NASA plans cannot get man to Mars

Nice one, Obama. The appearance of advancing manned space travel without the expense of advancing of manned space travel. Building a permanent base on the Moon would have been a great stepping stone. You have to crawl before you can walk.

The problem isn't getting them there. It's that there's no economically way or reason to bringing them back.

NASA's mission/plans and budget have not matched in decades. the only thing new is that now Washington barely even attempts to pretend that they do.

There are several absolutely mandatory exploration targets on Mars and then there's the little moon Phobos. Richard Hoagland was saying you could almost count the rivets even with the earlier B/W images and then you got the HIRISE color images in 2008:



Real moons are supposed to be made of dirt, rocks, and green cheese i.e. they're not supposed to reflect light all over creation like that. Phobos is quite obviously artificial, some sort of an ancient space station 15 miles across and made of metallic strakes. An intelligent US government should want to get a look at whatever the ****'s inside the thing before the Chinese and Iranians do...

I wish. That would be a whole lot more fun. Unfortunately it's just a big rock. If there was any scientific validity to it being an artificial space station, every nation on Earth would have been climbing all over each other to get there first (and we would have been there years ago). Something like that would be just staggeringly valuable for a long list of reasons. Nobody would pass up an opportunity like that.

Like I say, real moons are not made of metallic strakes and do not reflect light all over creation. Do your own Google search on 'phobos hirise'.

A google search on 'hoagland' and 'brookings institute' would also help.

You have not demonstrated that this is made of "metal strakes" (do you even know what a strake is?), nor that it has any unusual reflectance signature. Things are not so, and people are not going to believe them just because you say so.

Ive never heard the term used in anything but old wooden ship planking (especially "lap straking" of Chesapeake deadrise boats), UNTIL the Virgin Space Ship Company started using the term to describe its own rocket skins.

I've seen the term used in books on differential geometry to describe things made of spiraling bands of metal.

is the "Phobos hirise" another 10 story building discovered by Richard Hoagland?
Mr Hoglnd, you remember, won the Ig-Nobel Prize for discovering faces on Mars nd buildings on the moon.

hes not what Id call a "credible resource"

In all of your posts for years, I've seen no sign of the level or type of knowledge required to read differential geometry, which involves calculus and abstract algebra. If you had that type of knowledge, it would have been abundantly clear.

Strake is used to describe reinforcing structures in aircraft design.



There is nothing in that image of Phobos that remotely resembles strakes.

I just checked to be sure--the image Gunga Dim is using is an "enhanced" photo from NASA, which shows the crater Stickney on Phobos. The striations which appear are artifacts of the impact that created the crater.

Phobos and Deimos are carbonaceous chondrite objects. The majority opinion is that they are "captures" from the group of erracticly orbiting objects which cross the orbits of the inner planets. Phobos and Deimos rise in the west and set in the east, which tends to confirm that they are "captures." Phobos is closer to Mars than the "moon" of any other planet, and it is predicted that it will impact the planet in several tens of millions of years. It might break up due to gravitational stresses sooner than that but with a gravity of .38 G on Mars, its a toss-up which will happen first. Neither of Mars' moons is tidally locked, as is the earth's moon, and in fact, they move faster than Mars rotates. Phobos, from the surface, rises in the west and crosses the sky in less than 5 hours, setting in the east, and goes through that cycle twice a day. (The Martian day is 24 hours and just less than 40 minutes.)

Gunga Dim loves those "enhanced" photos.

Ask Gunga Dim about the "face" on Mars.

According to the "Big Hit" hypothesis, the objects in the so-called asteroid belt are either fragments of the planetesimal which struck Mars, or Martian ejecta. (Not all one or the other, but each object either one or the other.) The more extreme statement also holds that the rings of Saturn are the volatiles blown off of Mars by the impact. I'm not claiming enough scientific savvy to know, but i am skeptical--that would mean the objects in the asteroid belt were flung distance X, and the volatiles were flung distance 2X. Then they were swept up by Saturn moving in its orbital path. If true, i say we go up there, and sweep up the rings of Saturn, and fling 'em back at Mars. They're mostly water ice, so as they first entered Mars' wimpy little atmosphere, they'd melt, and you'd have one hell of a snow storm (mean temperature is around -100 to -150 degrees C.) But most of them would heat to the point that they'd separate into their constituent elements--hydrogen and oxygen.

Then drop a match in the new Martian atmosphere and watch the fun! Woo-hoo!

Damn Set. You ruined my day again. I was all ready to go to Mars and confiscate that space ship that the people of Mars put into orbit a few million years ago.

Oh, so you think the little red people would just blithely stand by while your rob them?

I thought they died out years ago.

Kasei, Al Quahira, Harmakhis, Ares, Her Desher, Mangala, Nirgal, Huo Hsing, Simud, Tiu, Mawrth, Bahram, Shalbatana, Auqakuh, Hrad, Ma'adim, Maja