Sick 360 Images on MARS. NASA FTW!

[SKORPI0]

Jupiter would be awesome. Just make sure Hal9000 is not on the ship.

You can send him to Uranus. :sneaky:

Can't wait for the New Horizons mission to Pluto when it arrives July 2015.

 

[jwhorfin]

I hope these guys don't come back.

 

[wirednuts]

i still think we might find a way to pump a fake atmosphere into mars. get water cycling again on that planet... that would be so awesome anyway.

 

[Jeff7]

If you look at the backend of the rover, there's a blacked-out square. Wonder what was covered up?

It's just some kind of dropout in the data. Those things showed up periodically in some of the MER images. They'll be able to pick it up in a later transmission session.

Agreed--this is awesome. I've been reading up on colonization and can't decide which is a better option--pressurized pods on Mars, or floating cities on Venus.

I hope in the coming decades they start to launch similar rovers on other bodies, especially Jupiter's moons.

What's nice about Mars is its atmosphere.
- Force against the heatshield slows the probe considerably.
- The parachute slows it down even farther.

The Galilean Moons don't have any appreciable atmosphere, so you'd need to carry fuel along to handle that descent.

Or else make a rover that can withstand an impact at ~12,000mph.
Just build a huge spacecraft that's 99.8% crumple zone.

 

[leper84]

i still think we might find a way to pump a fake atmosphere into mars. get water cycling again on that planet... that would be so awesome anyway.

I thought no plate tectonics= no dice?

 

[SsupernovaE]

I thought no plate tectonics= no dice?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...03186aa-e306-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_blog.html

 

[CPA]

lol

 

[leper84]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...03186aa-e306-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_blog.html

Well hot damn, that made my night, cool.

Now lets just get rid of some nukes and make more than 2 plates.

 

[lupi]

how is this different from the on going thread on the landing?

 

[Doppel]

The thing has dirt on it. Also what appears to be actual damage from impacted rocks, you can see what look like bullet holes on the white top. Is that rock damage?

Anybody know...?

 

[Ichinisan]

i still think we might find a way to pump a fake atmosphere into mars. get water cycling again on that planet... that would be so awesome anyway.

I thought no plate tectonics= no dice?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...03186aa-e306-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_blog.html

Well hot damn, that made my night, cool.

Now lets just get rid of some nukes and make more than 2 plates.

I've heard scientists believe the core used to be molten, then it cooled off. With no molten core, there's no significant magnetic field, and solar radiation continually erodes the atmosphere.

I expect that those plates no longer move if there's no molten core.

 

[Ichinisan]

I've heard scientists believe the core used to be molten, then it cooled off. With no molten core, there's no significant magnetic field, and solar radiation continually erodes the atmosphere.

I expect that those plates no longer move if there's no molten core.

...which leads me to theorize that the only "practical" method to make Mars Earth-like is to redirect another planet-sized body to impact it. If I understand correctly, such an impact would make it molten again (like when some large mass impacted early Earth and the two molten masses formed the Earth and its moon).

Of course, this would eject huge amounts of dangerous material that would almost certainly become Earth-impacting asteroids.

I think the terraforming time-scale would be too huge to be practical.