"You're blowing my cover! I tell you, there is water on Mars! I'm a secret agent! They will kill you all!"
So, I think Russian astronauts from Siberia should be contracted out by NASA to do the landing.
"You're blowing my cover! I tell you, there is water on Mars! I'm a secret agent! They will kill you all!"
There are recently released contracts to develope UAVs to do low level recon flights above the Martian surface.
May not be a manned landing but each of these little critters could return up to one hour of high resolution, color video shot as low as ten meters above the surface while limping along at up to 300 knots.
These UAVs are to be ready for launch before 43 faces reelection.
I for sure wont make it but surely it will be our second step taken into space.
yeah, inside the water too! Oxygen too! I love the press!
Yeah? What if all that hydrogen is in hydrogen sulfide instead of water? Not only would the astronauts have no way to get back, but they'd be doomed to spend the rest of their lives on a planet that smells like a giant fart.
Me,too! I even joined the Planetary Society so I could make sure I got to sign petitions to encourage Mars and other space exploration.
Nasa to head for Mars after water is found everywhere
The body of the article, however, says something very different:
In a paper for the journal Science, two scientists in Los Alamos involved with the mission will present evidence that ice lies about a metre beneath the surface over a large area.
There were "features that suggest water, or something like water, everywhere," Bob Reedy, one of the authors, told the Albuquerque Journal last week. "Yet today there's no water on the surface. Where did all that water go?"
This week Jim Garvin, the head of the US space agency's Mars exploration programme is expected to announce that, on the basis of the existence of accessible water on the planet, his agency is aiming to make a manned landing there within the next 20 years.
Seems to me there are far too many qualifications and "ifs" to merit the rather breathless headline. Two scientists (of hundreds, I'm guessing) who are "involved with the mission" (as opposed to heading it) "will present evidence" that there are "features that suggest water, "or something like water" about a meter below the surface. James Garvin is "expected to announce that, on the basis of accessible water on the planet [in other words, we need definitive proof], his agency is aiming to make a manned landing there within the next 20 years."
This doesn't make me want to book my reservations to the red planet just yet. And anyway, how many bajillion dollars did we spend on that little remote-controlled rover which determined, as best I can recall, that there are many rocks of various sizes and shapes, and varying in color from reddish brown to brownish red, on the surface of Mars?
) keep moving the water. A century ago, it was in the "canals"; a few decades ago, it was in polar ice caps; now it's hidden under the surface of the planet. Yeah, that's the ticket... Careful, it could be Ice Nine.
All that pristine water up there on Mars, and no brewery or distillery within millions of miles?
Let's get private enterprise involved! Forget NASA! Let's get Busch, Coors, Napa Valley wineries, and Jack Daniels involved in sponsoring missions to Mars! Who wouldn't want an ice cold Coors brewed from the fresh mountain waters of Olympus Mons?
Not a chance.
I work in the aerospace industry. And I have finally resigned myself to the fact that no human interplanetary missions will occur in my lifetime--probably in the next 50 years, unless the Japanese or some other nation picks up the torch we dropped.
Never doubt it: we have lost the "right stuff" and all our efforts will shortly be diverted to a life-or-death struggle with the Islamic world.
One more major terrorist strike (such as, e.g., bringing down the Sears tower in Chicago or the Golden Gate Bridge or...) will do it.
NASA is finished. In 5 years I expect its budget to be ~$5 billion. Eventually they will lose another shuttle (pure statistics) and that will be the end of manned spaceflight.
--Boris