Mars Probe Probably Lost Forever 167
David Shiga writes, "NASA's silent Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft is likely lost forever. The space agency attempted to take a picture of the 10-year-old spacecraft using the newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but did not detect it, either because its orbit has shifted since last contact, or because it isn't reflecting enough sunlight to be visible. NASA has now ordered its Opportunity rover to listen from the planet's surface for MGS's radio beacon. If that fails, the agency may call on the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft to join the search. But MGS may already have run out of power and NASA officials are not optimistic about recovering it."
Missing? (Score:5, Funny)
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DURACELL Batteries (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Missing? (Score:4, Informative)
Transformers (Score:4, Funny)
May I be the first to say.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Please, take our leader!
How about the song of the day
"This is ground control to Major Tom. Your circuit's dead, is there something wrong?"
Re:May I be the first to say.... (Score:5, Funny)
Surely they wouldn't be THAT stupid, would they?
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Re:May I be the first to say.... (Score:5, Funny)
Funny that. Aliens taking our probes, rather than the other way 'round.
Re:May I be the first to say.... (Score:5, Funny)
Well it's about time they got some probing action.... my doctor says the cream is helping though.
Thank goodness for small blessings and all that.
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Sycorax Rock! (Score:3, Funny)
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"We would destroy the Cybermen with ONE dalek."
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"Wow. They got a pair of Macs to talk shit to one another."
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Modern Daleks Float.
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Maybe we should wait for Google Mars... (Score:2)
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Gentlemen, the Martians have attacked our spy sattelite. Attack now... We will impress them with our Shock and Awe strategy!
Behold, Our Superior airpower... What do you mean, we only have a couple light armament sattelites? Wasn't that what daddy's president made Star Wars for, and Empire Strikes back? Send out the X-Wings!
Guess we'll have to resort to the secondary Shock and Awe strategy... Moon them, then shower them with cute teddy bears.
more like... (Score:2)
nice try. no politics here, move along.
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They are not X-Wings... they are Zigs. For greater justice.
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It was a good run... (Score:5, Insightful)
We just have to keep reminding ourselves that sending something millions of miles through space to a speck of rock and have it function so well for so long is an amazing achievement in and of itsself.
Re:It was a good run... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It was a good run... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. People can say what they want about NASA | JPL, but the bottom line is they put up some good stuff much of the time. What really got my eye was how they just 'asked' Opportunity to listen for it. That is, that those things are so dynamic in what they do and can be 'asked' to do simply amazes me.
Who knew years ago when Opportunity (also past expected mission life, right?) was designed that it would be on-the-fly tasked to listen for another spacecraft's signal. That it was designed in this way is a testament to well planned engineering. IMO.
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Well, they did say please...
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Wasn't the software for these rovers uploaded while they were travelling to Mars? They certainly have broadcast and reception hardware (to communicate ofcourse) so how hard would it be to send a patch or instructions to listen to certain frequencies (on which the Opportunity is broadcasting)? Right now I'm "asking" my monitor to display characters and send data to another server...
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You don't just "ask" a high-performance radio to receive on a specific frequency or modulation type. They have to be designed to be there doing that in the first place. And those radios work or the datalink that allows the upload of code changes simply wouldn't be there. They were designed, tested and done -- long before launch.
An example: Uploading code into yo
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While it doesn't say whether they rewrote a module to do this or simply set Opportunity to listen on a particular frequency (they don't even have to tell it what it's looking for - if it picks up a relatively strong signal, it's going to be the MGS) - it'd be more astounding if they hadn't built in flexibility in this day and age.
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Luckily one of the engineers realised that if Opportunity was to bounce an inverse-polarity tachyon beam through the fifth phase of a quantum singularity, it might be possible to convert Opportunity's deflector dish into a scanning-tunnelling pulse wave detector
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Re:It was a good run... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Mars Global Surveyor finished its mission, and had long outlasted its original mission scope when the failure occurred. While unfortunate, this failure isn't wholly unanticipated as the craft was "out of warranty" as it were.
Re:It was a good run... (Score:5, Interesting)
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This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Any other options? (Score:5, Funny)
So either it wasn't there or it was there but they didn't see it. I think that has to pretty safe to say they have limited the problem down considerably.
