Thread: Phoenix Spacecraft Set to Land on Mars Today

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

I'm anxious to see what kind of data they pick up, after digging through the dirt and ice.

Im for one am not.

Originally Posted by dragonoverlord

Im for one am not.

Why not?

So what do we get like 3 black and white photos one of the horizon, one of the robot arm and some rocks.....

I expect hours of color DVD quality footage of mars in detail roaming around. Not just a few black and white blurry photos. Otherwise don't spend so much money and excitement over nothing. That is pointless what they gave us. They must think we are really dumb. Maybe some are but I expect better. There is such thing as a movie camera in color. There should be days of detailed documented footage. Otherwise that is lieing. Reason being you don't go all the way to mars for nothing. Even if it is a robot. Your suppose to get a reasonable amount of footage. Not just a few out of focus black and white photos and then end of entire mission. That's so ridiculous. Footage we need the footage. Where is the footage. That is why you go there.

Anyone else see anything terrible wrong with this....

Originally Posted by Minervas Phoenix

So what do we get like 3 black and white photos one of the horizon, one of the robot arm and some rocks.....

I expect hours of color DVD quality footage of mars in detail roaming around. Not just a few black and white blurry photos. Otherwise don't spend so much money and excitement over nothing. That is pointless what they gave us. They must think we are really dumb. Maybe some are but I expect better. There is such thing as a movie camera in color. There should be days of detailed documented footage. Otherwise that is lieing. Reason being you don't go all the way to mars for nothing. Even if it is a robot. Your suppose to get a reasonable amount of footage. Not just a few out of focus black and white photos and then end of entire mission. That's so ridiculous. Footage we need the footage. Where is the footage. That is why you go there.

Anyone else see anything terrible wrong with this....

Wow, no offense or anything, but you are kind of retarded. You have absolutely no sense of why they go there and what is involved in there. NASA does not exist to entertain the masses. And NO, that is NOT "why they go there." Not "for the footage."

I really don't want to go into detail about this, but it kind of appalls me that you have no idea about any of this. One purpose of the robot is to find water and take samples as well as other data. They are not just filming up there.

Good. Take samples of water and rocks too. I know there is more involved. But anyone with half a brain left wants to see some quality footage at the very least. Lame excuses like calling me a retard does not make the scary funny situation about a total lack of footage go away. Like I said. Footage is part of the package. Can't dish out what is naturally expected when you go to mars than ofcourse you are going to look silly when you don't deliver. Don't make lame excuses cause we know what is possible with technology and keeping it secret is also a lame and pointless thing.

Should I say it again.....

The footage is wanted.

Cool, that craft was made just a few miles from here where I live, now its X million miles away, how interesting!

We have plenty of pictures of Mars, why do you want more? We didn't send it up for re-runs. We sent it up to analyze the soil. If you want pretty pictures, NASA's website is chock full of 'em.

Well skysaw, they landed in a region never before seen so, there are some things people would love to see, like new mountains we haven't seen...etc

I'd be more interested in the water-ice science myself.

That lander only has about 3 months to get its job done before the winter polar ice caps creep in and encase the entire probe in ice, thereby destroying it. It doesn't have the time to be fucking around with picture taking when we've been doing that for the last 40 years.

NASA is only going to let you see what they allow you to see. If they find evidence of past alien life or E.T. in a cave eating Reese's Pieces, you're still going to get grainy, foggy pictures of the Arizona desert through an orange filter lens.

Originally Posted by Minervas Phoenix

Should I say it again.....

The footage is wanted.

Yeah I'd love to see footage of mars too, I don't really understand why it's so hard, I can make vids with my cellphone np. I think while they're on mars they might as well make a vid of it and put it on youtube for the rest of the world to see right

They may as well but they may as can't. That's why their honesty is highly doubted because they don't do what is obviously expected as a minimum requirement of a mission.

NASA has found all kinds of shit-- The Catholic Church is just paying them to keep it to themselves.

What confuses the hell out of me is how they do the landing and can know exactly when it lands (they have a video where there is a landing "countdown" of sorts) exactly as it happens. It takes the signal a good 40 minutes to get back to earth (about 37 minutes to be exact), so how do they go about doing that type of stuff? Do they just set up something so it lands by itself (which is very impressive) and "guess" when exactly it should land? Or in those videos where the NASA crew watches it land, are they actually just looking at the signals 40 minutes later?

They subtract forty minutes from their clock

They subtract forty minutes from their clock

I think he already knows about a delay he was asking how the robot works in dealing with such a delay not how to subtract it so they know what time it is. I think you already knew what he was asking so I don't know why you responded with that simplistic answer. I am so disinterested in NASA that I didn't even consider or was aware of such technicalities and what technology they use.

They build the landers with complete autonomy in mind - they fly and land themselves.

The entire landing sequence takes 7 minutes from start to finish, but the time it takes for light to get from Earth to Mars is 10 minutes. By the time we got the signal that it had started its entry, it would have been over 3 minutes already.

