And yes, I was oversimplifying things just a wee bit. I just meant that every aspect of Curiosity is even more impressive then its predecessors, and that I’m as excited as a young girl at a Justin Bieber concert about it

“The unique rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gasses so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.”

” Truly, every part of this mission is “Our past good ideas, but new, improved, and cranked up to 11.”

“Heh, all the best questions begin with “I wonder…”
As in, “I wonder what happens to this thing when I shoot it with a 10 megawatt laser pulse?””

Yes and no. In the short term, design works well with such “new and improved!” However, on longer timescales, engineers must ask whether it’s time for a clean break, and an entirely different design. That’s where things get risky… and interesting.

And that’s engineering… in science, as they say, the interesting stuff usually happens after saying “Hmm, that’s odd.”

“Hey, Phil! On the telecast, it said the Centaur stage will be going into a solar orbit. It also had a camera & transmitter (the ones used to show separation of the Mars mission from the Centaur stage). So will the Centaur stage be doing any science?”

No. The camera is likely a Sony security/industrial cam, dragooned into space service. It wasn’t designed for hard vacuum or radiation. So, by instrument standards, the data are crappy, and the unit might die in weeks to months. Still, it’s enough to tell if anything went wrong with mission events, which is why it’s there. Also, the transmitter on Centaur is probably too weak to be heard from deep-space distances, if engineers are following standard practice.

Someone with curiosity.

Heh, all the best questions begin with “I wonder…”
As in, “I wonder what happens to this thing when I shoot it with a 10 megawatt laser pulse?”

Someone with curiosity.

Yeah – every time I look at pictures of Curiosity, I can’t help thinking of War of the Worlds. Who was the bright spark that decided sending probes capable of vaporising rock at 30m with a laser mounted on a fracking mast was a good idea?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw&feature=related

Gale crater, Mars here we come!

@42. Brian137 : Lol.

***

“No one would have dreamed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
- Opening sentence of H.G. Wells ‘War of the Worlds’, 1898.

(Jeff Wayne Musical version linked to my name here.)

Must be tough living underground licking ice cubes.

Just overlooked one microscopic detail.

Of course I tried to get my kids watch this as well… “Oh, come, quickly! It’s a camera showing how the spacecraft is going to separate… as it happens in reality!!”

Probably I’m the person at home who’s most excited, but I’m quite certain that the English word ‘Curiosity’ will be well known for my 4 and 6 year old girls (we are native Swedish speakers otherwise ).

Hopefully Curiosiy will land at a time of the day which allows us to fire up Nasa TV and follow it live in ca 9 months or so. Will be fun as my kids remember the rocket launch that happened today !

(I know, indoctrinate your kids, as everyone else does it and all that… but it cannot really hurt to turn them into partial space-nerds, can it?)