FOR SCIENCE! A Thread about Curiosity Rover and Nasa and only about the Curiosity Rover and Nasa

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Necronic

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It's a simple point of money spent, not the rest of the situation.
Can you place a value on what scientific discoveries will be made through the NASA landing?
The problem is that the olympics bring in money incredibly fast. Like, within the same time frame that the money is being spent. Also the value of it is very direct and measurable. Ticket sales, licensing deals, etc. Even indirect value, like how much money a foreigner spends in country overall while going to the olympics, is pretty measurable. It's not unrealistic for the Olympic games to actually bring a monetary profit to the country hosting it. That could never be said about the Nasa mission.

The value of the NASA mission is far more ephemeral. Not that it isn't a priceless project. Just saying that the chart linked is very misleading.
 
No, you read more into the chart than there was to be stated. It simply said:

We spent more on the Olympics this year than we did on the entire program to get Curiosity to Mars.

Anything more, you put into it.
 
Yep, the meaning was.

I repeat:

We spent more on this year's Olympics than we did on the entire space program to send Curiosity to Mars.
 
I've heard that 1984 Los Angeles was the last Olympics to turn a profit. My guess on that, is most of the venues from 1932 survived. Also being a town the size of LA they had enough sports complexes to host the games with out all the construction.
 

Necronic

Staff member
Yep, the meaning was.

I repeat:

We spent more on this year's Olympics than we did on the entire space program to send Curiosity to Mars.
We also spent more on the federal highway system.

I've heard that 1984 Los Angeles was the last Olympics to turn a profit. My guess on that, is most of the venues from 1932 survived. Also being a town the size of LA they had enough sports complexes to host the games with out all the construction.
I actually just read an article on that. Apparently the Olympics were so expensive that there was only one city willing to do it: LA. And they had really major stipulations like refusing to build stadiums and severely limiting public funding.

Beijing also turned a profit on the games, if you're willing to believe them.
 

Dave

Staff member
By the way, I've had a couple of reports that this was more suited to the Olympics thread than the science thread. But at the same time it is a comparison of science vs. sport so it does kinda fit. So for now I'm allowing it to stay as it shows the priorities our government has. Note I didn't say the American public, because I think we've seen that there is still great interest in the space program.
 
Ultra-high Res pictures are now coming in. Panoramic view being contructed : http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia16051_figure_1_raw_smaller-full.jpg

For those interested, Obama called up JPL this morning : http://www.space.com/17071-obama-calls-nasa-mars-rover-landing-team.html

Close up view of the ground... doesn't look like Mars a whole lot does it? http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00003/mcam/0003ML0000082000E1_DXXX.jpg

Every Mars Mission we've launched... or attempted to : http://nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/mars_15001.gif
 

GasBandit

Staff member
By the way, I've had a couple of reports that this was more suited to the Olympics thread than the science thread. But at the same time it is a comparison of science vs. sport so it does kinda fit. So for now I'm allowing it to stay as it shows the priorities our government has. Note I didn't say the American public, because I think we've seen that there is still great interest in the space program.
People need to unclench.
 
Sometimes when I read about some of these planetary discoveries, I feel that the scientists are talking out their collective asses. Because we see a slight twinkle and wobble in a pinhole of a star, we extrapolate that the planet has water, mild temperatures and the actual size of the planet.
 
Well, it's more like from the size of the star, the distance of the planet from the star and I guess some more things (which can be known from the twinklebobble) we extrapolate all that.
 

Dave

Staff member
Well, it's more like from the size of the star, the distance of the planet from the star and I guess some more things (which can be known from the twinklebobble) we extrapolate all that.
I wonder if someone from the Canis Major galaxy is checking out Earth's twinklebobble. Aw yeah!
 
Sometimes when I read about some of these planetary discoveries, I feel that the scientists are talking out their collective asses. Because we see a slight twinkle and wobble in a pinhole of a star, we extrapolate that the planet has water, mild temperatures and the actual size of the planet.
The twinklebobble allows us to estimate/calculate what kind of mass, size and orbit a planet would need to have to cause it.
Changes in the spectrum of radiation of the star at the same time as the twinklebobble give some indication as to what elements are possibly on the planet (hence "it has water"). We can't/don't know if it's actually habitable (hence "if it has land"). "Mild temperatures" is a bit of an asspull; the average temperature is supposedly 22°C (which is about 7°C warmer than Earth, so even if it was pretty much a mirror image otherwise it'd be mostly covered in zones too hot for comfortable human life), but that doesn't say much about conditions there. It's perfectly possible that it's an ocean-covered planet, wrecked with 150+ kph winds all year long, and far too warm for us to survive.

