What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I for one am very happy that this mission is turning out to be a great success. I don't see much difference in the Mars landscape since the Last one, but I guess that was to be expected.

I just hope that 'Sleepy Hollow' doesn't turn out to be quicksand http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

What do you all think of the mission so far?

Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Looks like Utah.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

wonder how long this one will Last before J'onn gets to it...

come on, all those probes lost and your gonna tell me it's natural causes? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

PBS is supposed to have some special tonight with the new pictures comming from there. Looking forward to it.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I've been a big NASA fan since I was 6, when men were landing on the moon. I'm glad we've finally got a successful mission to Mars in the past few years. Don't know what it is about Mars and space missions. Maybe someone doesn't want us snooping up there?

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Well they just aren't interesting unless they fail for some innane reason. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon6.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I think things will get much more interesting once the rover starts roving. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

So when is the rover going to start driving around, exploring?

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Sh*t that thing didn't land on Mars. It's sitting in my Uncle Bob's back 40 in lower Texas. He has been taking pot shots at it with his varment rifle. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

All I can say is it is about time they succeeded. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif I guess the new calculators worked.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Full credit to NASA for landing Spirit. I think that the initial photos are phenomenal, and look forward to some even better shots when the rover starts trundling around. Even better when Opportunity lands.

Over this side of the pond, we are a bit gutted that our very own British Beagle 2, which landed (or was meant to) on Christmas Day, has disappeared off the face of the planet. They are going to try and contact it again over the next week, but if it does not get in contact by 14 Jan, all bets are off (apparently) - is it the intervention of little green men or just bloody bad luck??

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

i'm voting it's little green men, just because.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yeah I know, I would love to have seen it succeed if only to see the guy running the Beagle2 project catapulted to international fame. You know the one, he looks like he should be into organic gardening, real ale and steam engines rather than space-robotics. He's got utterly insane facial hair and a broad west country accent (alroight tharr moi luvvlies?) and I was really looking forward to the look on america's face when he suddenly appeared all over international news. I'm pretty sure that guy would need subtitles on US telly.

Seriously though, how is this rover so different from that one that landed a few years back? That sent back images very similar (to my eyes) to the ones we are seeing now.

EDIT: A Beagle2 press conference to announce the results of the latest contact attempt to be held in about 2 hours... http://www.beagle2.com/news/index.htm

[ January 07, 2004, 11:44: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

This rover is much, much bigger. Much bigger.

It also does new and different things.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Don't worry - the Nova show on Saturday was the same as the one on Tuesday except they showed a single colour photograph.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

OK, so it's bigger than the Last lander, but how is it better?

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

The new rovers are better because:

1. It has a much wider suspension for better stability.

2. The robotic arm carries a grinder that is able to take specimens, plus instruments to test them.

3. There is a much larger solar array to power the extra equipment.

4. The computer hardware and software are better.

There are probably other things that I have forgotten, or that weren't mentioned in the show. I guess I'll have to wait for some of the results to be published to learn the rest, unless anyone else knows...

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Only weighs 50% more, but is now the size of a golf cart, as opposed to a RC racer.

More room for more stuff. More stuff to do more things. More things doing to be find more things out.

[ January 07, 2004, 16:02: Message edited by: Loser ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Anyone know of some good sites to follow the mars mission? The NASA site seems a bit 'lacking' and the photos are actually quite small.

Cheers!

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yea, quite lame...hopefully things will be shown soon, probably Discovery or Learning Channel

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I missed the PBS show Last night, but I did see the one on Saturday. It's true that these rovers weigh 50% more the Last ones. The big problem that they had to overcome was that they had to fit them into the same sized capsules, which meant they had to figure out how to fold them up for transport, and unfold them on landing. They had to rework both the airbag and the parachute designs. So far, it looks as though it worked. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon6.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I just heard on the news that the images, the color ones, are fantastic. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Big smiles.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

[quote]Originally posted by dogscoff:
[QB] <font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">What worries me is that they will get photo's of Wurzel's wrecked spaceship, with a small martian standing there with a ray gun saying "Geetttt Orrrfffff Moii Lannnnndd Yeww Wazoks"

What is wrong with organic gardening and real ale? Guilty on both counts m'lord. And I have no facial hair, infact I have no hair on my head anywhere (except up the nose and in my ears I suppose)

Reality check - Wurzel becomes Captain on the next series of Enterprise, "alroight yewww klingon bahhhhstaahhds, preepair too foir that ol' muck spreader, roight"

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I'll be interested seeing what kind of landing the next rover makes.
If sucessful, does anyone know how far apart they will be? Or how fast and far they can go?
Would be way cool to see them taking pictures of each other! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I think it was mentioned that the rovers' missions will Last about 3 months. That gives lots of time to explore once they start roving.

