How Many times have we gone to the Moon total? QUESTION: Could a Fraud of that magnitue be perpatrated? I think it could. Esp back then. Do I think it *was*? what would be the point? Rocket River
YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS !! Ali G rocking Da House with Aldren, that was funny as hell. And as for that a$$clown that got clocked by Buzz, he should have hit him again. Calling a man who risked his life and did something INCREDIBLY dangerous like going to the moon a coward......wow, I would have hit him myself. DD
What would be the point? We were in the middle of the cold war and the Russians were ahead of us in the space race. The thing I don't understand is how we lost the technology to do this? Wouldn't it seem logical that we would have done something more significant than land a couple of little rovers on Mars at this point? It's almost 40 freaking years later and all we could muster is a couple of solar powered rc cars with cameras and a dremel attached. Something is wrong there. Then again its possible we landed there. What do I know? I wasn't around.
Why go there? What financial gain is there? What scientific gain? The moon is not exactly a place that is beckoning for us to go again. It is a big ole rock with little in the way of value, other than it orbits earth. Maybe a space station on there that we could set up an observatory, but we are already able to do stuff like that by linking telescopes on earth and using computers to filter out the noise etc... DD
Then answer me this question. How is it after 40 years of technology this is how we land something on Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Airbags.jpg
We are going back. NASA has just been committed to the Space Shuttle (for too long imo). My father works for Lockheed Martin and sent me this email last week or so. It has a movie: NASA - ESAS (Exploration Systems Architecture Study) The ESAS summarizes NASA's response to President Bush's directive to return to the Moon and look toward Mars exploration. NASA commisioned Media Fusion to create a compelling and accurate animation of the study findings. Portions of this animation have been used for the official NASA announcement. Media Fusion was also responsible for the creation of physical models of the spacecraft designs. The models will be distributed to the White House and members of the Congressional committee on Science and Technology . http://www.fusiononline.com/nasa_esas.htm But it does have critics: http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/m...3.htm?source=rss&channel=montereyherald_state
Right Anyway, obviously its much easier to land on something without an atmosphere. Balloons, though? Cmon.
Well it looks like Brian Muirhead, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's chief engineer for the of The Mars Science Laboratory heard your complaint and wants to switch to a skycrane in 2009. PASADENA, Calif. -- While the Spirit and Opportunity rovers wheel themselves into the history books of Mars exploration, get ready for the next giant leap in rolling across the red planet. The Mars Science Laboratory is an all-terrain, all-purpose machine, akin to an extraterrestrial Sport Utility Vehicle. To be rocketed toward Mars in 2009, this long-range, long-duration robot is a trend setter. It will scope out Mars like never before to assess that puzzling planet as a potential habitat for life -- past or present -- and help verify if human explorers could exist there in the future. Imaginative engineering Work on MSL is underway here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). And it is obvious from the get-go that just getting this mega-rover onto Mars takes a strong dose of imaginative engineering. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) would make the first wheels-down landing on the planet. No need for airbags, nor lengthy preparations to get the mobile robot "down-and dirty" on Mars. This Mars vehicle is lowered onto the surface via a Skycrane and ready for action, said Brian Muirhead, JPL's chief engineer for the MSL. Muirhead admits that the Skycrane idea evokes in some people "this is crazyyou've got to be kidding" comments. "I heard exactly those same words on the airbags," said Muirhead, who was a key leader in the Mars Pathfinder/Sojourner project - NASA's first Mars craft to use airbags. Spirit and Opportunity rovers now scuffing up martian landscape also utilized airbags to reach their respective landing zones. "But once you think about it a little bitthe Skycrane is absolutely better than airbags," Muirhead advised. Hang time After diving through the martian atmosphere and then under blossomed parachute, the Skycrane/MSL hardware would be set free to maneuver over Mars. The Skycrane frame carries propellant tanks topped-off with hydrazine propellant, as well as two "outriggers" - each outrigger equipped with a set of 700-pound thrust rocket motors. This suite of controllable engines first run hot and heavy to slow the structure down. By reducing motor thrusting, the Skycrane eases on down toward Mars. Using guidance and navigation gear, the Mars-bound hardware enters hover mode for a nominal five seconds. In a steady-as-she-goes manner, it hangs in mid-air a mere 15 feet (5 meters) above a pre-determined slice of martian real-estate. From there the MSL slips down a tether to reach Mars. Its