117 Replies to “No Sign of Ted Cruz or Bernie Saunders”
Someone call NASA and tell them about landscape mode.
That was my first thought. All that time and money and the dumb rover doesn’t know which way up to hold it’s cell phone!
Wow. This is truly awesome. Congrats to all involved. Pretty awe inspiring to see those clear images coming from another planet!
A frigid, uninhabitable wasteland. Like Nunavut, except Nunavut has breathable air, a little liquid water in summer and soil that isn’t actually poisoned and unfit for agriculture even were global warming a real phenomenon.
We’ve known that since the Viking probes in 1976, when Joe could still get an erection and knew where he was on any given day. What is the point of sending another robot now?
If this is the best the remnants of mankind will be able to do after the Red Chinese have succeeded in turning the earth into an uninhabitable toxic-waste dump with irredeemably poisoned air, water and soil—having hauled the environmentalists off to extermination camps after the useful idiots’ job of destroying western capitalism is complete—mankind has no future.
If we let them do it, we do not deserve one.
If this planet isn’t big enough for western civilization and the dragon, slay the dragon. Better him than us. Like the Greenies always say, there is no Planet B.
Jesus Christ dude, chill out a little.
Uh,yes. Thanks Andrew.
What is the point of sending another robot now?
To scout for sites where to build virus internment camps?
[deleted – ED]
“I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
~ Bruce Sterling
Mars exploration is panem et circenses.
I agree with Santayana G. We have enough issues to deal with here on earth. Not everyone gets excited about space exploration, and any pluses seem a long way off.
If you’re anti-space, how about giving up your cell phone, cable TV, Internet, GPS, and banking ATM? They’re all dependent upon communications satellites.
Without the efforts of space exploration, you wouldn’t have many of the medical instrumentation that are used by your physician or hospitals. Weather forecasting would be far more difficult. Farming and trucking are dependent upon the global positioning satellites.
A dollar’s investment in space has resulted at least 10 being returned here on the ground.
That’s all stuff in low earth orbit. No moonshots or Marsshots required.
How far out do you think the Clarke orbit is? It’s definitely not LEO.
Without the efforts. . .
And we would never be able to figure out what the climate will be like in 2050.
Oh, wait. . .
Sattelites are one thing — exploration ventures to Mars are something else. The benefits are not obvious there.
Why bother doing anything? After all, failure is a possibility.
Go back to “armpit college” and spew that drivel.
Perhaps you’d be more content living in the Neolithic Era. Banging rocks together doesn’t take much effort or skill.
Hey Strapon, take a sanity pill already!
LindaL, car racing, a useless sport with no return people used to bark, and the roll off benefits are much safer cars today, and lots of $$$$$ saved at reduced medical costs. So try again to show us how you don’t get it. And strapon is an idiot with mental health issues!
I think she’d be happier living in prehistoric times. Life was so much simpler then. Waydaminnit–there wasn’t any social media in those days, was there?
yeah, Mars is pretty useless. The Moon and the asteroids, however, could pay off nicely.
Mars is pretty useless.
Without exploring Mars and seeing what’s there, we won’t have any idea if it’s worth going to. Perhaps many of the minerals that are believed to be on the moon or among the asteroids are there as well.
That is specious logic. You don’t spend exorbitant amounts of money on something just because it MIGHT be useful. Just like those vaccines. Let’s force everyone to take them because they MIGHT work.
One invests money in such ventures on the possibility that there will be a payoff, either directly in finding what one was looking for in the first place or in discovering something that one didn’t know was there but could still be beneficial.
When I was much younger, most oil wells that were drilled turned out to be dry holes. Yes, that money was spent for nothing, but the drilling was done because of the possibility that the formation in question might actually yield something. The data that was available indicated that there might be oil or gas there, but, until that hole was punched into the ground, there was no way of making sure.
With your logic, we’d still be living in hide tents and wearing animal skins because we’re afraid to look at or invent something because it might fail.
It was thought that there would never be a market for more than 100 or so computers. After all, for what could they be used? Before the first satellites our current level of communications and weather forecasting weren’t forecast. The first automobiles were met with jeering cries of “get a horse!”. When asked if he wanted to wire his house for electricity, one of Edison’s neighbours scoffed and said “there isn’t enough whales in the world to power enough of your generators for everyone, it’ll be a short lived fad.”
I’m disappointed to see so many saboteurs here.
I remember a comment made by Dr. Carolyn Porco when the Cassini mission went into orbit around Saturn more than 15 years ago. She said that we’ll be going there permanently eventually, so we need to know what’s out there.
Absent somebody inventing some kind of magical technology that reduces the $/lb cost of getting to LEO to something comparable to international flights, mining the Moon and asteroids will never pay off. And if such technology did exist, it would be used to make Earth-based mining cheaper and more efficient so you wouldn’t have to travel millions of miles through an instantly fatal environment, bringing all your air and food with you.
