It's going to get like rush hour in Los Angeles up there.
@edgarblythe,
A planet populated by robots... searching for life. Weirdly ironic
@rosborne979,
In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, the last or the next to the last novel, the central characters come to the conclusion that robots chose a dimension with no other sentient, technological, space-faring species in response to the first law of robotics, and moved the human race into that dimension as they became interstellar space-farers, then subtly arranged the abandonment of Earth so that there would be no traces of the shift. The first law of robotics is: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Apparently, they decided, at some point, robots decided that allowing humans to inhabit a dimension with other sentient, technological, space-faring species would be to allow them to come to harm through inaction.
@rosborne979,
They make it sound like the Euros had this blinding insite to just skip any prelims and start digging. Without the data that supports a water planet and evaporate deposits and rosion fields on the surface, the Euros would be blindingly just poking very expensive holes in the grounds attached to a GPR (ground penetrating radar) unit that has a great energy requirement(as does a deep drill)
Imagine they just start poking around
1why choose one area over another without the prelim data that the Rovers provide?
2 Why 6 ft? could a water table be at 12 feet and theyd miss it al?l(The patterns of evaporite minerals leave a trace (like a chemical bathtub ring) of salts that come out of solution first and last . this will direct the "where' and the "how deep"
3. If they really want to do this seriously, there should be a greater collaboration among the countries so the Euros aren't blindly poking holes
Without the Rovers, this proposed effort would just as much be a waste of time as a hit. In todays workd of tight economics such multi billion dollar efforts don't make much sense without a cautious stepwise investigation of the unknowns.
@farmerman,
dude that was a hoax just like all of the apollo missions. wow what people believe in todays world is frightening
@hater,
get outta my thread you moron. People will think that you are taken seriously .
Today marks the one year anniversary.
@farmerman,
What for? I don't see no Martians to eat it.
I read about that. Good to know they still are in business.
It’s official: Voyager 1 has slipped from the solar system.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 traveled past Jupiter and Saturn and is now more than 11.66 billion miles (18.67 billion kilometers) from the sun, becoming the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Proof of this long-anticipated milestone for the storied spacecraft comes in a study released Thursday by the journal Science and announced at a celebratory NASA headquarters briefing.
"We made it! We are in interstellar space," said Voyager scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, speaking at the briefing.
Solar storm aftershocks at the edge of the solar system provide confirmation that the Voyager 1 spacecraft made the passage on August 25, 2012, space agency scientists said Thursday.
On that date, Voyager 1 passed beyond the fringes of the sun's outward-flowing solar wind and into the interstellar space between the stars.
"It is an incredible event, to send the first human object into interstellar space," says study lead author Donald Gurnett of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "It’s not quite the moon landing, but we are where the solar wind ends."
Finding the Solar System’s Edge
The solar wind flows outward from the sun traveling at one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) an hour, a bath of energetic particles that's blasted off the solar surface and into space, where it surrounds our star like a bubble.
At its edges, the solar wind piles up into the "interstellar wind," a cloud of cooler charged particles that suffuse the thin vacuum of space between stars. Since 2004, Voyager 1 had been traveling within the boundary region between the solar wind and the interstellar wind, which is the cooked-off debris of thousands of exploded stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
Knowing exactly where the solar wind ends and where interstellar space begins has been an open question among space scientists for more than four decades, says Stone.
Since an instrument for directly detecting that transition died in 1980, the researchers have had to rely on indirect measures of magnetic and electrical activity from other instruments aboard Voyager 1 to find an answer.
One key to identifying this boundary is the difference in the density of charged particles between the solar wind and interstellar space, as it is about 50 times greater in the latter region.
Looking at a pair of solar storms that caught up to the spacecraft last October and then again last April, Gurnett’s team reported that measured changes in electrical activity around Voyager correspond to interstellar space.
As the storms passed the spacecraft, they triggered spikes in electrical and radio waves that uniquely corresponded in frequency to the spacecraft having entered the more densely charged interstellar space.
Based on that increase, the team extrapolated the entry date for Voyager 1 into interstellar space as August 25, 2012.