depositing duty complete, the Skycrane departs the scene for a crash landing distant from the rover's arrival area. No fuss. No muss. No miles of bouncing. MSL's touchdown speed would be modest: one meter per second. "That's like falling from three inches on Earth," Muirhead told SPACE.com . "We're six wheels on Mars instantly," he explained. "The concept is very solid. One of the things that we really like about thisit's very testable on Earth," Muirhead said. A facility to help flesh out the Skycrane idea is being built at China Lake - a large Navy test complex about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Energizer bunny The MSL's landing ellipse -- the zone in which a spacecraft attempts to land within -- is some 6 miles by 3 miles (10 kilometers by 5 kilometers). That is nearly a factor of ten better than the target zones in which the Spirit and Opportunity exploration rovers came to rest. Where exactly on the red planet MSL is destined to put down is still to be determined. "We want to be able to go plus or minus 60 degrees in latitude at any season," Muirhead said. The mobile lab is five times larger than the current wheeled robot design now busily at work on Mars. That class of rover is around 400 pounds (180 kilograms). The heftier MSL could tip the scale at 1,980 pounds (900 kilograms). What drives that weight up is the science gear MSL will tote across the martian terrain -- 10 times the payload of a Spirit/Opportunity-class rover. MSL is designed to operate a full martian year, or two Earth years. At present, Boeing Co. and Lockheed-Martin are working on competing nuclear battery designs for the laboratory. Boeing's Canoga Park, Calif.-based Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power unit is designing a so-called Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG), a more powerful version of the RTGs that powered NASA's Viking 1 and 2 Mars landers in the 1970s. While the Multi-Mission RTG would not be as powerful as the RTGs aboard NASA's Cassini Saturn probe, it is designed to be more flexible, adaptable to both the orbiter and lander missions on the space agency's drawing boards. Given a nuclear power plant that it carries, the rover would be the energizer bunny of Mars by goingand goingand goingfor a number of years. On Mars, size matters. "We believe that a bigger vehicle has a lot more mobility," Muirhead said. With MSL's large wheel diameter, it can steer itself to exotic sites as well as chalk up serious distance much easier. And thanks to a more precise landing ellipse, the rover could touch down in a reasonably safe place and then trek to a much more hazardous region, he said. The now forbidden, do not trespass canyon region of Valles Marineris is a possibility for MSL roving. Clean as a whistle One of the big and costly challenges facing the MSL program is planetary protection. MSL is being sent to Mars to story board just how habitable the planet was in the past or whether that faraway world now serves as a haven for life. That means the rover must be free of any hitchhiking Earth bugs, and be organically clean too. Great care must be taken, therefore, in assuring that any microbial life detected by MSL aren't hangers-on from our own planet. That being said, going to a chosen region that may be an abode for life means MSL must be sterilized. Without taking a clean as a whistle approach, MSL could "foul the nest", so to speak at Mars. "If you were to crash in a mud puddle on Mars -- if such a thing existed -- you would have created an environment where terrestrial bugs could grow. And that would be terriblecontaminating the planet big time," Muirhead said. In the event of a crash-landed rover, the robot's nuclear-energized power supply could possibly create a liquid water region - an unwanted martian meltdown of ice. A major assessment is underway to agree on a spacecraft sterilization plan-of-action. Chemistry of whatever Development cost of the Mars Science Laboratory is slated to be below $850 million. With the price tag of either a Delta 4 or Atlas 5 booster tossed in, along with a rover-ready nuclear power pack, sterilization expenses and mission operations, MSL now adds up to a billion dollar plus probe. Later this year, the type of science gear loaded on MSL will be determined. What's wanted is an analytic suite of instruments. Already included is a core drill and crusher that delivers ground up samples for detailed, onboard study. "We can get into soil, rock, and ice. We can core anywhere," Muirhead said. "We actually have the capability to understand the chemistry of whatever we find on Mars," Muirhead said. The MSL is a "discovery-driven" mission. It will be dispatched to a scientific sweet spot on the red planet, picked because of the findings from earlier orbiters and landers. "What this mission is about is habitabilityunderstanding the ability of Mars -- past, present, or future -- to sustain life," Muirhead concluded. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/mars_science_lab_040211.html
You're not following me. Shouldn't the skycrane have been ready about 20 years ago? We went from gracefully landing onto the moon to crashing probes and rovers padded by balloons.
It was cheap alright, but it polluted the surface of Mars with lots of little fibers of fabric. If you remember they were even mistaken for microbes initially.