On the other hand, if there were sufficient mineral resources out there, they will ultimately reduce the cost of building and maintaining any habitations through the utilization of on-site resources.
How many environmental impact studies do you think would be needed for asteroid mining? I’m thinking not many.
The upcoming Psyche mission will prove to be interesting. The asteroid 16 Psyche is primarily metal, believed to be a remnant of a planetary core.
A few more of those, and space mining and metallurgical processing would be a definite possibility. Why ship structural steel to, say, Mars when one can make it on-site out there?
You should see the surface of Europa: Thoroughly frigid, no atmosphere and bathed in enough ionizing radiation to flash fry any living thing on the surface. You’ll get a great view of Jupiter though…
enough ionizing radiation to flash fry any living thing on the surface
Any living thing that we know of. There is speculation, however, that Europa has a subsurface ocean and it may harbour, perhaps, simple lifeforms. The Europa Clipper spacecraft will be launched in about 3 years time and we may learn more about what’s there.
Just curious why Mars has any atmosphere whatsoever. A dead rock out in space should simply be surrounded by the vacuum of space … Right? Have we sampled the atmosphere? Is there water vapor in it? Do the rocks of Mars give up gasses of some kind?
Yeah … I can Google all that … but it’s easier to ask those who might know. 🙂
Let’s be clear here. This “sound” is NOT what a human would hear at the same location. What we would hear would be the equivalent of a faint whisper. What we are hearing in this video is an electronic enhancement or, in other words: cranking up the volume.
I touched on this when I commented yesterday on a previous post about the Mars mission. There is virtually no air on Mars. The atmospheric density on Mars is only .6% or .006 that of the Earth which, as an aside, is about what you would expect on Earth at an elevation of about 32,000 ft or so. Think Mt. Everest.
Thanks Jack: I am always wary when doing math so I am glad to be asked to double check my figures.
At the link below is a table U.S. Standard Atmosphere Air Properties – SI Units.
From the table:
Density @ 0 ft altitude = 1.225 kg/cu. m
Multiply x .006 = 0.01 kg/cu./m
Again, from the elevation tables:
30,000 ft = 0.01841 kg./cu. m.
40,000 ft = 0.003996 kg/cu.m.
Oh, oh! I just spotted the error.
Elevation units are in meters not feet. Aw, poop!!!
So it isn’t 30,000 ft. It is 30,000 meters or about 100,000 ft.
I don’t think this takes away from my overall point but, still, I am embarrassed.
So, with extreme trepidation, I once again push the post comment button.
bf, don’t be embarrassed, I used to win math competitions , and can still screw up simple mental math at times. We all make mistakes, and you are good with admitting you did so:-))))
Still, I’ve always wondered what a Barsoomian hunting call sounded like.
Sounds very much like microphone in the wind.
There are some exceptional winds over there at the planet.
A huge waste of money.
A negligible amount of money compared to the overall budget.
Maybe, but the overall budget has many more pressing matters to deal with.
So, how do you think life will improve if money isn’t spent in space? Far more is wasted on useless social programs.
That kind of “they got theys, I wants mine” attitude is how government spending gets bloated to the unsustainable level it is today. There is no direct taxpayer benefit to space exploration outside Earth orbit. None. If you want to explore Mars, pay for it your damn self, don’t demand your share of other people’s money and then try to justify it by claiming it’s smaller than what those other guys are demanding.
That same argument was used more than 50 years ago.
The original space race was part of the Cold War. Going to the moon was designed to show the superiority of American technology over that of the Soviets. The resulting infrastructure, including communications satellites, was one unforeseen benefit.
Meanwhile, how much money was squandered on, for example, the so-called war on drugs and how successful was that as an investment?
How do you think life will improve if money is spent on space exploration?
So, how do you think life will improve if money isn’t spent in space? Far more is wasted on useless social programs.
Your cell phone is a descendant of electronic hardware that was originally developed for the military and for the space program. The fact that you can locate yourself almost anywhere on the ground is a result of the global positioning satellites that were developed for the military using that same technology.
Every time you go into a hospital, the instrumentation used to monitor your metabolism are descendants of medical instruments used to check on the health of the early astronauts.
The fact that you can estimate what the weather might be like in a few days time or, for that matter, keep you safe in a storm was as a result of the early meteorological satellites.
I could go on, but I don’t think you’d be convinced. Perhaps you’d be far happier living your life wearing bear skins and using stone knives, foraging for roots and berries and whatever grubs and insects you can find.
Spending on space has more than proved to be worth the investment.
Billions wasted on welfare just get’s us more welfare, no improvement.
If this was about demonstrating that America was still capable of things she could do in 1976, let’s see Joe get an erection. He could do that in 1976 too.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are hard at work fine-tuning biological weapons that can kill blue-eyed devils in three days but not affect a military-age Han tribesman at all.
When they aren’t laughing themselves silly at our expense.
If that’s what you want to see and Joe wants to show it to you, please do it in private. Let the rest of us not see Joe get an erection.