"The spacecraft doesn't feel anything traveling into interstellar space. We can only detect the transition because of its instruments," says Stone, who was not on the study team.
The new report confirms an analysis made last year that found that Voyager had entered interstellar space, based on indirect measurements.
Stone finds the new report convincing: "Nature has finally given us a nice set of solar storms which show us that Voyager is now out in interstellar space."
Surprise! Galaxy, Sun's Magnetic Fields Aligned
Scientists were surprised by NASA's finding that the galaxy's magnetic field is apparently aligned in the same direction as the sun's, forming a "magnetic highway." Space scientists had generally assumed that the galaxy's magnetic field would have some other direction.
The alignment had stymied attempts to use magnetic measurements to determine a starting line for interstellar space.
"We have a lot to learn still, I think, is what it means," says Voyager scientist Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who reported the magnetic highway results last year.
Along with Voyager 1's measurement of increased galactic cosmic rays (the solar wind serves to partly shield the solar system from these high-powered rays), the new results have Krimigis "absolutely convinced."
"In the same way that Sputnik carried us out of the Earth's atmosphere in 1957, Voyager has now carried us outside the sun's atmosphere," Krimigis says. "It is quite an achievement in the short time that we have had spaceflight."
Given the estimated lifetime of the plutonium battery aboard Voyager 1, its last signals should be heard on Earth around 2025, Stone says. The spacecraft will eventually pass within 1.7 light years (about 16.1 trillion kilometers) of another star in 40,000 years, according to Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The spacecraft's twin, Voyager 2, which explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, is also still kicking, now some 9.55 billion miles (15.36 billion kilometers) from the sun on its own journey.
"It has really been an exciting 40 years for the mission, and the next 10 years should be exciting ones as well," Stone says. "We are still exploring places we have never been."
@edgarblythe,
if they had an ion propulsion system the damn thing would be cruising along at .78(c) by now.
@farmerman,
Love to see some conscientious Space Aliens write us a ticket for littering.
@Ragman,
Thousands of years from now some alien intelligence may intercept it. Probably not.
@edgarblythe,
Brief convo of 2 observant space aliens:
Alien #1: "Earth is sending out their trash to our solar system. It looks like they finally reached their quota in their own orbit. Man, are they pigs!"
Alien #2: "Should we get medieval on their asses?"
Alien #1: "Nawww! They'll choke on their own crap in another 10 yr if they don't nuke themselves!"
Curiosity reports "no methane in martian atmosphere".
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/20/us-space-mars-idUSBRE98J00820130920
This is a very surprising turn of events, because previously orbital spacecraft had reported large plumes of methane in the atmosphere. This brings up a lot more questions.
The assumed presence of Methane in the atmosphere was one of the BIG indicators that there might actually be something alive on mars (probably microbes under the surface).
Quote:"There's a discrepancy," lead research Christopher Webster, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Reuters. "Suddenly the whole interpretation of earlier observations is stuck."
(In my opinion, this is the biggest news to come from Curiosity since it landed)
@rosborne979,
A more detailed article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/science/space/mars-rover-comes-up-empty-in-search-for-methane.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Quote:One of the scientists who found the methane plumes in 2003, Michael J. Mumma, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in an interview this week he was certain that his earlier measurements were still valid. He said he now believed that methane on Mars was episodic — released in large plumes and then quickly destroyed. He suggested, half-jokingly, that there could be huge colonies of methane-eating microbes on Mars that eliminated the gas from the air.
Dr. Mumma acknowledged that he could not identify any phenomena that would explain why methane plumes spurted out that year but not more recently, or how methane could be destroyed much more quickly on Mars than on Earth.
“Mars may not be operating the same way,” he said. “It’s a puzzle.”
"It's a puzzle" is right, to say the least. This is a huge and critical puzzle piece.
@rosborne979,
when they drill for methane and don't find it, then Ill be convinced. CH4 is photodegradable. Id also like to see the isotopes of any carbon in minerals they do find.
@farmerman,
I agree that methane may be present in some other form, but when one device reports plumes of it in the atmosphere which should take hundreds of years to break down, and another device finds none in the atmosphere, then something is fishy
