Mars landing ... happening now - Thursday 18th Feb 19:30

dee · Feb 18, 2021

For anyone interested

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/landing/watch-online/

Not that theres cameras... but live nasa feed. It takes 11 min for light to get to us from where this is happening. Its crazy what they are doing.

websaway · Feb 19, 2021

mind blowing, I find it makes one feel so humble and it's literally up the road from us, our next door neighbor . Don't you just love it, I always find that looking up in the sky is the best cure for a state of mild depression.

dee · Feb 19, 2021

websaway said:
mind blowing, I find it makes one feel so humble and it's literally up the road from us, our next door neighbor . Don't you just love it, I always find that looking up in the sky is the best cure for a state of mild depression.

I know. Its crazy. Think being outdoors in general is a great cure for most things

dee · Feb 20, 2021

okay... so even more wow. First pic is taken from the descent chute dropping it there. Second is from rover on the ground !!!

Its mental. This is Mars. Its like they're sending holiday snaps back.

ian · Feb 20, 2021

To think Mars is 38.6 million miles from us (at the closest point). The ironic thing is that should they find evidence of past life, it will be one of the biggest discoveries ever, yet will pass most by simply because of the impossibility of trying to understand the almost incomprehensible. Trying to explain this to my young son is no different than trying to explain to much of the population. This achievement, and that of so many recent developments in space exploration and travel are truly fascinating.

dee · Feb 21, 2021

ian said:
To think Mars is 38.6 million miles from us (at the closest point). The ironic thing is that should they find evidence of past life, it will be one of the biggest discoveries ever, yet will pass most by simply because of the impossibility of trying to understand the almost incomprehensible. Trying to explain this to my young son is no different than trying to explain to much of the population. This achievement, and that of so many recent developments in space exploration and travel are truly fascinating.

I know its amazing. Its actually about 136 miliion miles at moment I believe. That figure would be at the closest approach, which is a window once every two years, and that close far less often due to orbit differences. I find it mind boggling that we can do this. I mean.... 11min at light speed away. Its insane they can send back snaps.
AND they landed it on the exact river inflow they wanted.

Siusaidh · Feb 21, 2021

I love reading your excitement and amazement. Always loved space and the dream of exploration that may lie ahead. I was a 1950's kid who grew up with the beginnings of the Space Age. I remember when Yuri Gagarin went up in orbit. And as a 7 year old, I would sit at the dining room table, drawing diagrams of the planets and their distances from the sun. And I remember the Apollo missions, and that day in 1969 when I watched the reports of the landing with my teenage girlfriend. The exploration of Mars is fantastic. I feel sure that it doesn't end here. Even if it takes hundreds of years or a thousand years, I believe we will colonise other star systems in the end. I just wish I could live long enough to be out there, among the stars, and the mind-boggling vastness of space. There must be billions times billions of planets. I don't believe we're the only life in the universe either.

dee · Feb 21, 2021

I was 70s so grew up with the challenger launches etc. It's always blown me away. We'll definitely sort the technology at some point. I think however when it comes to space travel we'll find we're the weak link. When you consider the voyager satellites have been mashing across space at 40000 mph since 1977 and is still only 21hours light time away, Were the ones that cant handle it really. To get anywhere distant you'd need multiple generations to crew a ship. Who knows.... they didn't understand what electricity was not so long ago. Now look at us. I love the thought of Elon Musk watching the landing and going......"right...... hold my pint"

This is pretty cool for anyone interested in the voyager stuff:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

Siusaidh · Feb 21, 2021

I agree the distance - speed - time thing is the huge challenge for technology and biological life forms like humans. Various ways round may be found - ways of increasing the speed, cryo- technology, or autonomous ways of 'parenting' egg/sperm cells, once mechanised colonisers have found and prepared the right conditions. Of course, all that is speculation. As AI grows more powerful, it's possible that solutions will start to develop exponentially. I tend to think, for the very issue you raise about the weak link of human biology, that a major part of space colonisation may involve autonomous mechanised AI making the pioneer journeys, building the initial structures etc. You could argue, at that point, that the artificial intelligence wouldn't even need humans anymore, but there's also the prospect of human/AI interfaces or uploading.