And if they use them, we’ll test how resistant they are to high levels of radiation.
Stark beauty. I love it. The noise is a little annoying which I’m assuming is wind. Dang, put a fur mitten on the mike.
Pretty sure it’s “Sanders” Francisco.
I guess it’s cool and kind of amazing that they can do it but it doesn’t look like anywhere I’d want to spend time.
I hope they are on the lookout for beautiful, large breasted, red girls.
Don’t you mean Beautiful large breasted red headed girls…..Just sayin Steve O
You evidently don’t know your Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote the John Carter books as well as Tarzan and the Princess of Mars was definitely red and not red headed.
Steve: Might you be referring to the rare double-breasted mattress thrasher?
To quote Elton John,
“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact, it’s cold as Hell.
And there ‘s no one there to raise them if you didn’t.”
Ah… not Perseverance.
It’s video from Curiosity.
(Stop the video, scan to the last frame, and see what is written on the part of the rover at the bottom of the screen).
The tires are different too.
Previous mission vid. But note – blue sky on Mars. Always was. I wonder why they went to so much trouble to put a red filter on all the imagery from older missions. I think “NASA” is Aramaic for “Kabuki Theatre”, is it not?
And I still can’t get a consistant cellphone signal on earth…
Not just a red state but a whole red planet!
I wonder how long that will last?
Shiite. I think you just answered my “red filter” question above!!
They’re still counting in the Tharsus volcanoes region and Margarifiter, expect a 4:00 am flip.
I’m pretty sure a carbon tax can fix the problem there.
Wakeup – Mars atmosphere is 95.32% Carbon dioxide now so I don’t think it is helping much. There must have been a lot of SUVs on Mars a billion years ago. Earth has 0.04% Carbon Dioxide. Wiki thought the laymen might notice this paradox so it says “The weaker greenhouse effect in the Martian atmosphere (5 °C, versus 33 °C on Earth) can be explained by the low abundance of other greenhouse gases.” Of course. Always an excuse. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect from C02. It has 96.5 % C02. Not a lot of volume left for those “other greenhouse gases”.
It’s a function of density and not gas composition per se. Venus has an incredibly dense atmosphere. Mars has the opposite.
I second Lance Boyle’s comment. Venus’ surface temperature is primarily a function of its super dense atmosphere, 90+ times the density of earth’s atmosphere. An interesting fact is that temperatures on Venus at the altitude where the pressure is one bar (like earth’s surface) is about the same as the average temperature at the earth’s surface. A coincidence? I don’t think so. So Venus’ surface would still be super hot if all that CO2 was replaced with an equal mass of N2 and / or O2.
I’ve long believed the differences in temperature (Venus>Earth>Mars) were more dependent on the distance from the sun rather than the composition or density of their atmospheres. The solar radiation falling on the planets diminishes exponentially with the distance from the sun
No, the radiation diminishes inversely with the square of distance, not exponentially.
“square” is an exponent (^2)
So exciting! Real-life Sci-Fi! We’re living it!
Mars just became racist.
We need to cancel Mars Bars now!!!!!!
It sounds like the mike fell off and is now dangling around the exhast pipe.
Pretty awesome stuff though.
I hope they send fish pictures!
Nice beach, but the Wifi sucks
Fake just like 1960.
Clearly a stone pathway at the end of video .Martians ? Who knows? LOL
The only reason you racists want to go to Mars is because there are no minorities there.
Better yet is that there aren’t any UnMes, either.
Thank you unme for a new and creative way to prove your ignorance. White people are the minority on earth.
Has UnMe ever done anything but?
Ya know …. mmmm …. you have a point. Racist space travel.
As in, if I am going to be locked in a tin can for 2 years, then cooped up in a massive bio-tent, amd not step outside again for the next 10 years, my levels of tolerance for people who aren’t exactly like me, … same look, same demeanour, same outlook on life, same values, same cultural practices, same foods, … are going to be effing south of ZERO, pal.
If and when the Mars refugee camp turns into Toronto (assuming we make it that far) then you and your diversity clusterfuck maybe get to join in.
Till then, sorry, go get your own damned tin can to fly in.
Looks like Barstow, California minus the chicas and gringos.
Sudbury, Ontario.
We should take the gigantic thermometer from Baker, Calif (just down the road from Barstow) and launch it to Mars. I’d love to watch that thing land.
I swear I saw Pinky NO’tool peeking out from under a rock at the 18 second mark.
They better hurry up with their scoop and experiments.
When Martians notice the thing, they may take it for your quad and will for sure shut it down and start driving the thing around not unlike the earthlings in their quads.
As far as exploring Mars is concerned and the concern is economic then as long as the missions aren’t manned, the costs are somewhat contained. Manned missions are extremely expensive due to the proportion of payload and budget aimed at keeping the humans alive and functional and for the otherwise unnecessary return trip.
