Am I the only one
Who sadly expects this lander with its flying sky crane to fail spectacularly and spray bits of radioactive rover all across mars?
I don't want it to, but it seems a massively Heath Robinson way to get a lander landed.
While tales of UFOs and alien abductions are still being greeted with snorts of derision, NASA really is searching the skies for signs of extraterrestrial life, though it's not little green (or grey) men the agency is looking for, it's signs of life - most probably not above the microbial level - on Mars. The Red Planet has …
I hope that they remember which units they are working with - at least one previous mission has failed to arrive due to a mix-up between metric and imperial units. And the last thing we want is for this nuclear bomb to come back home in the future and then burn up in the earth's atmosphere and spray radioactivity everywhere.
Hopefully the half-life of the nuclear materials used will be of a relatively short duration so that by the time Buck Rogers arrives it will have safely decayed to a level where humanoids won't be at risk.
So it'd be- at worst- a Dirty bomb. And not a very good one.The half life of Plutonium is in the region of 90 years, which is why the Voyager craft have kept going so long. The energy from an RTG comes from natural decay of the materials inside it rather than 'normal' fission.
There is ALREADY radioactivity everywhere. Nature makes it, man makes it- coal power plants belch it into the atmosphere in massive amounts, the Carbon-14 in the wood in your house is releasing radioactivity all the time. Same with the Granite in the walls if you have them. A small proportion of it even comes from nuclear power and bombs.
Good point about the units, though- hope they don't get mils and mm mixed up!
@AC, don't forget bananas too... full of radioactive potassium, which is the main source of radiation inside us.
Actually, just sleeping with someone for a year gives as much extra dose as a chest X-ray, so presumably spending a lot of time in crowds, football matches, discos etc also increases exposure to what we already have to tolerate, and we can't live without potassium.
I wonder what effect on longevity a K40-less diet could have if it was ever economically feasible to do.. probably not much, but it's activity has almost certainly contributed to the mutations that helped to create who we are today, so for that we should be grateful...
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I hope that this or one of the following missions do find life on Mars. It would probably be the most important historic event in my lifetime and I would so love to see it happen.
Of course, It would not make up for missing the singularity (bugger) but it would be a nice consolation prize.
Well I personally hope that there is life found on other planetary systems (not just Mars), and that we are never able to get at it. We can't even get on with each other without blowing each other up, so heaven help any other civilisation which gets in our way.
Even in this case there's no danger of us actually meeting the alien life form, but we've sent our "we come in peace" message in the shape of a nuclear weapon which could wipe out other life forms.
The human race is in a very difficult position of evolution currently where we see rewards as being in the shape of shiny objects where the game plan is to get as many shiny objects into your personal bank account as possible whilst anhiliating the opposition (monopoly anyone?). I hope other civilisations which might cross our paths in the future haven't got the same outlook, and that they do truly come in peace.
Where's Gort when you need him?
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I bet the Martian microbes are worried now, the earthlings are coming in their war machines!
The Martian microbes didn't listen ... Few microbes even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to their own regarded this Martian world with envious eyes; and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against them.
The UK mission to land a craft on Mars a few years back must have been targeted on a race of aliens, and they saw it coming in and took it out before the beadyscope could show life.
Spirit and Opportunity have been left to get on with it because they have been wandering around in a desert region where no life exists.
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The NASA probe is certainly bold in its objectives. Experience with existing Martian rovers and orbiters indicated that a larger rover was needed to go after Martian soil structures. The fancy lander was chosen to avoid burning a large bowl of soil right-near the landing site. In this way, soil sampling and analysis can begin right away, even if something goes wrong with the six-wheel roving mechanism.
On the up side, the power source has a potential useful lifetime of 10 years+. This could be a really GREAT mission, if they can get the darn thing safely on the ground. NASA no longer wants to set expectations about discovery of life forms, but they DO discuss analysis of organic matter. Spin control...
The interplanetary path insertion didn't go buttery-smooth, but all seems OK at this point...