Posted on 03/28/2007 6:36:28 PM PDT by KevinDavis
BEIJING (Reuters) - China and Russia will mount a joint effort to explore Mars and one of its moons in 2009, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday following an agreement to boost cooperation between the two ambitious space powers.
A Russian rocket will lift a Chinese satellite and Russian exploration vehicle to survey Mars and Phobos, the innermost and biggest of the red planet's moons, the China Daily reported, citing China's National Space Administration.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
The Russkies tried to probe Phobos once before...that didn't go so well.
The UK's Beagle 2 being the most notable recent failure, but a Japanese mission was DOA a few weeks before that (got zapped by a solar flare enroute).
True, but I was also speaking a bit facetiously because of the "theories" about what happened.
I had to go refresh my memory. What "theories" did you hear?
Well, the usual UFO theories about a beam of light striking the probe and the spacecraft going dead immediately thereafter.
What about the ESA shutting down one of the data channels on Cassini relaying data from Huygens during its descent?
I hadn't heard about the Cassini datalink.
... scientists initially received only about half as much data as they’d hoped,...Cassini managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were given an incorrect instruction set by the European Space Agency team,...“...we made a stupid mistake. I take full responsibility,” said Jacques Louet, head of science projects at the European Space Agency.
Part of the data lost in the malfunction was subsequently retrieved by a network of radio telescopes here on Earth that had been able to pick up some of the transmission directly from Huygens, bypassing the Cassini relay.
See The Wire for full article.
It is good that the data was lost.
I'll have to go to the NASA website and look at the Titan pics.
It's ours. We got there first. Hands off.
Sincerely,
America
"You want to impress us? Bring back our FLAG, A-holes!"
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