Science and Inquiry discussion

Exciting news:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/sci...

Wonderful. I've been concerned enough to check the outcome at 11:45 my time last night. :)

Great! Thank you, Betsy. I received another news with robots in it this morning.

http://designtaxi.com/news/353169/Jap...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...

Aloha wrote: "Great! Thank you, Betsy. I received another news with robots in it this morning.

http://designtaxi.com/news/353169/Jap..."


wow ! thats awesome , its deign looks like "metal gear" if you know thi famous Game .

I "watched" the landing live and the excitement in the JPL control room was palpable. Simply an amazing achievement.

Although it is said that robotic missions such as MSL are precursors to human missions to Mars, I wonder if they aren't lessening the general enthusiasm for manned missions. It's not like Apollo where we had never seen close up views of the Moon's surface before Neil and Buzz landed. Thanks to three rovers, and now a fourth (and don't forget Viking) we have seen large and various parts of Mars close up and personal.

There will always be hard-core enthusiasts who want to see boot prints on Mars, but I wonder if the general public and the politicians will be willing to spend the orders of magnitude more bucks to send Buck Rogers to set foot on the surface, when they can get fairly astounding results from robots with much less cost and risk.

Steve, were you watching the landing live on the NASA channel, or on some other channel?

I ask, because just as the Curiosity rover was landing, I was reading the book Seeing in the Dark: How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe. It mentioned that when an earlier Mars rover mission landed, people all over the world stayed up late to watch the first photographs unfold, live on TV. However, people in the United States could not view the landing on TV because networks did not think people were interested.

I watched on the Nasa channel.

Yup, NASA channel. Should have been watching Eye On the Solar System simultaneously. Would have been able to see an animation of the landing in sync with the real thing. Check it out with Replay mode. They are updating it to use the real data.

I am not surprised that other countries might be more interested than US citizens. I hope Science makes a comeback. All of the Mars landings have held me spellbound, not because of Mars, but because of what we humans are capable of.