The problem with the previous "Pathfinder" mission was that the NASA guys said there wasn't enough "science" on/from it. The new rovers as mentioned already are much larger and packed with lots of excellent instruments!

Let's just hope the other rover lands safely too!

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I wish we had a camera crew there to watch the landing in real time not computer generated. I could see some alien on Mars looking into the sky thinking WTH? That is one HUGE piece of hail. Oh well I digress.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I believe they are on opposite sides of the world.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I wonder if the Discovery Channel will do somthing on this? It seems like a prime oppurtunity for a good hour long feature or documentary.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I was thinking it's a shame that one of them isn't close enough to the Beagle 2 to roll over and give it a kick and see if that doesn't get that one working. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">They're two satellites in permanent orbit of mars, they are the Global Surveyor and a weather satellite.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">There are several permanent orbitting sattelites areound Mars. I am not sure but I suspect they can relay Messages in a pinch. To do that for all the communications isn't that efficent I don't think though. It's easier for the rover to track in on the Earth far away then to track a sattelite whipping about in a close mars orbit. Especially since the orbiters useally go into a polar orbit to make coverage of the entire planet easier. Your windows of communication would be much smaller than with direct comm back to earth. The limiting factor in bandwith isn't the transmitting power as much as it is the line of sight window. Unless you put the mars orbitter in a geo-synch orbit, and then it's not much good for anything but relaying Messages, which is an aweful waste of resources.

With a big enough antenna on Earth you could probably pick up a transmitter on mars not much bigger then a cell phone. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo
I'm not a sattelite communications expert, but I play one on tv...

[ January 09, 2004, 11:57: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I thought they already had something like this? I was thinking that is why they could only try at certain times to communicate with the Beagle because they had to wait for the sat. to be in the right orbit to recieve the transmission from the surface. Maybe I was mistaken. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif Wouldn't be the first time, that's for sure. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Hot diggity damn!! We're finally getting a president that's talking about expanding the space program. Although i doubt if men will land on the moon again before Bush leaves office, let alone before I die, it's still good to hear something like this from a sitting president. I can't wait to see what happens.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

His father said something similar and nothing came of it. NASA estimated that getting to Mars would cost $400 Billion and suddenly everyone forgot about space programs. Rather than make some big, vague, grandiose statement of 'values' and 'idealism' we need a concrete and reachable goal. A genuinely reusable orbital vehicle would be a good, solid goal. The current shuttles are just experimental vehicles forced to serve as working shuttles. They are essentially disassembled and rebuilt after each flight. NOT cheap and not genuinely re-usable! We need that 'space plane' to actually get developed so that the cost of going into orbit can drop by 90 percent or so. From there it will be dramatically easier to get to Mars or anyplace else we want to go.

[ January 09, 2004, 22:26: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

I was thinking that the "space plane" was pretty close to being done (as far as development goes) and that they were going to use a SCRAM jet/rocket engine. Been a while but I can't remember the name otherwise I would do a google search.

Also, we will see many people saying why spend that kind of money for science fiction (not me by the way) when we need to do X,Y,Z. But I heard a great come back, If the King and Queen of Spain decided NOT to fund Christopher Columbus, where would the world be today.

The pessimist in me thinks that there are too many people that would like to go back in time and stop Columbus from discovering the new world, sorry Rutha, though I don't doubt Erickson made it over here earlier, but they didn't have the cash to capitalize on it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

I have read some books from people that think by-passing the moon and just head straight to Mars is the best way to go, but hell I can see the moon almost every night, what a symbol if we can set something up permanently.

I hope we do it, I really do.

[ January 10, 2004, 03:55: Message edited by: Narrew ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

It is not THAT expensive. $400 billions are not going to be spend in one year. War in Iraq alone costs around ~100 billions. I think Mars landing is feasible in next 20-30 years.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well I wouldn't have turned down Columbus for budget reasons...

