Since January 3rd [or 4th, depending on your time zone] in 2004 the rover, Spirit, has been tracking through the dust of Mars. Designed for a 90-day mission, Spirit and its sibling, Opportunity, have been chugging along showing us and telling us things about out neighbor.
There was a time when we knew how to do things, but we are losing the skills.
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Established: 21 November 2004
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13 comments
Yeah…JPL!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/santabarbarian/sets/344622/
These things were obviously over designed and a lot of good taxpayer money was wasted buying over spec’d components. Not nearly enough shortcuts were taken nor enough compromises made in the design. Absolutely unacceptable. I expect a Congressional investigation just as soon as they get back to work next week.
I find it dismaying that almost 40 years after America placed men on the Moon, we couldn’t even begin to do that today. We’ve made lots of technological advances in killing and permanently disabling people, though… I guess there’s been a change in priorities.
(@Fallenmonk – ROTFL!)
Those are some great pictures, Jill.
That’s an engineer’s response to the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty – the specifications for the glass were wrong. 😉
We have lost the manufacturing capability to build the equipment today, and we don’t spend anything close to what is necessary for research and development to keep up with the rest of the world, much less lead. That is the main problem I see with many of the programs being suggested to deal with global climate change and other problems – they assume that we can respond like we did to the man on the moon challenge, but we can’t without decades of rebuilding and a major investment in public education.
One of the best little secrets in LaLa is the OpenHouse Weekend at JPL. You get to talk (and touch) the scientists (mad or otherwise), take in some of the projects they are working on and see some dang cool science stuff.
My actual favorite was a computerized globe that had current weather patterns moving all over. Just way cool. The photo didn’t do it justice and didn’t show the “coolness” factor.
Glad you enjoyed the photos.
cookie jill´s last blog post..Ruby’s Cafe…
It was nice back the old days when people were still “interested” in science and there was some effort to explain things in the media. PBS maintained it for a while, but even that is fading.
We still do some amazing things, but no one knows about them, so they don’t care.
Yeah, JPL and Sandia were very cool in those days. 🙂 When I was employed by GD, I and my two companions were given a tour of JPL and Sandia that was a little more in depth than the normal public tour. 🙂 Sandia were just beginning construction of a huge machine they called the ‘Z Reactor’. A few years ago, a friend sent me a photo of the operating reactor. Once I realised what I was looking at… my jaw really did drop and a swore an oath! All references seem to have vanished now, which either means it was a success and they don’t want anyone to know, or it was a dismal failure and they don’t want anyone to know! 😉 LOL
I can try to post the photo if anyone is interested. 🙂
photos! yes! do want!
hipparchia´s last blog post..
Oh! I shoulda checked first! *sigh* The site is back up… Hmmm. I *know it was gone for at least a year. Oh well… 🙂
Sandia Z Machine Home Page
8 Mar 2006 — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.
Nov. 3, 2006 — Sandia’s Z machine, by creating pressures more than 10 million times that of the atmosphere at sea level, has turned a diamond sheet into a pool of liquid.
Z Machine Melts Diamond To Puddle In Experiments On Capsule For Nuclear-fusion Fuel
Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water.
Sandia’s Z machine creates ice in nanoseconds
So, some great science is still being done, in spite of the Bushmorons. LOL
BTW, in that photo of the operating reactor, what you are seeing in what looks like a web of cracks, are actually electric arcs of immense power. When one realises that this is merely the corona loss of the operating reactor (a very tine fraction of the power being used and generated) and some of those arcs are several meters in length, the actual energy being used is mind bogglingly immense! For example, when I was designing a plasma based profile cutting system, we had to use a spark gap of about 2cm to be able to switch a DC current of 800 amps (at 800 volts, which is 160 kilowatts) 100 times a second (100Hz) to produce a small plasma only 4 times hotter than the surface of the sun (at least, that’s what CSIRO scientists told us) 😉 LOL.
Well… it even has a Wiki now! *shrug* LOL
Z machine Wiki
I love *real* science. 🙂
Ah, yes, the good old days of pure research –
It couldn’t wipe out the universe, could it?
I don’t think so.
You don’t think so, but you don’t know that it won’t?
Well, it might bend things a bit.
Are we standing in the bit that might get bent?
Come on, if I knew that, there would be no point in conducting the experiment.
Although I have mostly heard this in the framework of “This isn’t going to crash the server, is it?”
cool!
“At the pressures we’re interested in, everything is compressible,” said capsule designer Mark Herrmann, a Sandia researcher.
heh. very much like Well, it might bend things a bit. i love pure research, although i have to admit, i don’t especially want to be standing in the bit that might get bent.
took me a moment, k, to realize those weren’t cables in that photo.
bryan, i am famous for my server-crashing abilities.
hipparchia´s last blog post..