Mars Rover Perseverance Landing... and continuing...

[Imaculata]

No, but we are doing the most convenient one, and have been stuck on Mars for decades.

Science takes time. 'Stuck' in this case, simply means busy learning all kinds of wonderful stuff.

We are (hopefully) learning how to do this on more promising locations.

This IS a promising location, but you've got to start somewhere. There are several planets with an environment a good deal more hostile than that of Mars. Given the fact that most countries that undertake these kinds of missions have tried and failed to reach our closest planet, how about we stick with the closest planet for now? Once we feel like we can reliably land there, we can move on to more challenging projects.

Plus, the work being done here might form the foundation for the first manned journey to Mars, and the first base on Mars. This can then provide a springboard for further exploration of our solarsystem, as we venture deeper and deeper into the great unknown.

Mars is like one of those Star Wars planets. It's uniform because of the environment there. It's all rock and desert. And at the rate we're exploring the cosmos, I'll be long dead before anything interesting happens.

I'd say something very interesting just did happen.

It just depends on how you look at it... Landing a rover on Mars with a frickin' skycrane system and ai navigation is beyond cool. Just look at this! This is scifi stuff! We can do this now:

 

[Umbran]

I guess my practical side is saying if you don't find the evidence of life on Mars, will you stop looking on Mars?

Eventually, yes. There are other places to look for life, after all. Once we have sufficient evidence (or lack of evidence), we will look elsewhere. Mind you, we are nowhere near what we'd call sufficient evidence, because our ability to do experiments and explore is so limited at such remove.

So if Mars had some evidence of life that we could observe from earth, and then we sent a rover in an attempt to make contact or study it, that would be a comparison to manned flight.

So, the Wright Brothers were engineers, not scientists. The scientific principle upon which flight is based was discovered by Bernoulli back in 1738. However, that principle was not discovered in the context of trying to fly - Bernoulli was working in hydrodynamics. It just happens to be that air is also a fluid, and so Sir George Cayley could apply that principle when developing the airfoil generations later in 1810. The Wright Brothers added some structural engineering and improved control systems in 1900.

And this is how science typically goes. The principle or information you find at one time is later (often much later) used in unrelated applications by other people. This is the value of research for the sake of research - you cannot predict what science bits will be needed a decade or a century in the future. So, trying to limit people to targeted pursuits with known outcomes will put a decided drag on advancement.

Sending rovers to Mars is the equivalent of rednecks throwing different things on a fire to see what will happen.

You do realize that doing this systematically was some of the founding work of chemistry, right? And that writ very large and with very complicated mathematics, this is the high-energy physics of colliders, which can be characterized as trying to figure out how a mechanical watch works by throwing it at a brick wall really hard, and watching the pieces fly out.

My doctoral thesis was effectively about smashing watches against walls.

Your "practical side" is apparently uninformed about how well these things pay off over time. Your entire technological world is based on what was, at its time, like rednecks throwing things into a fire to see what would happen.

 

[Umbran]

No, but we are doing the most convenient one, and have been stuck on Mars for decades.

No, we haven't been stuck on Mars. There's all sorts of other things going on - In the time since the first landing on Mars, we've done explorations of the moons and atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, some basic workup of Uranus and Neptune, and a most excellent flyby of Pluto. We've done sample returns of solar wind, comet tails. Landed on and done sample returns of asteroids. Tested solar sails and ion drives....

With respect... you seem profoundly out of the loop on what NASA's been doing. Maybe you should stop making judgements, and start getting informed.

And at the rate we're exploring the cosmos, I'll be long dead before anything interesting happens.

Dude. It isn't about you.

 

[trappedslider]

My doctoral thesis was effectively about smashing watches against walls.

Now,all i have is an image of Umbran talking about the best way to smash a watch as part of his thesis defense "It's under hand but using your off hand with a twist but it has to be going at about 5 MPH"

 

[Umbran]

Now,all i have is an image of Umbran talking about the best way to smash a watch as part of his thesis defense "It's under hand but using your off hand with a twist but it has to be going at about 5 MPH"

It was more about figuring out what some of the resutling whirling of gears implied about the teeny-tiny screws, but yeah.

 

[Istbor]

No, we haven't been stuck on Mars. There's all sorts of other things going on - In the time since the first landing on Mars, we've done explorations of the moons and atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, some basic workup of Uranus and Neptune, and a most excellent flyby of Pluto. We've done sample returns of solar wind, comet tails. Landed on and done sample returns of asteroids. Tested solar sails and ion drives....

With respect... you seem profoundly out of the loop on what NASA's been doing. Maybe you should stop making judgements, and start getting informed.



Dude. It isn't about you.

Humanity has been slowly losing our will or perhaps even ability to think generationally. At least from my perspective as a rugged capitalistic American. Obviously all of that colors how I see the world.

It is a trait that I hope has a resurgence.

 

[Umbran]

Humanity has been slowly losing our will or perhaps even ability to think generationally.

It is not clear that we've ever really had that ability in any consistent way.

 

[Istbor]

It is not clear that we've ever really had that ability in any consistent way.

Fair. Only noting that in the past we have begun structures or feats of engineering that wouldn't be complete until our children's children were of age. Perhaps some of that was due to technology and construction methods of the time, but I have to think at some point there were people asking what the point was, and enough people thought it worth while to complete for people they would never meet.

 

[ART!]

Fair. Only noting that in the past we have begun structures or feats of engineering that wouldn't be complete until our children's children were of age. Perhaps some of that was due to technology and construction methods of the time, but I have to think at some point there were people asking what the point was, and enough people thought it worth while to complete for people they would never meet.

Or they were slaves and didn't have a choice.

 

[Istbor]

Or they were slaves and didn't have a choice.

Sigh, that somewhat misses the point, but sure. Some of the projects I can think of were during very different socio-economic periods, where you didn't have to pay your labor for their time, but simply keep them alive. Others were not.