... on the other hand, wiping out all the indigenous cultures of the Americas wasn't cool in my book.

I also don't think "lack of cash" explains why the Scandinavian colonists left.

But I'm mainly just being contrary. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

PvK

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Those English, French, Spanish and Portugese conquerors were nasty people... Of course, you have to keep in mind that most of the indigenous peoples that died died from diseases carried by Europeans for which they had no immunity to at all, and so the diseases were fatal, rather than just inconveniences.

[ January 10, 2004, 22:51: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

A few years back, there was a program to design a truly reusable space vehicle called "Venturestar," or perhaps "Venture Star." That may be what was Narrew was referring to below for the topic of a Google search.

[ January 11, 2004, 03:08: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

According to this article, it is expected that Bush will announce a manned mission to Mars. Also, a Moon base is to be constructed within the next 15 years.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994551

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Isn't it interesting to see how the administration is quick to "latch" on to the early success of the latest Mars mission and grab the positive publicity and make all these grand statements about future exploration...when the real guys are making it really happen at NASA despite facing cuts and cuts for the Last two decades?

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I was listening to Coast to Coast on the way home late one night a month or 2 ago and who ever was speaking said that Bush was going to make an announcement to get back into space, the thing is he may be using the the recent success as the "right" time, but it sure beats talking about it right after the Last shuttle disaster or a "lull" in news, because you can be sure that there will be many people saying why spend the money to go "back to space, lets spend it at home", so I am glad he has brought it up because we will need all the positive momentum we can get.

Of course I am biased, I wish we hadn't stopped working in space all those years ago, the longer we take to get back at it, the longer it will be until private enterprises get involved, and until then it will just be governments doing it.

And of course I have read too many Sci-Fi books about space yards and exploration, so I can be labeled naive.


ps yea I think it was the Venture Star, going to look it up now...

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

yep it was VentureStar, but it was cancled in 2001, doh, I could have sworn that I heard that a place in eastern Washington (in the flat planes west of Spokane) was in the running for a space port/launch site, damn that sucks, now what they going to use, the shuttle cant Last much longer, maybe if there is some funding, they will restart VentureStar, but more than likely someone else will have a "pet project" and they will start all over.

I swear, who ever thought it was a good idea to destroy all the Saturn Rocket blueprints should be whipped with a wet noodle *sigh* http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Right, as Oleg says not only were the plans not destroyed, I'd venture a guess that you could probably buy a set of the schematics yourself if you looked hard enough. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif But the difficult part would be recreating all the factories and tooling used by the thousands of subcontractors making components all over the place. It would probably be more expensive to do it the second time around, even adjusting dollars for inflation.

[ January 12, 2004, 14:03: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

Say what you want about the politics of the situation, but it would be nearly impossible to achieve anything in the space program without presidential support. I'm glad the current president approves, and hope the next one does. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

It's also good that we have those old programs to look back at. We generally learn more from our failures than our successes.

[ January 12, 2004, 16:28: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

DOH http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif can't belive I was a dupe of an urban legend. Well, the Saturn might be 60's tech, but I thought they were still the highest thrust ability next to them massive Russian rocket?

It till be interesting to see which way they go, maybe they will use a huge magnetic rail gun to throw large payloads into space http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's an urban legend. We can make an exact copy of SaturnV now. But that would be insane - where will you get all that 60's technology http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif It is far more cheaper and effective to start from scratch and take full advantage of 40 (!!!) years of progress.

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

IF we get a larger space program, it will probably be rockets again.
The Space Shuttle fleet was originally only going to be a temporary measure. There is very little that we did with shuttles that we couldn't have done with rockets.
Given that Maglev is fairly new, would YOU want to be the first to try it? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif
I only wish we would have found Gold nuggets the size of baseballs on the moon way back then.
We'd probably would have operational MINES on the moon by now... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">you really want to give control of that much gold to a government? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif

Re: What? No talk about the Mars Rover?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">you really want to give control of that much gold to a government? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/rolleyes.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I think the point is if we had found vast resources lying around on the moon, then by now industry and private enterprise would have found a way to get there. Rather then waiting on the government to do it all. And that would mean access to space for the rest of us that aren't in NASA.