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Mars revisited?Follow

#1 Jan 05 2004 at 2:46 PM Rating: Excellent
YAY! Canaduhian
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Ok all, settle a dispute, please. Have we -"earthlings"- ever landed a mobile roming device on Mars before? Have we ever landed anything on Mars before? I know I could Google it, but this is more fun. The national news was sure making a HUGE deal of it last night which prompted a household dispute.
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#2 Jan 05 2004 at 2:54 PM Rating: Good
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Not 100% sure but I seem to remember that we did. Didn’t it start roaming the surface and then break right away?

Perhaps someone who knows something should post. I'm just rambling...
#3 Jan 05 2004 at 2:55 PM Rating: Good
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Yes. And it promptly broke.

The "Mars Curse" has had its' hand on just about everything relating to Mars, but now it appears we may have our first mission that wil go off without a hitch. It just goes to show how difficult it is to make a successful inter-solar system mission and why inter-galactic travel is nigh-impossible.

Totem
#4 Jan 05 2004 at 2:57 PM Rating: Good
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My dad works for NASA, and according to whatever I didn't filter out during dinner this weekend, it's a huge deal, since we've landed 3 times on Mars but failed 7, and this is the first craft (Spirit) equipped with super-cool robots looking for water, hydrocarbons, and other evidence of life. Another one is going to the other side of Mars on the 24th. (Opportunity)

That, and the pictures are the best quality NASA has ever had. They are all proud like only true geeks can be.
#5 Jan 05 2004 at 3:29 PM Rating: Good
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Don't you people remember the Sojourner (sp?) probe that the Pathfinder craft spat out? It was that little TV tray on wheels that scuttled about the surface of Mars for maybe a month a couple years ago. It was a pretty big deal at the time as it was the first successful "low tech" landing (using mainly airbags to cushion its fall instead of rockets) and the probe lasted much longer than what was expected.

I could probably look it up and stuff, but I'm pretty sure I have my details straight.

Oh, and further back in the past, I'm close to certain one of the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars and sent back some data for a while. The real ***** of a planet is in the other direction: Venus. Everything we send there (not that it's been much) gets eaten by the thick, violent acidic atmosphere and crushed under the pressure the atmosphere produces.

Edited, Mon Jan 5 15:32:24 2004 by Jophiel
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#6 Jan 05 2004 at 5:28 PM Rating: Decent
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The Sojourner was more of a prestige ploy then a scientific experiment: more to say "look we can land on other planets" than to actually start research. We did get some fuzzy images and incomplete data, with what I seem to recall a week-long data lag. Other than that, I know that Britain's Beagle 2 embedded itself into the surface of the planet not too long ago, and shortly after that Japan's probe wandered off somewhere around the neighborhood of Saturn. Of course, Ray Bradbury himself expects that we will have people on his Red Planet within the next fifty years. I wonder how many of our 'nauts will be Lost in Space by then.
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#7 Jan 05 2004 at 5:32 PM Rating: Good
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Tare's question was whether or not we've landed a mobile roaming device on Mars before. The answer is yeah. It could have done nothing but flash Coca-Cola advertisments as it cruised the Martian landscape and it'd still qualify Smiley: grin
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