Rovers on Mars

OUCH!

theres gotta be a better emoticon than that one. It looks like he's just shaking ketchup into his mouth.

I'm sure I've seen red beer someplace!

Yeah, like the other emoticons are more realistic.

Off topic a bit but:

http://io9.com/nasa-plans-a-robotic-mission-to-search-for-life-on-euro-1536803742?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
It looks like it's finally going to happen, an actual mission to Jupiter's icy moon Europa — one of the the solar system's best candidates for hosting alien life.

Yesterday, NASA announced an injection of $17.5 billion from the federal government (down by $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak). Of this, $15 million will be allocated for "pre-formulation" work on a mission to Europa, with plans to make detailed observations from orbit and possibly sample its interior oceans with a robotic probe. Mission details are sparse, but if all goes well, it could be launched by 2025 and arriving in the early 2030s.

This is incredibly exciting. Recent evidence points to a reasonable chance of habitability. Its massive subsurface ocean contains almost twice as much water as found on Earth. The water is kept in liquid state owing to the gravitational forces exerted by Jupiter and the moon's turbulent global ocean currents. The good news is that a probe may not have to dig very deep to conduct its search for life; the moon's massive plumes are ejecting water directly onto the surface.

Very exciting indeed. But 2030 is a long time to wait. Oh well.

26 years. I will only be 97. I can wait.

I actually got a bit sad when I realized the time element!

Edgar...anything on that asteroid that is supposed to come closer to us than the moon today?

I don't know. I haven't kept up with it.

Another one of those near miss things.

Noticed that a big one hit the moon recently...and sent up a plume that was visible from Earth.

The one that hit the moon I did know about. That's too damn close for comfort.

Safest place to live would be in Arizona's Meteor Crater because a meteor would never hit that spot again in a zillion years..
Or would it? is there a math statistician in the house?

First of all, it's 16 years to 2030. Second, this is such a timid, modest timetable to plan a mission in the 2030s. Clearly, someone wants to put ambitious sounding NASA projects in the budget, but rely on future government office holders to actually spend most of the money. Bush created a "Return to the Moon" program and Obama cancelled it. The international space station was started, reduced, eliminated, and re-started by succeeding office holders several times. The timetable is timid and there is no particular reason to believe that in such a length of time it won't be discontinued by future politicians.

The fact that a location was hit once has no bearing on whether it will be hit again.

The light in this picture has not yet been explained.

It is a Motel 6 .

The news article tried to make something of it, but it looks to me like a glitch on the photo, rather than being "something out there."

The JPL alchemists are now saying they have found good evidence that Mars once had the necessities for microbial life . . .

Opportunity discovers Martian habitable zone.

I would not be surprised if one day a pocket of single cell organisms are found to be surviving in a hidden enclave on Mars. The rovers won't find them. But -