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Is any else following Curiosity? Here’s a great short video from NASA: http://www.wimp.com/rovercuriosity/To give you a sense of the scale of Curiosity, check it out next to a couple of its little brothers:  Go here if you want to see a full page photo: http://i.imgur.com/FdzQB.jpgCool stuff! 
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I'm anxiously waiting on the Hi-Def pics to start flowing in...
Any idea when we'll be seeing those?
Living in The Music City
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Cool - thanks for the link. It is an amazing accomplishment, for sure.
I remember the first lunar landing. I was a kid, but my folks let me stay up to watch them bouncing around on the lunar surface. As a matter of fact, my Dad had a hand in a few of the space missions, so I had some exposure to the early missions. Always had a fascination for this kind of stuff. This mission is special due to the technology that will be deployed. Using lasers on rocks, scooping up samples of the terrain, roaming around the surface, hi-def images - pretty cool stuff!
Living in The Music City
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Apprentice
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I agree wholly with you Mike. Stuff like this drew me to engineering. Just hope the current and future administrations don't continue to see NASA as an easy way to cut spending.
Todd
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I also watched the first lunar landing live as a kid. I’ve been a NASA fan ever since. Only 12 people have walked on the moon. Quote:
Neil Armstrong - Apollo 11 - July, 1969
Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin - Apollo 11 - July, 1969
Charles "Pete" Conrad - Apollo 12 - November, 1969
Alan Bean - Apollo 12 - November, 1969
Alan Shepard - Apollo 14 - February, 1971
Edgar Mitchell - Apollo 14 - February, 1971
David Scott - Apollo 15 - July, 1971
James Irwin - Apollo 15 - July, 1971
John Young - Apollo 16 - April, 1972 (also on Apollo 10, without landing)
Charles Duke - Apollo 16 - April, 1972
Eugene Cernan - Apollo 17 - December, 1972 (also on Apollo 10, without landing)
Harrison Schmitt - Apollo 17 - December, 1972
It’s hard to believe we haven’t been back in 40 years and we’re now reduced to hitching a ride with the Russians on 30+ year old technology just to get to the space station.
The space station is only 220 miles away. The average distance between the Moon and the Earth is 384,403 kilometers (238,857 miles).
As for Mars:
Quote:
The nearest that Mars has ever been to the Earth is 56 million km or about 34.8 million miles. On the opposite end of the scale, Mars and Earth can be a whopping 401 million km (249 million miles) apart when they are in opposition and both are at aphelion. The average distance between the two is 225 million km (140 million miles).
The makes the complicated landing of an SUV sized rover pretty impressive. I’m looking forward to seeing what it finds. With the equipment on this rover, it could be pretty exciting.
Funding NASA is important to the future of our advancement as a species. And it’s also pretty cool to watch.
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I was logged into NASA TV Sunday night and watched the people in mission control start jumping and screaming when they received that little text message. Very cool. I read somewhere that Curiosity won't be all checked out and ready to go for about 10 days.
I was playing a gig in a bar in North Hollywood when we landed on the moon. Actually I don't think we had started yet, we were there setting up. We were all glued to the little 21" TV listening to Uncle Walter. Everybody there including us, the staff and the drunks all cheered.
One reason NASA's budget gets cut is the incredible cost overruns for everything. And the very expensive and embarrasing incompetence. Remember the Hubble when it was first launched and it beamed back the first pics and they were blurry? How about that other Mars mission where somebody forgot to do a metric to miles conversion and it entered the Martian atmosphere way too steep and crashed? Several billion dollars for both of those incidents.
I remember very clearly all the things the Shuttle was going to do for space exploration especially the much lower cost because it's reusable. Right. It's a marvel of engineering but it was so far over budget even I can't exaggerate it. I hate to say it because NASA is well, NASA we all love it and what they stand for but in reality it's just another wildly overblown wasteful government program. The stories about costs are legendary, I've read about them for years. The line from the movie Contact that goes something like "the thing about government programs is why have only one when you can build two at four times the cost" pretty much says it all. That Russion system is simple, reliable, safe, powerful and cheap. Relatively speaking of course. Sure, when you're in a Communist dictatorship that has morphed into a Russian Mafia/KGB faux democracy where if you screw up your dog can't find you, it's somewhat easier to get things done.
Like Heinlein said, we'll just keep muddlin through and it usually works out.
At four times the cost.
Bob
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[e: spam removed]
Last edited by Will - PG Music; 08/08/12 08:50 AM.
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Well, this old robotics engineer from days now past, who once worked at a university under a JPL contract, is all up innit.
Did you know that the wheel treads of Curiousity leave a MESSAGE in the Martian Sands everywhere she goes?
There are slots milled into the wheels that extrude sand into Morse Code letters as the wheels roll.
Di-Dah-Dah-Dah
Di-Dah-Dah-Dit
Di-Dah-Di-Dit
or
J
P
L
Over and over again.
How cool is that?
Morse is the *only* digital code that does not require a machine to read it. Can be done with the human senses and mind only.
One of the whizkids might be an Amateur Radio Operator and ain't a nocode nuthin'...
--Mac
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Journeyman
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Growing up in the 60's and as an avid reader of every sci-fi book I could get my hands on I eagerly awaited each and every next chapter of "The Space Race".
My mother went to school with Rod Serling (she even got me his autograph at a high school reunion)so The Twilight Zone was a weekly staple at our house.
My school notebooks were full of drawings of space ships and alien monsters often to the chagrin of my teachers.
My goal was to eventually get a job with NASA until, in college, the reality hit me that my brain cells were better equipped for doing art than math.
So I ended up painting rockets instead of flying them.
A lot safer choice as I look back on it now.
Throughout my life I have never ceased to be amazed at the things science can accomplish to be used for both good and bad.
However, while I realize most of what we have today can be traced back to the efforts to put men on the moon and possibly on Mars, I wonder if it's time we put the same effort and expense into Terraforming our own planet.
I believe there is still a universe of undiscovered wonders right here on Earth and exploring them would yield many more real benefits which could help save our planet from the pollution and economic pressures it now faces.
Focusing on near space projects,such as experiments in the space station and possibly mining the moon, for example.
These could give us more bang for our buck and result in expanded living areas to now uninhabitable areas, more and cleaner water, cheaper and less polluting energy sources, etc.
I'd hate to be one of the astronauts who travel on a round trip to Mars and then realize there is no place to go home to.
Just stirring the pot.
Have a great one,
Carkins
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Curiously, I have no curiosity at all.
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I always envied you guys. In 69 i was a kid and we had to listen it on the radio...(not the same)
here in South Africa we only got TV in 1976! 1 channel I'll have you know.
Spent the begiinning of my career in the miltary aircraft industry (avionics and gyroscopes) ...
A couple of years ago I was a speaker at a project management sofware conference in Florida and Alan Bean was the keynote speaker.
He based his talk on risk and made us reflect on them sitting on the top of Apollo built by the cheapest tenderers ...
I managed to have a chat to him afterwards and shake his hand (haven't washed it yet)
I'm doing allright for Country Trash ....
I used to care, but things have changed (Bob Dylan)
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This quip fits in perfectly here:
(Top joke in Canada)
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300°C.
The Russians used a pencil.
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I'm sure all this will pay off in the end. I mean, just look what the pictures are showing us now that we didn't know existed before: 
Living in The Music City
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