According to panicking officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the new InSight lander successfully touched down on the Red Planet Monday, transmitted a few seconds of footage showing the Mars Curiosity rover charging hard in its direction, and then went completely dark. “In a series of blurry images received just before we lost all contact with the lander, we can see Curiosity suddenly appearing in the distance, cresting a dune, and advancing at full speed toward InSight,” said the mission’s principal investigator, W. Bruce Banerdt, explaining that the spacecraft had landed 370 miles north of Curiosity’s last known location, and that his team had no idea how the rover found the landing site or why it apparently rammed into InSight with maximum force.
The idea of placing a microphone on Mars was first suggested by Planetary Society Founder Carl Sagan. Sagan wrote in a 1996 letter to NASA, "Even if only a few minutes of Martian sounds are recorded from this first experiment, the public interest will be high and the opportunity for scientific exploration real."
Audio data collected by the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI), which includes an acoustic sensor, during Huygens' descent, 14 January 2005.
I never once thought of it before but why dont probes have some kinda high tech mic on them to do this?
It would be of limited scientific value, but it might be interesting to the public if a future lander was equipped with a mic and a nice speaker, so that it could play music or some sort of prerecorded speech from the speaker while recording it from a mic, so people could hear how the thin atmosphere would make music or language sound different.
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 4:14 pm
by Fireball
Kraken wrote: ↑Fri Dec 07, 2018 2:55 pm
There are 15,000 stars within 100 light years of Earth? I did not know that.
I never once thought of it before but why dont probes have some kinda high tech mic on them to do this?
It would be of limited scientific value, but it might be interesting to the public if a future lander was equipped with a mic and a nice speaker, so that it could play music or some sort of prerecorded speech from the speaker while recording it from a mic, so people could hear how the thin atmosphere would make music or language sound different.
IIRC the Mars 2020 lander will be equipped with a mic at least. Don't think it will have a speaker however.
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2018 4:43 pm
by Paingod
Hearing Mars somehow made it feel more moving and personal.
Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Mon Dec 10, 2018 9:18 pm
Why would Pink Floyd lie to us?
They wouldn't and they didn't. You just failed to listen to the whole song, dude
"There is no dark side
of the moon really.
Matter of fact
it's all dark."
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2018 5:09 pm
by Daehawk
I went out about 1am and looked but could not spot the comet. It was very foggy though and that didn't help.
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2018 9:22 pm
by Daehawk
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2018 11:01 pm
by Kraken
On Tuesday New Horizons has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it encounter with Ultima Thule, a mysterious Kuiper Belt object that's of interest because it's a cold relic of the solar system -- it has never been heated by the sun. Scientists aren't sure of its shape, its size, or even precisely where it is. Here's a thorough, non-technical mission summary.
In some ways, this event is more difficult than the pass of Pluto.
The object in the viewfinder is almost a hundred times smaller.
New Horizons will get closer than at Pluto, which is good for image detail; but it means that if the pointing is off, the probe could be sending back pictures of empty space!
And this really is a major concern. Because Ultima was only discovered four years ago, its position and movement on the sky are much more uncertain than the coordinates for Pluto.
Hence the importance of the final timing commands uploaded to the spacecraft on Sunday.
And, remember, all this is being done at a distance of 6.62 billion km (4.11 billion miles) from Earth.
At that separation, radio signals take six hours and eight minutes to reach home.
What is more, the data rates are glacial - around 1,000 bits a second.
It will be late on Tuesday before the first of a few choice images in downlinked, and it will be September 2020 until every last scrap of data from the flyby is pulled off New Horizons.
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 5:15 pm
by Isgrimnur
Re: SPACE - random thread about space stuff
Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2019 12:07 am
by Kraken
While Americans weren't watching, the Chinese dropped a rover on the far side of the moon.
Also, OSIRIS-ReX slipped into orbit around Bennu, which is only news because it's really hard to orbit a body that has basically no gravity.