Also, they're receiving telemetry from the craft every step of the way: just on a 10 minute delay. They're still 'seeing' the craft land, just not in real time.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

They build the landers with complete autonomy in mind - they fly and land themselves.

The entire landing sequence takes 7 minutes from start to finish, but the time it takes for light to get from Earth to Mars is 10 minutes. By the time we got the signal that it had started its entry, it would have been over 3 minutes already.

Also, they're receiving telemetry from the craft every step of the way: just on a 10 minute delay. They're still 'seeing' the craft land, just not in real time.

Ah... my bad with the time there. I read that the Phoenix Spacecraft went on a "422 million mile journey." I assumed that was the total distance (where I got 40 minutes from). But still, why wouldn't the spacecraft go directly to Mars which is much less distance?

I figured it must've had to land by itself... that's pretty nifty I must say.

Originally Posted by Minervas Phoenix

Should I say it again.....

The footage is wanted.

Like wasup said, NASA isn't about making the general population happy. It's about advancing our scientific knowledge of space. And water and rock samples are probably a lot more benificial for analysis than footage.

A number of reasons actually.

Our craft don't fly at speeds quick enough to go in a straight line. They have to use gravitational slightshots from other planetary bodies in our solar system to get themselves there. Also, their trajectories are circular, not straight.

Mars and Earth have an optimal orbit path occasionally that brings them 'close together' (and there's a ridiculous chain letter that gets emailed around about Mars being as big as the full moon in the night sky when this happens, total bullshit). I think this only happens once every couple of years or so (hazy on the details), so missions to Mars can be easier to navigate when you take advantage of these 'shorter' journeys.

The amount of math that goes into the calculations to pull these feats off is nothing short of astounding.

And for people who want "hours of color TV from the surface of Mars", get a grip on reality or educate yourself. We don't have a fibre optic cable network stretching from Houston, Texas to Mars to download Martian home movies at 1GB/sec. Everything coming from our probes is being transmitted on pathetically small bandwidth because radio waves are the only thing we have to work with and they are agonizingly slow for information transfer. It can take HOURS to get a single high definition frame decoded from the scrambled signal we receive back here on Earth.

We can't land a probe on Mars, get it to take a few hours of high color DVD imagery then lift back off into space like our Moon landers did. The gravity is too high, and it couldn't carry that kind of fuel capacity on a lander that small. It's also completely unnecessary and unrealistic. The space program doesn't exist to provide 'pretty' pictures of rocky iron-rich deserts. It exists to further our understanding of space, time and the Universe.

Originally Posted by wasup

Ah... my bad with the time there. I read that the Phoenix Spacecraft went on a "422 million mile journey." I assumed that was the total distance (where I got 40 minutes from). But still, why wouldn't the spacecraft go directly to Mars which is much less distance?

I figured it must've had to land by itself... that's pretty nifty I must say.

Most deep system probes use the gravitational fields of other bodies to 'slingshot' themselves towards their target, thus using less fuel. I haven't looked it up so I don't know if this is true or not, but it probably made a trip around our moon in order to gain some speed, which would add to the distance quit a bit.

Not sure how I missed this earlier, but:

Originally Posted by Tornado Joe

NASA is only going to let you see what they allow you to see. If they find evidence of past alien life or E.T. in a cave eating Reese's Pieces, you're still going to get grainy, foggy pictures of the Arizona desert through an orange filter lens.

Do you really think that an organisation that has to fight tooth and nail for the pathetic budget it currently has, would sit on the greatest discovery in history? The biggest negative leveled against NASA these days is that if life does exist off of this rock we call home, it's either too far away or too improbable to be true. If you can show that life existed on another world (either past or present), budget problems would be a thing of the past.

The results from those water ice tests, and photos of Martian beer cans (or whatever) would be seen by tens of people as they came streaming down through our atmosphere. Good luck shutting everyone in that room up in even your most nutty of government conspiracy theories.

NASA isn't about making the general population happy

Where do you get the idea that NASA and humanity are to be two separate things. People must be really losing the plot. Nasa belongs not just to me and my interests. But everyones. It's our right. That's what a space program is meant to be for. Humanity. This is not meant to be a minority dictatorship of a few people and what they think is a good idea for humanity.

Besides. I don't agree with Nasa and what they are doing and I don't trust them at all. I'd rather have my own organization if I was rich enough. I'd be willing to make DVDs of the planets because I'd have nothing to hide. I wouldn't muck around with black and white photos airbrushing reality out to sustain a dreamworld fantasy of what I want people to expect.

The smoking gun is already here.

Originally Posted by Minervas Phoenix

Where do you get the idea that NASA and humanity are to be two separate things. People must be really losing the plot. Nasa belongs not just to me and my interests. But everyones.

Actually it belongs to the US government. And I'm pretty certain they have better knowledge of what to do with a robot on Mars than a random internet troll such as you.