Plague (Score:4, Funny)
If God had meant us to fly, he'd have given us rocket engines, day one.
(Yes, tongue is firmly in cheek.)
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Re:Plague (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Plague (Score:4, Funny)
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If you're talking about masturbation, on the other hand, other questions are raised. For example, women don't need thumbs to masturbate. So, if didn't have opposable thumbs, would that mean that women could masturbate but men couldn't?
And of course you have to consider that the thumb is not strictly necessary for masturbation (you could use all of your others fingers for a grip). And considering that even animals without hand
Re:Plague (Score:5, Funny)
Evil: If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
[zaps one of his minions accidentally, minion screams]
Evil: Sorry.
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Light one of your farts on fire, and tell me that's not a rocket engine...10-9-8-7...
Lost forever? (Score:1, Funny)
Either that or it will appear in a future episode, with..certain...alien mutations.
time for a rescue mission, perhaps? (Score:1, Funny)
If Mars Global Surveyor had been out there all alone, mission controllers would have little choice other than waiting for it to somehow recover and renew contact on its own. Having Spirit, Opportunity, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Express al
Not a bad run (Score:5, Funny)
lost forever? (Score:1, Funny)
Calling ESA? (Score:1)
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It's not about LUCK... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dang... (Score:1, Interesting)
Time to update... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Time to update... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I mostly stopped commenting (or even reading) space related stories on
You just got added to the wrong column of that scorecard.
Mars Global Surveyor was a huge win in Earth's column. The spacecraft returned friggen superb results, for far longer than we expected. We didn't get "some good work out of MGS," we got vast amounts of good work out of it.
God damn, I wish Slashdot quit posting space related stories.
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Forever? (Score:1)
Thats ok (Score:1)
Sony Battery Recall (Score:4, Funny)
Wow.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Lost in Space (Score:2, Insightful)
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Voyager is going to keep its record... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Curious to know (not just nit-picking semantics), I decided to go to the JPL mission page [nasa.gov]. Voyager 1 passed the 100 AU mark this summer, that's about 12 light-hours. Although it's signal is very weak, we can still talk to it a bit. According to this blurb [nasa.gov]
Re:Voyager is going to keep its record... (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. Voyagers 1 and 2 are still doing significant work, since they are so distant and still functioning. They have begun to encounter the outer reaches of the solar system, where the influence of the Sun ends and interstellar space begins. NASA believes they recently crossed the termination shock and may be approaching the Heliopause. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliopause [wikipedia.org]
It's going to be a very, very, very long time before another probe gets out as far as the Voyagers are (if Pluto Express lasts that long, at least 20 years). Voyager gets a fairly decent chunk of Deep Space Network tracking time because of the importance of what it is doing.
The oldest satellites still functioning are Pioneers 6,7, and 8, which are all around 40 years old and still ticking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_6,_7,_8_and_
Re:Voyager is going to keep its record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Voyager is going to keep its record... (Score:4, Informative)
That's the prevalent meme - but the reality is that space based nuclear power has gotten steadily less controversial. The Mars Science Laboratory Rover [nasa.gov] will almost certainly be nuclear powered - and the proposal to do so has drawn nary a peep.
Re:Voyager is going to keep its record... (Score:4, Informative)
It will be very interesting to see how long Cassini--which is powered by RTG's--continue to run orbiting Saturn.
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Also, remember that the rate at which the RTGs
So what's the point in trying to see it, anyway? (Score:1)
But what's the point of trying to take pictures of an orbiting craft? What useful data will we glean, if successful, that would either help restore MGS to functionality or inform future activity?
Re:So what's the point in trying to see it, anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
Same thing. First, verify it's where it's supposed to be. Second, if the resolution is good enough (and they weren't sure it would be) see if it seems to be oriented correctly.
If it's not where it's supposed to be, then there's a partial explanation of why it's not responding -- it's off course -- and also tells them their options are limited to setting it straight again. If it is, but it's oriented incorrectly, then the batteries are not getting recharged and you focus on getting it oriented correctly so it can get power again. If it is present, oriented correctly, and still not responding, then you've got a different set of options.
More information can only help.
