Anyone Seen My Beagle?
Discussion
But even if the Beagle has landed a bit too heavily and is now a piece of £45m scrap metal on Mars' surface, what's the point of carrying on looking for it? What will this prove?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4542174.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4542174.stm
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beano500 said:
But even if the Beagle has landed a bit too heavily and is now a piece of £45m scrap metal on Mars' surface, what's the point of carrying on looking for it? What will this prove?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4542174.stm
If they find out what went wrong on this one, they can make the next one a bit better.
billb said:
to find out whether the americans sabotaged it so they could be first of course!
They already were 30 years ago.
The Americans WEREN'T the first to soft-land a probe on Mars. The Russians did it first - in 1974 (two years before the Viking landers). Unfortunately for the Russkis, there was a planet wide sandstorm blowing at the time and their probe stopped transmitting minutes after it had deployed its antennae etc on the surface. They even managed to get a few lines of a picture from the surface before the probe died. It was probably overwhelmed by dust or blown over in the wind.
If they can find a tiny probe thing on Mars where are the pics of the Lunar Rovers ?
We had a library of pics from that Galileo probe and the Hubble, but not one shot of any of the stuff the yanks left behind, where did it go ?
Let's see US flags, the buggies, the legs of Appollo, lots of stuff.
We had a library of pics from that Galileo probe and the Hubble, but not one shot of any of the stuff the yanks left behind, where did it go ?
Let's see US flags, the buggies, the legs of Appollo, lots of stuff.
No one has orbited a space probe around the moon since 1971 that has ANYTHING like the resolution powered of Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor (the two craft currently orbiting Mars). The Hubble Space Telescope pictures of Mars are pretty good, but they can't resolve individual features on the surface less than a couple of hundred miles across.
As for soft-landing on Uranus - there is no other kind of landing there since Uranus (like all the gas giants) has no solid surface. Only one probe has been to Uranus (Voyager 2 - in 1986) and it flew past and went on to Neptune.
The discoverer of Uranus, William Herschel, wanted to call the new planet "Georgius" (after George III) but he was overuled. I wish they'd accepted the original name
>> Edited by Eric Mc on Tuesday 20th December 12:56
As for soft-landing on Uranus - there is no other kind of landing there since Uranus (like all the gas giants) has no solid surface. Only one probe has been to Uranus (Voyager 2 - in 1986) and it flew past and went on to Neptune.
The discoverer of Uranus, William Herschel, wanted to call the new planet "Georgius" (after George III) but he was overuled. I wish they'd accepted the original name
>> Edited by Eric Mc on Tuesday 20th December 12:56
Hilts said:
If they can find a tiny probe thing on Mars
They can't really the resolution's not good enough - Pillinger is 'making an educated guess'
Hilts said:
where are the pics of the Lunar Rovers ?
We had a library of pics from that Galileo probe and the Hubble, but not one shot of any of the stuff the yanks left behind, where did it go ?
Galileo was a Jupiter probe, so hardly surprising that it returned no hi-res pictures of the moon's surface, and the moon is far too bright to turn Hubble to it would bugger the sensors in short order, even if we could I don't think it has anything like the resilution necessary to resolve anything as small as a LM or Rover at that distance
Hilts said:
Let's see US flags, the buggies, the legs of Appollo, lots of stuff.
The Apollo 15 "mini-satellite" which orbited the moon whilst the astronauts were on the surface DID photograpgh the Apollo 15 Lunar Module on the surface.I've seen the picture it took showing the lander (or at least, the shadow it cast).
People don't realise that there has been no systemtatic scientific survey of the moon by space probes since Apollo ended in 1972. The last automatic probe survey of the moon actually ENDED in 1967, two years BEFORE Apollo 11 landed. I expect that the "return to the moon" programme which NASA hope to embark on soon will see at least one new survey mission launched to check out future landing sights for manned missions and also locate water if possible. I'm sure that these survey probes should be able to picture Apollo hardware sitting on the surface - believe me, the stuff is there. The laser reflectors the astronauts left behind are still functioning and are used regularly.
People don't realise that there has been no systemtatic scientific survey of the moon by space probes since Apollo ended in 1972. The last automatic probe survey of the moon actually ENDED in 1967, two years BEFORE Apollo 11 landed. I expect that the "return to the moon" programme which NASA hope to embark on soon will see at least one new survey mission launched to check out future landing sights for manned missions and also locate water if possible. I'm sure that these survey probes should be able to picture Apollo hardware sitting on the surface - believe me, the stuff is there. The laser reflectors the astronauts left behind are still functioning and are used regularly.
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