Topic: The Phoenix lands on Mars (Page 1 of 1)

I've just been visiting the Nasa home site, knocking myself out with the mutlimedia and images they have on show from Phoenix, now that it has safely landed. I find this human endeavour and scientific adventure an inspiration.

One can so easily become jaded by all the negative things going on in the world. Stuff like this always fires my imagination and tickles my sense of wonder.
One should always have one's imagination tickled at least once a week, doctor's orders

Terrific! Thanks for sharing.

I actually was on IRC with a bunch of other people watching the live commentary from JPL. Sorry, should've mentioned it.

Too bad we all know well that the NASA master the art of manipulation. Remember their faked landing on the Moon.

Part of me applauds the feat, the other part of me has sad visions of the martian landscape one hundred years from now: Big Mac packaging, dented beer cans, broken bottles, strewn all over the place as the oil companies tear up the surface looking for fossil fuels just in case life existed there millions of years ago.

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Ha. Well at this rate it'll be more than one-hundred years. :/

I wouldn't say that. The Japanese space agency intends to put a base on the moon before 2025, and they've not yet launched a manned spaceflight of their own! (They're currently in the testing phase of a rocket that could possibly carry manned crafts out to ISS or the moon.)

If we get a base on the moon, that's a good first step to get a base on Mars. (It's quite possible that the best option for manned flight to Mars is to build (or at least assemble) the actual craft on the moon, thereby allowing a considerably higher weight of the spacecraft than launching from Earth would, allowing more essential materials for setting up a manned Mars base.)




However, Burt Rutan had a point in his 2006 TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/4, that neither aerospace engineering nor space engineering has progressed significantly since the sixties, even pointing out that both the fastest military and the fastest commercial airplanes to this date have been taken out of flight due to old age.

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