We don’t even know how much that’s going to cost as we still don’t know how to get humans there. Yes, we’re familiar with building habitations in space, but there are matters such as the interstellar radiation to which the crews will be exposed that need to be examined and resolved.
They are expensive because they are rare and new. Only nation-state monarchs (and British Freebooters – yay!) could afford the explorations across the oceans in the 14th & 15th. Centuries.
The price will come down as the confidence and size of the vessels go up. I imagine your typical solar system liner will be a few kilometers long, be nuclear powered and get to Mars in a couple of weeks, with a near normal effective gravity for most of the way. Only the bulk freighters will be using the lowest energy trajectories in weightlessness. Launch windows will be biennual but wider.
Jezus JC, quit spoiling the fun with common sense already:-)))
It looks just like the other places on Mars. Boring
Space exploration is vital.
Until we have useful space tugs or some such alternative we are nought but crabs crowding the bottom of this gravity well.
Waiting for the asteroid.
Because that is all we can do.
And just like crabs in a buck,we keep pulling down any that seem about to break free.
When the asteroid finally smashes into us,we will still be bitching about what a waste of money space exploration is..
Never mind all the toys and technology the last effort brought us.
Money spent on welfare and “Social engineering” however, may as well just be flushed .
For these things are destroying us.
“Once you get to earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.” Robert Heinlein
Then again, he also said: “The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”
This has been an interesting thread today.
I was wondering if one of many reasons for the Mars Mission is to look for rare “Mars” metals resembling the rare ones found on our Planet.
Indeed that’s part of it, though I think the emphasis would be for minerals that could be utilized to survive there, including building and maintaining a habitation. People are eventually going to have to live off the land, so to speak.
I’ve cited several examples of how space technology has benefited us, though that wasn’t the main reason for developing it. Sometimes it just happens that there’s a solution in search of a problem (lasers being one example) or a problem for which existing hardware or techniques can be adapted.
One example for the latter was originally developed for deep space astronomy. A number of researchers look for distant galaxies and the pictures taken by various observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or those participating in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contain myriads of objects. It can be tricky determining which of them are galaxies, let alone what type.
One method is to use computer programs to determine whether an object is a galaxy, a star, or a nebula. Someone in the medical field noticed that this approach would be useful for detecting cancer cells in biopsy samples and apparently it’s being used now by some facilities.
All it took was for someone to recognize how an existing method could be applied in a parallel situation for a different application. One can only imagine how many people were helped by this.
This stuff is right in your wheelhouse. You’ve put together a most generous and concisely thought-out reply with some great observations. I like that. Thanks for your thoughts, B.
It’s an Internet radio show that’s been around for 20 years. It’s livestreamed, but he archives each program. He’s interviewed all sorts of people including astronauts and scientists, and he even had a show with Elon Musk, well before he became famous. He’s interviewed SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell several times as well as Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance.
You may recognize him if you’re a regular listener to John Batchelor’s show as he has the Hotel Mars segment just about every week.
I’ve bookmarked it, and will give it a shot. Thanks!
(Picture me with Bose Headphones chopping veggies at kitchen island, listening to the Space Show!)
I totally disagree that sending probes to Mars is a waste of money. The development of remote controlled vehicles that can be operated millions of miles away here on earth is itself a huge accomplishment. I remember my Dad buying a new Mercury Grand Marquis in 1969. He had trouble with the automatic choke. He once told me, ”They can open and close doors on the moon, but they can’t make an automatic choke that works when it’s 3 feet away from the driver.”
Today, they can drill holes on Mars, and navigate a vehicle over any terrain. Someday, Rover 12 may be able to dig up diamonds on Mars. Just imagine the potential!!
Did you think wind would sound like a Mariachi band on Mars?
If in fact this is from Mars
Looks a lot like the capitol of Voter Fraud
Nevada
I hate to burst bubbles and all, but that is not Perseverance Rover. It’s the last rover, Curiosity, which has been there since 2012. Curiosity has the tires with the angled ribbed tread, which you can see here as the camera pans. Perseverance has a wavy tread, an innovation because Curiosity’s treads haven’t held up as well as hoped.
That said: Hang on to your hats, it’s going to be a terrific mission with even better graphic resolution!
Someone call NASA and tell them about landscape mode.
That was my first thought. All that time and money and the dumb rover doesn’t know which way up to hold it’s cell phone!
Wow. This is truly awesome. Congrats to all involved. Pretty awe inspiring to see those clear images coming from another planet!
A frigid, uninhabitable wasteland. Like Nunavut, except Nunavut has breathable air, a little liquid water in summer and soil that isn’t actually poisoned and unfit for agriculture even were global warming a real phenomenon.
We’ve known that since the Viking probes in 1976, when Joe could still get an erection and knew where he was on any given day. What is the point of sending another robot now?