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Success! (Score:2, Funny)
quote from the latest AP news! (Score:2, Funny)
"We have gathered information from inside NASA, that during the last minutes of contacts the Mars Global Surveyor sent out an encrypted message. After a grueling three hours trying to decrypt the message, top scientists at NASA was startled to see what appears to be a message from semi-intelligent beings. It reads 'How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us.' Then the MGS went silent.
Governments of the United States and Western Europe have moved to take of ev
Could have been smacked by a rock... (Score:2)
Its right here!!! (Score:2)
five times expected lifetime (Score:2)
Ten years? (Score:2)
What's really amazing are those little rovers on the surface. Those definitely have Energizer Bunny Syndrome. In reality it is a tribute to the engineering.
Not if we side with autobots (Score:2)
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For my money, this whole leaving the oceans thing was a bad idea.
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The resolutions available would STUPIFY you.
3D art is nothing more than a hobby to me, but it's fun to render still-images and sometimes video of a simple sphere with more detail than is available even with Google Earth.
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Um, actually, yeah. I have a couple friends who are probably going to be out of a job now. So, approve or disapprove of it, the fact remains somebody's going to miss it.
I call shenanigans (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I call shenanigans (Score:4, Insightful)
Implicit in your assumption is that a mission is operated solely by NASA civil service employees, which is a handy assumption for your flip answer, but meanwhile, back in the real world, that's not the case. I'll grant that the people who will be affected have some warning, but I guarantee you Griffin and Co. are already planning on where to reallocate the extended mission money if and when they declare MGS dead. That money doesn't all go to NASA facilities. The science operations for the Mars Orbiter Camera goes to a small company [msss.com] and the Thermal Emission Spectrometer money goes to Arizona State's Mars Space Flight Facility [asu.edu], a place I worked for 4 years and personally witnessed several people get laid off in early '06 because of NASA reallocation for the new manned program and to pay for hurricane damages to NASA facilities.
Yeah, I'm sure the people who got laid off worked something out, and the people who will get laid off will work something out, too. You can continue to choose to "call shenanigans" all you want, but you asked a question, I answered, you didn't like the answer and decided to wave it away with flippant handwaving. This has effects on real people and your "rational ignorance" becomes willful ignorance if you choose to continue to deny it.
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Well you could just click on the link to RTFA and find that it happened on the 2nd of this month. (This month is November if you're _really_ not paying attention.) Or you could put "mars" into the search bar for Slashdot and find this article [slashdot.org] from about a week and a half ago.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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If we don't spread humanity to other planets, humanity is doomed, period. It's as simple as that. Currently we have all our eggs in one basket, and we are kicking that basket around for shit 'n giggles. And if we don't manage to wipe us out by ourselves, we will eventually get hit by a planet-busting asteroid.
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The moral and scientific issues it brings up are so crazy I choose not even to discuss them.
That's classic. I think I'll sig it, if it doesn't end up too long. While many moral and scientific "issues" (I assume you mean "reasons not to go") are crazy, the legitimate ones are not. For example, if Martian life exists, then it's probably completely incompatible with Terran life. And there probably won't be much in the way of competition between the two. But it could still be the case that one branch of lif
Re:What is with Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've all seen pictures of the top of Mt Everest. Does that mean we should no longer climb mountains? We have seen pictures of the ocean floor. Should we no longer SCUBA dive? By no means! We explore because it is human nature to test our limits, to push the boundaries, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
We have not even seen one tenth of one percent of the Martian surface, yet there "is nothing more to see". Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the Solar System, three times as tall as Mt Everest, but who cares. There is nothing to see. Tourists flock by the millions each year to take in the Grand Canyon. The Valles Marineris is the deepest canyon system in the Solar System. Five times deeper, and hundreds of times longer, it makes the Grand Canyon look like a tire rut. But who cares. We've seen a few pictures of a couple of Martian rocks, so there's no point in going to the Valles Marineris. Well, Here's [englishriverwebsite.com] a picture of some Earth rocks, and here's [google.com] a link to some maps. So now you don't ever have to leave your house.
As for Mars being lifeless, we do not *know* that there is no life on Mars. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Why, Opportunity could find lichen on a rock tomorrow afternoon.