MSL Video |
MSL Video |
Jun 5 2006, 08:54 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 321 Joined: 6-April 06 From: Cape Canaveral Member No.: 734 |
Saw the MSL video, which was similar to the MER video. It was awesome. Will try to get a copy
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Aug 2 2006, 04:59 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 172 Joined: 17-March 06 Member No.: 709 |
For those interested in MSL's RTG system, here is the link to a great paper summarizing the design. It looks like they have it figured it out, at least in the engineering world. Perhaps, it is the world of politics, or the availability of Plutonium, or both, that is holding back a definite decision. http://marstech.jpl.nasa.gov/publications/...-2005-01-28.pdf Another Phil |
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Aug 2 2006, 09:47 AM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 159 Joined: 4-March 06 Member No.: 694 |
Russia has said to the US that the US can buy Plutonium-238 for $2000 per gram from Russia if and only if it is NOT used for any military purpose. Russia has lots of Plutonium-238 to give the US!
The US has said it will resume domestic production of Plutonium-238 as soon as possible. It is most likely that there is a lot of political sensitivity to anything nuclear. Just look at the fuss over the Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons missions! If we told the people that RTG's were used in the Viking landers, then I'm sure most of the fuss will go away. Protestors are strange people. No one protested against the launch of the Voyager 1 & 2 probes. Why? Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, just 4 days after Elvis Presley died! And Voyager 1 launch date (on September 5, 1977) was during the immense grieving over his death! -------------------- I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed.
- Opening line from episode 13 of "Cosmos" |
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Aug 2 2006, 02:21 PM
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#4
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
Protestors are strange people. No one protested against the launch of the Voyager 1 & 2 probes. Why? Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, just 4 days after Elvis Presley died! And Voyager 1 launch date (on September 5, 1977) was during the immense grieving over his death! I recall one quite vocal anti-nuke protestor who was not only deeply concerned that Cassini would somehow fly back to Earth and crash on it after exploring Saturn but that during the probe's 1999 flyby of Venus that NASA should have let the craft smash into the second world from Sol because the planet had no atmosphere! I was also told by a friend who attended an anti-Cassini (read anti-nuke) group meeting in Cambridge, MA in 1997 (home to Harvard) that when he tried to explain how safe Cassini's RTGs were even from an explosion of the rocket, he was told they didn't want the facts because they had already made up their minds that Cassini was dangerous and had to be stopped. After all that, any amount of sympathy I had with the anti-nuke groups went right out the window. BTW, Groucho Marx died around the same time as the Voyagers left Earth and Elvis went into hiding, but sadly people didn't seem as upset about his passing. -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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