Well, the first of the twin rovers looks like it’s successfully ready to go! Every system so far has worked flawlessly - everything is deployed, the stereo camera has already returned 360 degree panoramas, the uplink to the Mars Observer satellite is working correctly. The only even slight glitch so far is a solar panel that appears to be only making 83% of rated power.
All in all, an amazing success.
There should be a debate in this somewhere…
Is NASA back? Does this successful landing buy NASA more funding?
What will the result be if Spirit successfully shows that Gusev crater is a lakebed? If signs of life are found?
One thing I’m curious about - does the next rover have several possible landing sites? I’m thinking that NASA may have picked a conservative but less dangerous landing site as the primary, and then chosen a more dangerous but scientifically interesting site to switch to if the first rover was a success, allowing a little more risk.
I have little to add, except for ‘Huzzah for NASA’, and I hope this 800 million USD project heralds the end of the ‘smaller, cheaper’ phase that NASA was going through for a while. If they are going to spend the money, may as well spend enough to get the job done right.
I have to admit that I doubt there has been life on Mars and that proof of even the existence of water on the Red planet would make me reconsider A LOT! Signs of life, no matter how small would be a huge discovery.
I should clarify that by the existence of water I mean the existence of a lake or wetland or some such. Some type of enviroment or potential enviroment which, AFAIK, has not been found on our bellicose brother.
Could someone explain to me the point of going to Mars just to go to Mars? I could understand a private enterprise going there for the purpose of mining or something. But why go just to blow a bazillion dollars? Yes, I know that man is an exploring animal and so forth, but space exploration is such a waste of time since interstellar travel is hopelessly problematic. Unless we are woefully wrong about the laws of physics, no one will be colonizing any planets around other stars. Ever.
And so what if they find some bacteria on Mars? They frankly can’t know that they didn’t take it with them either on this trip or on a prior one. And even if they find guaranteed-to-be-alien bacteria, so what? We already understand abiogenesis and natural selection. Exploring Mars, it seems to me, is like throwing pennies in a well.
Here is what NASA says the goals are. Not exploring the planets because interstellar travel has not proven possible is rather like not getting into a rowboat because it can’t cross the Atlantic. We may indeed never travel to the stars, but interplanetary travel is definitely within our capabilities. The rovers are legitimate scientific research and research is a legitimate function of government.
Just want to point out that this is not a biology mission, but rather a geology mission. It will not be looking for Martian life as such although it will be looking for things that would have made life possible.
For example, finding sedimentary rock would indicate the former presence of water. The mission will also be looking for carbon and organic compounds, but there will be no attempt to culture any actual life.
As for why do the mission at all – it is called doing science. Learning new things is good enough reason for me.
I don’t agree that scientific research is a legitimate function of government. Set aside government’s celebrated bureaucratic incompetence — I’ll even grant for the sake of argument that government is a lean and efficient researching machine. But science ought not to be politicized and dogmatized. Once that has happened, it will become indistinguishable from religion.
I respectfully disagree about government’s role in research. Without government funding, Columbus would never have sailed. Much research is done in medicine only with government grants. Private enterprise would pursue only those things with tangible economic benefits, sometimes you need to do research with no immediate payoff and for those things, govenmental funding is essential.
One of my fondest wishest is for proof of non-terrestrial life being found in my lifetime. I know it’s unlikely, but a great way to start this year would be for some really obvious sign of past life being found on Mars, like a fossil large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
Actually, I think abiogenesis is something a lot of biologists would give their right arms or first-born children to understand. We have a lot of sober hypotheses and wild-ass guesses about it, but no deep understanding.
Whether or not Mars missions (or the comet rendezvous by the Stardust probe) will aid in this is still anybody’s guess.
Business often does research with no immediate payoff. Besides, since the public dole is there anyway, why wouldn’t they take advantage of it? And since government regulates the research, there are the additional expenses of lobbying and purchasing legislation. With respect to the raping and pillaging by white European conquistadors, much of it was privately financed. America is named after one such.
Lib, that you’re posting your anti-government in research and development stance on a message board on the Internet is all the evidence you need that the government should do basic research and build basic infrastructure, if for no other reason than to open up possibilities for commercial exploitation.
Ask yourself this: if NASA had never existed, and the Soviet Union had never competed against it, would we have satellites in orbit now? What private initiatives were there that would have developed the capability to put satellites in orbit with some reliability and economy?
Until the private sector puts up its own money to develop a space travel capability (and the X-Prize is a good step in that direction), it falls to government to pave the way for business, because business is too short-term to do it themselves.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of making some tiresome, snotty nit-pick about Amerigo Vespucci and the total disconnect between a balmy Italian map-maker and Spanish conquistadors.
Oh, I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be anything people would expect from silly sci-fi (i.e. no galatic civilization, certainly not one i real time), but it’s certainly possible that we could someday spread life to other places in the galaxy over hundreds of thousands of years.
What? When was this announced? We have tons more to learn about both of these things (moreso the latter than the former).
If we were to find an indepedant abiogensis of life, not only would it radically alter many people’s vision of the universe, but it would be invaluable for understanding the possibilities of life in our universe, and deepen our understanding of our own form. Currently, we have only one known tree of life to study, our own. A single data point is not particularly informative when what you want to know are the possibilities and constraints out there, what sort of solutions to various problems are plausible. So life on other planets would be an absolutely incredible finding.
It would be fairly easy to figure out if the life was from contamination, given that things on our tree of life share similar DNA.
I dunno: private research doesn’t exactly have the best track record on that score either. It’s hardly an either or situation, and both have severe deficiencies of their own on this score.
And regardless, science keeps from getting dogmatic not by every single scientist or endeavor being unbiased, but by there being lots and lots of scientists all with incentives to argue and debunk each other. The core principles of liberal science are that there is no central authority on what is right, and there is no end to the discussion over what is right. I don’t see how public money threatens those principle at all: it’s not like the government bars private space research, and indeed quite a bit of that has already begun ramping up. Would it have happened without the space program in the first place, an arugably unproductive, purely for show effort? Probably not as soon or as fast.
The problem with government funding of science is the same problem with government funding of anything: why should people who might have other interests be forced to pay for it? Space exploration may have all sorts of great benefits. But why is it defacto assumed that it has MORE benefit than what someone else wanted to use their money for? Or that we can make cost/benefit claims that include other people’s property in the first place?
To put it another way, it’s been fifty years since space exploration started in earnest, and only now is the first serious effort at developing a private sector capacity to replace the government’s happening.