If this is the best the remnants of mankind will be able to do after the Red Chinese have succeeded in turning the earth into an uninhabitable toxic-waste dump with irredeemably poisoned air, water and soil—having hauled the environmentalists off to extermination camps after the useful idiots’ job of destroying western capitalism is complete—mankind has no future.
If we let them do it, we do not deserve one.
If this planet isn’t big enough for western civilization and the dragon, slay the dragon. Better him than us. Like the Greenies always say, there is no Planet B.
Jesus Christ dude, chill out a little.
Uh,yes. Thanks Andrew.
What is the point of sending another robot now?
To scout for sites where to build virus internment camps?
[deleted – ED]
“I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of plonkingly obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.”
~ Bruce Sterling
Mars exploration is panem et circenses.
I agree with Santayana G. We have enough issues to deal with here on earth. Not everyone gets excited about space exploration, and any pluses seem a long way off.
If you’re anti-space, how about giving up your cell phone, cable TV, Internet, GPS, and banking ATM? They’re all dependent upon communications satellites.
Without the efforts of space exploration, you wouldn’t have many of the medical instrumentation that are used by your physician or hospitals. Weather forecasting would be far more difficult. Farming and trucking are dependent upon the global positioning satellites.
A dollar’s investment in space has resulted at least 10 being returned here on the ground.
That’s all stuff in low earth orbit. No moonshots or Marsshots required.
How far out do you think the Clarke orbit is? It’s definitely not LEO.
Without the efforts. . .
And we would never be able to figure out what the climate will be like in 2050.
Oh, wait. . .
Sattelites are one thing — exploration ventures to Mars are something else. The benefits are not obvious there.
Why bother doing anything? After all, failure is a possibility.
Go back to “armpit college” and spew that drivel.
Perhaps you’d be more content living in the Neolithic Era. Banging rocks together doesn’t take much effort or skill.
Hey Strapon, take a sanity pill already!
LindaL, car racing, a useless sport with no return people used to bark, and the roll off benefits are much safer cars today, and lots of $$$$$ saved at reduced medical costs. So try again to show us how you don’t get it. And strapon is an idiot with mental health issues!
I think she’d be happier living in prehistoric times. Life was so much simpler then. Waydaminnit–there wasn’t any social media in those days, was there?
yeah, Mars is pretty useless. The Moon and the asteroids, however, could pay off nicely.
Mars is pretty useless.
Without exploring Mars and seeing what’s there, we won’t have any idea if it’s worth going to. Perhaps many of the minerals that are believed to be on the moon or among the asteroids are there as well.
That is specious logic. You don’t spend exorbitant amounts of money on something just because it MIGHT be useful. Just like those vaccines. Let’s force everyone to take them because they MIGHT work.
One invests money in such ventures on the possibility that there will be a payoff, either directly in finding what one was looking for in the first place or in discovering something that one didn’t know was there but could still be beneficial.
When I was much younger, most oil wells that were drilled turned out to be dry holes. Yes, that money was spent for nothing, but the drilling was done because of the possibility that the formation in question might actually yield something. The data that was available indicated that there might be oil or gas there, but, until that hole was punched into the ground, there was no way of making sure.
With your logic, we’d still be living in hide tents and wearing animal skins because we’re afraid to look at or invent something because it might fail.
It was thought that there would never be a market for more than 100 or so computers. After all, for what could they be used? Before the first satellites our current level of communications and weather forecasting weren’t forecast. The first automobiles were met with jeering cries of “get a horse!”. When asked if he wanted to wire his house for electricity, one of Edison’s neighbours scoffed and said “there isn’t enough whales in the world to power enough of your generators for everyone, it’ll be a short lived fad.”
I’m disappointed to see so many saboteurs here.
I remember a comment made by Dr. Carolyn Porco when the Cassini mission went into orbit around Saturn more than 15 years ago. She said that we’ll be going there permanently eventually, so we need to know what’s out there.
Absent somebody inventing some kind of magical technology that reduces the $/lb cost of getting to LEO to something comparable to international flights, mining the Moon and asteroids will never pay off. And if such technology did exist, it would be used to make Earth-based mining cheaper and more efficient so you wouldn’t have to travel millions of miles through an instantly fatal environment, bringing all your air and food with you.
On the other hand, if there were sufficient mineral resources out there, they will ultimately reduce the cost of building and maintaining any habitations through the utilization of on-site resources.
How many environmental impact studies do you think would be needed for asteroid mining? I’m thinking not many.
The upcoming Psyche mission will prove to be interesting. The asteroid 16 Psyche is primarily metal, believed to be a remnant of a planetary core.
A few more of those, and space mining and metallurgical processing would be a definite possibility. Why ship structural steel to, say, Mars when one can make it on-site out there?
You should see the surface of Europa: Thoroughly frigid, no atmosphere and bathed in enough ionizing radiation to flash fry any living thing on the surface. You’ll get a great view of Jupiter though…
enough ionizing radiation to flash fry any living thing on the surface
Any living thing that we know of. There is speculation, however, that Europa has a subsurface ocean and it may harbour, perhaps, simple lifeforms. The Europa Clipper spacecraft will be launched in about 3 years time and we may learn more about what’s there.
