This is very exciting news and promises the best opportunity yet for discovering life on Mars !
To Quote the JPL at NASA:
Phoenix Mission Ready For Mars Landing
Phoenix is preparing to end its long journey and begin a three-month mission to taste and sniff fistfuls of Martian soil and buried ice. The lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet May 25.
Exciting times for sure, Mars landing always hold a measure of intigue for me. I was reading where NASA terms the landing schedule as the "7 minutes of terror"
Just finished reading "The Origin of Life" by Paul Davies. Very interesting and thought provoking. He is feels that there alomst certainly was life on Mars, but probably not (on the surface at least) for the last 3 billion years. However, as microbial life has been detected living deep within the Earth's crust, Paul Davies feels that it is not impossible that life may still exist deep under the surface of Mars. If this is the case, then Phoenix is unlikely to collect anything actually living, but may perhaps collect evidence of things formerly living. Who knows?
Anyway, I've gone on from Origin of Life to "Quantum Evolution" which seems like it may be at least as thought provoking as the former.
COR! Read that stuff on spaceinfo.com It sure is scary what they are trying to do... Landing with a fighter plane radar, 12 separate rockets, a parachute that might come down on top of it, electric motors many years old., some hardware with no redundancy... Wow, if it gets down what an achievement that will be
COR! Read that stuff on spaceinfo.com It sure is scary what they are trying to do... Landing with a fighter plane radar, 12 separate rockets, a parachute that might come down on top of it, electric motors many years old., some hardware with no redundancy... Wow, if it gets down what an achievement that will be
It's not rocket science.... oh wait yes it is
I've always loved the "Scotty" approach to space exploration... MIR designed to last 5 years... lasted 15. Any number of deep space probes designed to last a relatively short time.... still sending data from the furthest reaches of our solar system (well furthest we have yet reached anyway).
But it's reading things like that, that make you feel it's reasonable that a few probes have had a less than successful landing (though that one that was a result of an error between metric and imperial was a bit of an embarrassment).
Monday Morning 09:30 Eh ..... looks like I will have to book a conference room at work with a big screen TV and an internet connection
I have made this mission the main topic of my science show this week ....
I have just uploaded the first podcast on the mission to http://www.askthescienceguru.com/
Hope you enjoy it
Thanks Liz, glad you liked the podcast
From what I can gather, there wont be pictures during the landing.
It will be some time after the landing before the video becomes available.
I will certainly be tuned in to the NASA channel on my PC at work on Monday morning anyhow.
As Liz has mentioned, NASA TV will be covering it from 8:00am Sydney time for those who want to witness the landing on the web. (You know what I mean -- there won't be any live pictures coming back, but hopefully there'll be lots of shots of excited people jumping around in mission control.) If you're near a TV with cable/satellite, you can also watch coverage on Sky News from (I'm guessing) around 9:45am. Yours truly will be there, burbling on in my usual fashion.
If you live in or near Canberra, you can go along to the NASA tracking station at Tidbinbilla where they'll be having live feeds and special activities. There's a link at the same page quoted above.
Only one image is expected back from Mars on the first day -- it should be in by shortly after midday Sydney time.
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Read that stuff on spaceinfo.com It sure is scary what they are trying to do... Landing with a fighter plane radar, 12 separate rockets, a parachute that might come down on top of it, electric motors many years old., some hardware with no redundancy... Wow, if it gets down what an achievement that will be
