• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Mars Exploration 1: Unmanned Missions (Probes; Rovers; etc.)

Nazis on Mars!

Secretly escaped in 1945.
I know someone who is a real conspiracy buff who is convinced there are secret US and Russian bases on Mars which have been there since the early 70s. Funny thing is, he also believes the Moon Landings were faked as it's "clearly technically impossible" for humans to get to the Moon :huh:
 
I know someone who is a real conspiracy buff who is convinced there are secret US and Russian bases on Mars which have been there since the early 70s. Funny thing is, he also believes the Moon Landings were faked as it's "clearly technically impossible" for humans to get to the Moon :huh:
Hmmm.
Believing both of those things to be true is a logical inconsistency! You can either believe in one or the other. D'oh!
 
Hmmm.
Believing both of those things to be true is a logical inconsistency! You can either believe in one or the other. D'oh!
Consistency has never been his strongest point. This is a person who believes that all south facing beaches always have low tides. One of these days I'm going to write a book about him :)
 
NASA says there might kind of possibly be liquid water flowing on Mars. I was hoping for something more definite. Also, princesses.
 
It must be REALLY briny.
If humans go there, it'll be difficult to extract any useful amount of water (but not impossible).
 
Consistency has never been his strongest point. This is a person who believes that all south facing beaches always have low tides. One of these days I'm going to write a book about him :)
Please do!

I have much experience of beaches facing south (and every other direction), and I can confirm that they nearly all have high and low tides!
 
Please do!

I have much experience of beaches facing south (and every other direction), and I can confirm that they nearly all have high and low tides!
This character also thinks that north on a map is whatever direction you are facing when you look at the map, south is easy too - that's where the sun happens to be, it rises in the south, spends all day in the south and sets in the south. Occasionally some poor person who doesn't know him will let him navigate, he once had someone drive 70 miles to get to a place that was 10 miles from their starting point.
As one person who knows him said "Some people are only alive because it's illegal to shoot them."
 
Not again!
We already friggin' know that! :rolleyes:

I wish NASA would tell us something new.


I was informed, Mytho, that NASA stands for 'Never A Straight Answer'. so they're running true to form...:rofl:
 
I know someone who is a real conspiracy buff who is convinced there are secret US and Russian bases on Mars which have been there since the early 70s. Funny thing is, he also believes the Moon Landings were faked as it's "clearly technically impossible" for humans to get to the Moon :huh:


A bet each way?
 
Given that Nasa seem edgy about even sending the Mars Rover to examine the flowing water in case it contaminates the water with "Earthly bugs" (presumably they mean bacteria rather than woodlice), wouldn't colonising Mars forever ruin our chances of discovering whether it ever hosted indigenous life?

I suppose it raises an interesting alternative slant to the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis. Perhaps rather than deliberately seeding life on Earth, ancient alien explorers could have accidentally kicked off the process by leaving some of their bacteria behind?
 
I know someone who is a real conspiracy buff who is convinced there are secret US and Russian bases on Mars which have been there since the early 70s. Funny thing is, he also believes the Moon Landings were faked as it's "clearly technically impossible" for humans to get to the Moon :huh:

Maybe he will share Rush Limbaugh's opinion that the water on Mars discovery is just a left-wing conspiracy. o_O
 
The longest lived and still operational Mars rover 'Opportunity' travels very slowly and has only covered some 40 km in the last 11 years. Given that it is over 50 km away from the nearest suspected water source on Mars, it ain't getting there any time soon!
 
WELL BEFORE NASA announced that liquid water exists on Mars, a team of designers from Clouds Architecture Officeand Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch) toiled to figure out how we could use ice—so, in essence, water—as shelter on the Red Planet. It’s a simple idea, really. We’ve known for some time that Mars is home to large quantities of water ice, and that this ice could serve as a locally sourced building material. Ice is also translucent, and all homes need a little natural light.

The team of eight ultimately came up with the Mars Ice House, a sloping, triangular structure that would be autonomously built by robots using additive manufacturing techniques. For their idea, NASA recently awarded them first place in a design competition for 3-D printed habitats made for future human inhabitants of Mars.

At one point in time or another, everyone on the team was a student in the Space Studio class taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. The course is taught by Michael Morris, who also led the Ice House project. Because the SEArch/Clouds AO team also has ties to Pratt, Parsons, and Carnegie Mellon design programs, they bring a certain humanism to a field that’s usually frequented by engineers at NASA, or private ventures like SpaceX. For them, the prospect of life on Mars isn’t just about how you get there and survive, it’s about how well life might be lived while there.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/nasa-digs-idea-robots-build-igloos-mars/?mbid=social_twitter
 
Saw The Martian last night. Very impressed overall. Quite high-tech and geeky at times, it made living on Mars seem believable and certainly achievable.
 
That ice house on Mars concept is actually pretty good.
It could work.
 
In an airless world, no matter how hard you throw the object, it will reach the ground in the same amount of time.

***Cough...*** Only if you always throw it horizontally, and from the same height each time, which is implied, but not stated outright in that article.
 
***Cough...*** Only if you always throw it horizontally, and from the same height each time, which is implied, but not stated outright in that article.

*** cough... cough...*** And only if you ignore the curvature of the planet's surface.

It was that cunning old devil Newton who first explained that a body could orbit the earth if it was 'thrown' hard enough. (He imagined a cannon ball fired horizontally from a cannon - although it constantly curves towards the earth, the earth's surface curves away, so the ball remains in orbit and does not reach the ground.)
 
ExoMars mission: ‘13 years of British research strapped to massive bomb’
The British-backed ExoMars mission will launch on Monday March 14 with the hope of finding life on Mars
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
11:54AM GMT 11 Mar 2016

British scientists are facing a nail-biting wait ahead of next week's ExoMars mission launch, warning that 13 years of research is now ‘strapped to a great big bomb.’
The huge proton rocket, which will take the spacecraft to the Red Planet, was rolled out on Friday morning ahead of its launch from Baikonor, Kazakhstan, on Monday.
The mission is hunting for life on Mars and will be looking specifically for evidence of the methane, a gas primarily produced by living organisms.

After a seven month journey, the ExoMars orbiter will release a probe to the surface and remain in orbit hunting for signs of life.
It is the first time that Britain has ventured to the planet since the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission in 2003.

The probe and orbiter are carrying an array of British instruments, tuned to hunt for elusive methane emissions which could signal the presence of life-forms. It will be followed in two-years-time by a rover which is currently being built by Airbus in Hertfordshire.

Dr Manish Patel, from the Open University, has helped develop the ozone-mapping ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer instrument on the orbiter, said: "This is a fantastic mission; massive.
"I spent the last 13 years of my life working on it so I am somewhat excited and nervous. You're strapping an instrument you've devoted your life to on top of a great big bomb.
"It's scary but it's why I'm in this business. There won't be many nails left on launch day."

Mars is thought to be our best chance of finding evidence of extra-terrestrial life because it once had running water and an atmosphere. The hope of discovering life was raised in December 2014 when intriguing ‘burps’ of methane were recorded by Nasa’s Curiosity Rover.

On Earth, around 90 per cent of methane is produced by organisms, so the expectation is that some kind of life is also emitting the gas on Mars.
Microbial life has been found to live more than one mile beneath the surface of the Witwatersrand basin in South Africa so scientists are sure microbes could survive below the permafrost layer on Mars.
Crucially methane vanishes on Mars after a few hundred years so it must have been produced in the recent past.

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ritish-research-strapped-to-massive-bomb.html

Video and photos, etc on page.
 
Back
Top