Just curious why Mars has any atmosphere whatsoever. A dead rock out in space should simply be surrounded by the vacuum of space … Right? Have we sampled the atmosphere? Is there water vapor in it? Do the rocks of Mars give up gasses of some kind?
Yeah … I can Google all that … but it’s easier to ask those who might know. 🙂
Let’s be clear here. This “sound” is NOT what a human would hear at the same location. What we would hear would be the equivalent of a faint whisper. What we are hearing in this video is an electronic enhancement or, in other words: cranking up the volume.
I touched on this when I commented yesterday on a previous post about the Mars mission. There is virtually no air on Mars. The atmospheric density on Mars is only .6% or .006 that of the Earth which, as an aside, is about what you would expect on Earth at an elevation of about 32,000 ft or so. Think Mt. Everest.
Check your math.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html
Thanks Jack: I am always wary when doing math so I am glad to be asked to double check my figures.
At the link below is a table U.S. Standard Atmosphere Air Properties – SI Units.
From the table:
Density @ 0 ft altitude = 1.225 kg/cu. m
Multiply x .006 = 0.01 kg/cu./m
Again, from the elevation tables:
30,000 ft = 0.01841 kg./cu. m.
40,000 ft = 0.003996 kg/cu.m.
Oh, oh! I just spotted the error.
Elevation units are in meters not feet. Aw, poop!!!
So it isn’t 30,000 ft. It is 30,000 meters or about 100,000 ft.
I don’t think this takes away from my overall point but, still, I am embarrassed.
So, with extreme trepidation, I once again push the post comment button.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/standard-atmosphere-d_604.html
bf, don’t be embarrassed, I used to win math competitions , and can still screw up simple mental math at times. We all make mistakes, and you are good with admitting you did so:-))))
Still, I’ve always wondered what a Barsoomian hunting call sounded like.
Sounds very much like microphone in the wind.
There are some exceptional winds over there at the planet.
A huge waste of money.
A negligible amount of money compared to the overall budget.
Maybe, but the overall budget has many more pressing matters to deal with.
So, how do you think life will improve if money isn’t spent in space? Far more is wasted on useless social programs.
That kind of “they got theys, I wants mine” attitude is how government spending gets bloated to the unsustainable level it is today. There is no direct taxpayer benefit to space exploration outside Earth orbit. None. If you want to explore Mars, pay for it your damn self, don’t demand your share of other people’s money and then try to justify it by claiming it’s smaller than what those other guys are demanding.
That same argument was used more than 50 years ago.
The original space race was part of the Cold War. Going to the moon was designed to show the superiority of American technology over that of the Soviets. The resulting infrastructure, including communications satellites, was one unforeseen benefit.
Meanwhile, how much money was squandered on, for example, the so-called war on drugs and how successful was that as an investment?
How do you think life will improve if money is spent on space exploration?
So, how do you think life will improve if money isn’t spent in space? Far more is wasted on useless social programs.
Your cell phone is a descendant of electronic hardware that was originally developed for the military and for the space program. The fact that you can locate yourself almost anywhere on the ground is a result of the global positioning satellites that were developed for the military using that same technology.
Every time you go into a hospital, the instrumentation used to monitor your metabolism are descendants of medical instruments used to check on the health of the early astronauts.
The fact that you can estimate what the weather might be like in a few days time or, for that matter, keep you safe in a storm was as a result of the early meteorological satellites.
I could go on, but I don’t think you’d be convinced. Perhaps you’d be far happier living your life wearing bear skins and using stone knives, foraging for roots and berries and whatever grubs and insects you can find.
Spending on space has more than proved to be worth the investment.
Billions wasted on welfare just get’s us more welfare, no improvement.
20 Inventions we may easily use everyday.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-wouldnt-have-without-space-travel
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
My point exactly.
If this was about demonstrating that America was still capable of things she could do in 1976, let’s see Joe get an erection. He could do that in 1976 too.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are hard at work fine-tuning biological weapons that can kill blue-eyed devils in three days but not affect a military-age Han tribesman at all.
When they aren’t laughing themselves silly at our expense.
If that’s what you want to see and Joe wants to show it to you, please do it in private. Let the rest of us not see Joe get an erection.
And if they use them, we’ll test how resistant they are to high levels of radiation.
Stark beauty. I love it. The noise is a little annoying which I’m assuming is wind. Dang, put a fur mitten on the mike.
Pretty sure it’s “Sanders” Francisco.
I guess it’s cool and kind of amazing that they can do it but it doesn’t look like anywhere I’d want to spend time.
I hope they are on the lookout for beautiful, large breasted, red girls.
