"Curiosity" Lands On Mars! Huzzah! Poland's Mars Society Must Be Ecstatic.

How about just start with this one, make it last twenty years, then build another and send it up? That isn't unreasonable.

Isn't it a crying shame to pump untold billions of the taxpayers' money into off-the-wall projetcs of this kind just so outerspace buffs can get their jollies off and filthy rich corporations can get even filthier! It could be better used to irrigate and recultivate huge populated wastelands (Ethiopia, Somalia,etc.) where millions are dying a slow death becaase of malnutrition , disease and drought.

OK, so the space gizmo contains apparatus produced in Ożarów Mazowiecki, if a Polish angle is needed here.

PlasticPole,I agree,unless they can come up with something that can do a lot more sooner.They should design these things to be able to be able to lift off when they are done and come back and maybe be refitted for another mission;I don't think this would not be unreasonable either,I'm glad to find out that this rover makes sense.

Actually, if you knew much about NASA, you'd realise that the majority of their funding comes from the private sector - not tax payer money..

Give this a read: cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-you-should-be-excited-about-mars-today/

No.


The Earth won't last forever. Eventually we'll have to be able to get past the edge of the solar system. This will take a heck of a long time and we have to start somewhere.


If people in the developed countries, especially the US stopped consuming so much life in the developing world would be easier. Are millions dying a slow death, by the way?

If they could figure out how to do that, they could bring back samples to study which would, perhaps eliminate the need for x amount of probes in the future.

It isn't so much about funding, because even if the funding is private, it is still sucking up money from the economy. It's more a matter of good management and avoiding waste which we, as a species, need to adopt as an attitude.

Nightglade,I said that in a prior post.I really don't know all that much about NASA though;nor do I claim to.

I was referring to Polonius's comments about "untold billions of taxpayer money"

Nightglade,My bad,Your post was right after mine and I hadn't read his as I was discussing with PlasticPole.

:) It's ok. I didn't quote because I thought it would be a very quick response, we both posted in the same minute :D

Nightglade,lol,what do you think of Curious?

Quite excited. I followed it from launch and I was very happy to hear this morning that it landed. NASA noted that it's not designed to search for microbial life, which is a pity - I think that proof of the existence of life outside of Earth is of great interest to many. But each extra-terrestrial mission brings us one step closer to that. We already know a lot about Mars and its history. It's believed that 3-4 billion years ago it resembled a smaller version of earth with oceans and continents. Solar winds stripped away the atmosphere, resulting in the barren wasteland we see today. It's quite possible such an occurrence could happen to us too. Thus, any knowledge we can gain about the history of our closest neighbour (just outside of the 'habitable zone') I think could be of great importance to us.

This point is alway raised when talking about peaceful space exploration, who we are, where we came from and are we alone.

The total cost of the MSL project is about US$2.5 billion.[20]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory

$10 billion spent on cosmetic procedures (2011 in the U.S alone)
caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/10/10-billion-spent-on-cosmetic-procedures-despite-recession

For the 2010 fiscal year, the (U.S.) president's base budget of the Department of spending on "overseas contingency operations" brings the sum to $663.84 billion

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

The denial that they're searching for microbial life is just canard, to keep those that don't follow these things from getting disapointed. They are most CERTAINLY prowling for signs of life, i.e. mineral deposits, aquatic depressions, dry rivulets, etc. There's nary a penny to spare, either from NASA or her precious few moneybag donators, to waste time with frivolities. This mission was planned, rehearsed, and simulated ad nauseum, because this is the best hope there is of determining whether the building-blocks of life ever existed on Mars.

Nightglade,I find it quite exciting as well,I don't think it's totally far fetched to think that Mars may have had forms of life that were very similar to ours,do you?

You misunderstand. They are, most certainly, searching for the existence of compounds. However, the rover is not equipped with technology capable of identifying microbial or fossilised microbial life.


Who knows what the solar system looked like 4 billion years ago when Mars had oceans. Isn't it conceivable that the orbit of Mars was also different? Perhaps even inside the so-called 'habitable' zone. Another emerging theory out there, is that Asteroids are repositories for chemical compounds that serve as the building blocks for life. One connected theory is that similar life may have once existed on Mars, and asteroids that impacted the surface of Mars carried microbial life (which is capable of surviving in the cold vacuum of space) to Earth. If not life, then at least other compounds.

... this might be an interesting video for you.

I do wonder if there was a dinosaur period on Mars like there was here, or was it very simple organisms that existed there at one time. It's not likely that Mars had life for long, though. Not like the Earth in that respect.

Au contraire! As a matter of fact, there's concern that the teflon coating on the instrumentation may interfere with the readings.

Another question is, how far would you have to dig down to find evidence of life on Mars, or would the solar winds cause so much wind erosion, evidence might be closer to the surface?

If anything else, future generations will be able to cook their eggs on a non-stick utensil


Cannot even pretend to know, but there are massive dunes on Mars that are the size of mountains. Who knows what lays buried beneath them :) Curiosity is aptly named.

PlasticPole,It's very possible and that may very well be they're thinking,because look at the size of the rover,As for life it's hard to say how long it could have been there had it existed.The circumstances for life may have come together much earlier in it's existence and may have lasted much longer than ours;It's really hard to say when we use the earth as a model..

It would be so strange if they discovered oil on Mars...

Unfortunately, due to the price tag (which people blow out of all proportions IMHO) the rovers are sent to 'safe' (or boring) landing spots to maximize the success of the mission rather than areas that could reveal more which are more hazardous.


Exactly! :)

This is cool google Mars.

The Mars daytime sky reminds me of the one here during a dust storm.

PlasticPole,It really does and if you didn't know those pictures were from Mars you could very well think it was a picture from a dessert on earth

life on mars from the poland's view.

There are a lot of unanswered questions SeanBM. Heh. My belief is, everything is so far apart throughout the universe, the odds of us finding a signal are so low, it's the same each one of us has of winning the jackpot in a lottery. It might take literally hundreds if not thousands of years of searching to actually come across one signal from another species and we have not been searching that long. So far.

Possibly some unanswerable too but I'd prefer if we at least tried :)


Maybe not hundreds or thousands of years:



Before boats, compasses and mapping it took a long time to go from Europe to the Americas or elsewhere.
Who knows what will be invented to make those vast distances short but I think we have not discovered all we can and at our current rate of technological advancement i.e. the moment you understand a new piece of technology means it's obsolete, I think it is our duty to find out.

I've heard this explanation about the origins of the WOW signal:

Ehman has stated his doubts that the signal is of intelligent extraterrestrial origin: "We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris."[9]

from the wiki article. So, I am not sure if that's an actual honest to goodness ET signal or just something from activity on or around Earth.

Join the club, nobody is but a man can dream can't he? :D

Personally I think that any life elsewhere will be as alien to us as life in the deep oceans, on the Hydrothermal vent, Lake Vostok of this planet.