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Tuomio on January 27, 2004, 08:36:42 AM
I bet the science team has to be drugged to hold their horses..

(http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/002/1P128373644EFF0200P2211L2M1.JPG)
Title: The Opportunity has Landed!
Post by: Otto on January 27, 2004, 10:39:51 AM
Quote
Originally posted by Nakhui

Why do you think we're going to Mars, because Bush thinks there's OIL there!!!


Come on boyz! We got some drilling to do!

YeeeHAW!


I want the contract for the pipeline.....:D