I prefer them with three breasts.
https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2547603/total-recall-director-thought-the-three-breasted-woman-could-have-had-even-more-breasts
Don’t you mean Beautiful large breasted red headed girls…..Just sayin Steve O
You evidently don’t know your Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote the John Carter books as well as Tarzan and the Princess of Mars was definitely red and not red headed.
Steve: Might you be referring to the rare double-breasted mattress thrasher?
To quote Elton John,
“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact, it’s cold as Hell.
And there ‘s no one there to raise them if you didn’t.”
Ah… not Perseverance.
It’s video from Curiosity.
(Stop the video, scan to the last frame, and see what is written on the part of the rover at the bottom of the screen).
The tires are different too.
Previous mission vid. But note – blue sky on Mars. Always was. I wonder why they went to so much trouble to put a red filter on all the imagery from older missions. I think “NASA” is Aramaic for “Kabuki Theatre”, is it not?
And I still can’t get a consistant cellphone signal on earth…
Not just a red state but a whole red planet!
I wonder how long that will last?
Shiite. I think you just answered my “red filter” question above!!
They’re still counting in the Tharsus volcanoes region and Margarifiter, expect a 4:00 am flip.
I’m pretty sure a carbon tax can fix the problem there.
Wakeup – Mars atmosphere is 95.32% Carbon dioxide now so I don’t think it is helping much. There must have been a lot of SUVs on Mars a billion years ago. Earth has 0.04% Carbon Dioxide. Wiki thought the laymen might notice this paradox so it says “The weaker greenhouse effect in the Martian atmosphere (5 °C, versus 33 °C on Earth) can be explained by the low abundance of other greenhouse gases.” Of course. Always an excuse. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect from C02. It has 96.5 % C02. Not a lot of volume left for those “other greenhouse gases”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#:~:text=The%20atmosphere%20of%20Mars%20is,%25)%20and%20argon%20(1.9%25).&text=The%20atmosphere%20of%20Mars%20has,of%20gases%20still%20continues%20today.
It’s a function of density and not gas composition per se. Venus has an incredibly dense atmosphere. Mars has the opposite.
I second Lance Boyle’s comment. Venus’ surface temperature is primarily a function of its super dense atmosphere, 90+ times the density of earth’s atmosphere. An interesting fact is that temperatures on Venus at the altitude where the pressure is one bar (like earth’s surface) is about the same as the average temperature at the earth’s surface. A coincidence? I don’t think so. So Venus’ surface would still be super hot if all that CO2 was replaced with an equal mass of N2 and / or O2.
I’ve long believed the differences in temperature (Venus>Earth>Mars) were more dependent on the distance from the sun rather than the composition or density of their atmospheres. The solar radiation falling on the planets diminishes exponentially with the distance from the sun
No, the radiation diminishes inversely with the square of distance, not exponentially.
“square” is an exponent (^2)
So exciting! Real-life Sci-Fi! We’re living it!
Mars just became racist.
We need to cancel Mars Bars now!!!!!!
It sounds like the mike fell off and is now dangling around the exhast pipe.
Pretty awesome stuff though.
I hope they send fish pictures!
Nice beach, but the Wifi sucks
Fake just like 1960.
Clearly a stone pathway at the end of video .Martians ? Who knows? LOL
That makes me very angry. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlVoD17y5y4
Okay, when the microphone is shut off, does the sound still happen?
(Like the tree falling in the forest)
Life Follows Art dept.
Where have I heard that sound before division
Forbidden Planet 1956 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYFr3UyVpRA
The only reason you racists want to go to Mars is because there are no minorities there.
Better yet is that there aren’t any UnMes, either.
Thank you unme for a new and creative way to prove your ignorance. White people are the minority on earth.
Has UnMe ever done anything but?
Ya know …. mmmm …. you have a point. Racist space travel.
As in, if I am going to be locked in a tin can for 2 years, then cooped up in a massive bio-tent, amd not step outside again for the next 10 years, my levels of tolerance for people who aren’t exactly like me, … same look, same demeanour, same outlook on life, same values, same cultural practices, same foods, … are going to be effing south of ZERO, pal.
If and when the Mars refugee camp turns into Toronto (assuming we make it that far) then you and your diversity clusterfuck maybe get to join in.
Till then, sorry, go get your own damned tin can to fly in.
Looks like Barstow, California minus the chicas and gringos.
Sudbury, Ontario.
We should take the gigantic thermometer from Baker, Calif (just down the road from Barstow) and launch it to Mars. I’d love to watch that thing land.
I swear I saw Pinky NO’tool peeking out from under a rock at the 18 second mark.
They better hurry up with their scoop and experiments.
When Martians notice the thing, they may take it for your quad and will for sure shut it down and start driving the thing around not unlike the earthlings in their quads.
As far as exploring Mars is concerned and the concern is economic then as long as the missions aren’t manned, the costs are somewhat contained. Manned missions are extremely expensive due to the proportion of payload and budget aimed at keeping the humans alive and functional and for the otherwise unnecessary return trip.