That aside, there's some serious bad-science-I-think-it-works-that-way-cause-I-read-Wikipedia going on in the comments there. Size =/= mass =/= gravity on surface =/= gravitic force.
 


Also, there's a lot of wicked footage from the Kaguya lunar orbiter from a couple years back. It might've been posted before, but it's new to me.

 
More like "Marsshaking"!

Seriously though, what a lame thing to do. If theres something big, report it. If not, just keep quiet until you've finished testing it.
 

Dave

Staff member
The press leaked it more than anything. JPL didn't make an announcement that they found something. The press found out & said, "So....what'd ya find?" & NASA was all like, "I ain't telling!" But in the past they have so it's probably pretty major.
 
They'll release the findings around Christmas.

"Santa lives on Mars, Rudolph's nose was radioactive martian dust!"
 

fade

Staff member
Sometimes when I read about some of these planetary discoveries, I feel that the scientists are talking out their collective asses. Because we see a slight twinkle and wobble in a pinhole of a star, we extrapolate that the planet has water, mild temperatures and the actual size of the planet.
I see what you're saying, but you fill up your tank everyday with gas from crude oil that was discovered with nothing more than a slight variation in a sound wave. From that, I can tell you how deep, how big, how wide, (sometimes) how profitable an oil reservoir is.
 
Curiosity celebrates it's first year on Martian soil! And it sung "Happy Birthday" to itself on mars. No word as to whether anyone was listening, or whether the RIAA has jurisdiction over Mars and if NASA paid royalties for the use of the copyrighted tune.



Curiosity, NASA's most sophisticated and complex Mars rover, touched down on the Red Planet on the morning of August 6, 2012 (August 5 if you're in Pacific Daylight Time). The $2.5 billion mission set out to explore Gale Crater, which was thought to have once hosted flowing water, and find out if that environment was once habitable.
Spoiler alert: It was.

But that's not all the rover found while traveling 1.6 kilometers across Mars' barren surface during its 12 months on the planet. Curiosity has collected 190 gigabits of data and sent back more than 36,700 full images and 35,000 thumbnail images, NASA said. The rover has also fired more than 75,000 laser shots to help scientists analyze the composition of material, and collected samples from two rocks.

NASA scientists joke that the "warranty" on Curiosity is two years, since that was the rover's design specification, said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission. But other robotic vehicles have far outlasted their projected lifetimes. NASA landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in 2004, and Opportunity is still chugging along. (Spirit stopped communicating in 2010).

Now, Curiosity is on its way to Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high structure made of layers that, scientists believe, recorded Mars' geological history.
Five things we learned since this time last year:
1. We can land a 2 ton (1,814kg) car sized object on mars gently as you please. Engineers who monitored the landing were alarmed that the spacecraft landed slightly more gently than expected, and after a year of study concluded that there is a gravity anomoly in the area, and next time they will have to taken into account gravitational maps of Mars.
2. Evidence of the building blocks necessary for life as we know it exists, suggesting that Mars could have supported life at one point in its past.
3. The carpet doesn't match the drapes. While Mars is a redhead, one need only drill a little into the surface to expose its gray interior.
4. The atmosphere, currently thin and inhospitable, was about 100 times more dense than Earth's several billion years ago.
5. Instruments collected radiation info during the trip to Mars, and found even in a shielded spacecraft astronauts would be exposed to too much radiation during the trip. They are going to have to shorten the trip, or increase the shielding, probably both, before we can consider manned missions to Mars

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/tech/innovation/mars-curiosity-anniversary/index.html?hpt=hp_c4
 
The press leaked it more than anything. JPL didn't make an announcement that they found something. The press found out & said, "So....what'd ya find?" & NASA was all like, "I ain't telling!" But in the past they have so it's probably pretty major.
 
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