I do believe in the future of colonisation though. It's deep in the human DNA. The only thing that could stop us in the long-term, I think, is if we self-destruct. I don't think we will, but there is a possibility that wealth divides will widen, and space will become the domain of the huge corporations and incredibly rich, not to mention the possibilities of those kind of entities seceding from the rest of the species.

The voyager missions, using such basic computer technology, are heroic really. Still ploughing their way towards inter-stellar vastness, epitomising adventure and hope.

ukbackorder · Feb 21, 2021

Once we have interstellar travel the simulation will be finished

It was an interesting experiment to find out how humans evolved and took to the cosmos.

lazarus · Feb 21, 2021

dee said:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

Does anyone know why the stats are showing that V1 and V2 are getting closer to earth?

I'm guessing but I suspect it is to do with earths orbit making ground on the distance between V1 & V2? Then once earth get past a particular point around its orbit around the sun, it will show as moving away again?

dee · Feb 21, 2021

lazarus said:
Does anyone know why the stats are showing that V1 and V2 are getting closer to earth?

I'm guessing but I suspect it is to do with earths orbit making ground on the distance between V1 & V2? Then once earth get past a particular point around its orbit sun, it will show as moving away again?

Hadn't clocked that ! But the Earth is in orbit around the sun travelling through space at about 67000 mph, so depending on quadrant of orbit could potentially be gaining on on it at approx 20k mph....... I think.

lazarus · Feb 21, 2021

dee said:
67000 mph

Another mind blowing fact.

Earth rotation is 1000 MPH
Earth moving around the sun 67,000 MPH
Our solar system moving around the Milkyway 483,000 MPH ( It takes 225 million years to make a round trip!)
The Milkyway is traveling at 1.3 Million MPH through the Universe

dee · Feb 21, 2021

lazarus said:
Another mind blowing fact.

Earth rotation is 1000 MPH
Earth moving around the sun 67,000 MPH
Our solar system moving around the Milkyway 483,000 MPH ( It takes 225 million years to make a round trip!)
The Milkyway is traveling at 1.3 million MPH through the Universe

Yep.... mental . And lightspeed is constant to any observer no matter where you are in that system. The whole thing is mind boggling. We cant possibly as individuals have any sense of scale really, and just how infinitesimally small we are on the grand scheme of things.

Siusaidh · Feb 21, 2021

The belief that there are 200 billion galaxies, each with somewhere in the range of 100,000s of stars to (in largest cases) a hundred trillion stars... is something I find mind-blowing. The number of 'Goldilocks Zone' planets in the universe must be absolutely huge.

lazarus · Feb 21, 2021

I was talking to my Son the other day about matter and energy. As a side note to his homework using Einstein's famous equation we worked out that the mass of a pen lid (1 gram) has enough energy locked up within it and if converted into energy it would be enough to wipe out a large city. (80,000,000 Mega Joules) equivalent to the same amount of energy of 1 Atom bomb.

Subsequently you would need to convert that same amount of energy if we wanted to make enough matter for our pen lid.

websaway · Feb 22, 2021

followed the bit " i was talking to my son the other day" after that you lost me but I'm sure it all makes absolute sense.

dee · Feb 22, 2021

lazarus said:
I was talking to my Son the other day about matter and energy. As a side note to his homework using Einstein's famous equation we worked out that the mass of a pen lid (1 gram) has enough energy locked up within it and if converted into energy it would be enough to wipe out a large city. (80,000,000 Mega Joules) equivalent to the same amount of energy of 1 Atom bomb.

Subsequently you would need to convert that same amount of energy if we wanted to make enough matter for our pen lid.

I know. Madness. A 1kg bag of sugar would equate to 21 Megatons of TNT if fully converted.

You can make matter out of nothing which is way beyond my brainpower to comprehend properly. So if you smash a photon and electron together with enough speed / energy, not only do you get the photon and electron back out, but you get a matter & anti matter pairing aswell. Normally it takes stars to do this, but essentially its what they do at places like the Hadron collider all the time to study and find particles.

boxerdog · Feb 22, 2021

Your giving me a headache! I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that the earth is flat and we're living under a dome

lazarus · Feb 22, 2021

As we go from big to small, the quantum world is truly bazaar and mysterious.
If you haven't heard of the double split experiment give the below a look. Be warned its weird and spooky! Stick with it, it's defiantly worth watching to the end!

At 4:10 Matter behaves differently depending on if it being observed. Now that's a mind bender!

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