We don’t even know how much that’s going to cost as we still don’t know how to get humans there. Yes, we’re familiar with building habitations in space, but there are matters such as the interstellar radiation to which the crews will be exposed that need to be examined and resolved.
They are expensive because they are rare and new. Only nation-state monarchs (and British Freebooters – yay!) could afford the explorations across the oceans in the 14th & 15th. Centuries.
The price will come down as the confidence and size of the vessels go up. I imagine your typical solar system liner will be a few kilometers long, be nuclear powered and get to Mars in a couple of weeks, with a near normal effective gravity for most of the way. Only the bulk freighters will be using the lowest energy trajectories in weightlessness. Launch windows will be biennual but wider.
Jezus JC, quit spoiling the fun with common sense already:-)))
It looks just like the other places on Mars. Boring
Space exploration is vital.
Until we have useful space tugs or some such alternative we are nought but crabs crowding the bottom of this gravity well.
Waiting for the asteroid.
Because that is all we can do.
And just like crabs in a buck,we keep pulling down any that seem about to break free.
When the asteroid finally smashes into us,we will still be bitching about what a waste of money space exploration is..
Never mind all the toys and technology the last effort brought us.
Money spent on welfare and “Social engineering” however, may as well just be flushed .
For these things are destroying us.
“Once you get to earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.” Robert Heinlein
Then again, he also said: “The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”
Australian contribution:
https://img.discogs.com/jZg9JS1jfFsweDPX86sElyLFDyE=/fit-in/600×597/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1096677-1489444570-2698.jpeg.jpg
I’m getting nothing but a blank page. Hmmmmmm……
Wasn’t it Einstein who remarked:
“The universe is not curved; it’s BENT.”
Looks a bit like Utah, I guess without Mormons.
Why would they use Millennial mode to film it?
This has been an interesting thread today.
I was wondering if one of many reasons for the Mars Mission is to look for rare “Mars” metals resembling the rare ones found on our Planet.
Indeed that’s part of it, though I think the emphasis would be for minerals that could be utilized to survive there, including building and maintaining a habitation. People are eventually going to have to live off the land, so to speak.
I’ve cited several examples of how space technology has benefited us, though that wasn’t the main reason for developing it. Sometimes it just happens that there’s a solution in search of a problem (lasers being one example) or a problem for which existing hardware or techniques can be adapted.
One example for the latter was originally developed for deep space astronomy. A number of researchers look for distant galaxies and the pictures taken by various observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or those participating in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contain myriads of objects. It can be tricky determining which of them are galaxies, let alone what type.
One method is to use computer programs to determine whether an object is a galaxy, a star, or a nebula. Someone in the medical field noticed that this approach would be useful for detecting cancer cells in biopsy samples and apparently it’s being used now by some facilities.
All it took was for someone to recognize how an existing method could be applied in a parallel situation for a different application. One can only imagine how many people were helped by this.
This stuff is right in your wheelhouse. You’ve put together a most generous and concisely thought-out reply with some great observations. I like that. Thanks for your thoughts, B.
You’re welcome.
Here’s a website you might be interested in:
https://thespaceshow.com/
It’s an Internet radio show that’s been around for 20 years. It’s livestreamed, but he archives each program. He’s interviewed all sorts of people including astronauts and scientists, and he even had a show with Elon Musk, well before he became famous. He’s interviewed SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell several times as well as Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance.
You may recognize him if you’re a regular listener to John Batchelor’s show as he has the Hotel Mars segment just about every week.
I’ve bookmarked it, and will give it a shot. Thanks!
(Picture me with Bose Headphones chopping veggies at kitchen island, listening to the Space Show!)
I totally disagree that sending probes to Mars is a waste of money. The development of remote controlled vehicles that can be operated millions of miles away here on earth is itself a huge accomplishment. I remember my Dad buying a new Mercury Grand Marquis in 1969. He had trouble with the automatic choke. He once told me, ”They can open and close doors on the moon, but they can’t make an automatic choke that works when it’s 3 feet away from the driver.”
Today, they can drill holes on Mars, and navigate a vehicle over any terrain. Someday, Rover 12 may be able to dig up diamonds on Mars. Just imagine the potential!!
Enjoy the song.
https://youtu.be/-I_T3XvzPaM
Em ploy these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoyR1U7Y7Po
Maybe I’ll move to mars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDH3bsXoLWs
Where’s the Dollar General?
Did you think wind would sound like a Mariachi band on Mars?
If in fact this is from Mars
Looks a lot like the capitol of Voter Fraud
Nevada
I hate to burst bubbles and all, but that is not Perseverance Rover. It’s the last rover, Curiosity, which has been there since 2012. Curiosity has the tires with the angled ribbed tread, which you can see here as the camera pans. Perseverance has a wavy tread, an innovation because Curiosity’s treads haven’t held up as well as hoped.
That said: Hang on to your hats, it’s going to be a terrific mission with even better graphic resolution!