Can you hear me now...?

So the Brits lost the Mars lander Beagle 2. Damn bloody shame. It was a gamble at best that the craft would survive the landing and be able to land right side up so it could deploy it's solar panels. Guess it's just sitting there like a piece of junk among the martian rubble. We need to send up the Sprint guy with his phone -- “can you hear me now?“. Thought for the day --

In heaven, the Italians are the lovers, the Germans are the engineers, the British are the organizational leaders.

In hell, the Italians are the organizational leaders, the Germans are the lovers, and the British are the engineers

Published Fri, Dec 26 2003 3:11 PM by craigg75
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# re: Can you hear me now...?

Friday, December 26, 2003 9:53 PM by fractalnavel
oh, i dunno, i thought it was kinda funny. i mean, we're the ufo's from the martian perspective. we keep sending stuff over there, and all it does is keep raining metal out of the sky. we make pretty inept aliens. if the situation was reversed, we would think they were the galactic equivalent of the village idiots. we'd be walking along, and some chunk of scrap would come crashing down, and we'd just smirk, shake our heads, and keep walking.

add this to the situation with the voyager plaque that shows nine planets while scientists are still arguing whether pluto is two planets, or not a planet at all, and it gets pretty embarassing. i mean, we don't even know where we live ;-) you know why seti can't find intelligent life ? they're avoiding us, that's why.
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# re: Can you hear me now...?

Thursday, January 01, 2004 5:26 AM by Klaatu Est Klaatu
There's a really high (over 30%) failure rate on Mars probes in comparison to all probes in the system. Mars should be an easy trip compared to some other missions yet we keep loosing them. It IS as if there's someone who doesn't want us to go there. <Tin Foil hat time>Now some kooks have said that mars is run by an automated facility and probes are often screwed up in transit by energy emmisions from some mobile "channel marker" satellites such as what was once seen before the old russian probe went dead.</Tin Foil hat time> I just heard an interview with som conspiracy guys that said
that a previous lander of ours was out on the pad to be launched and the weather changed so it was recalled and inspected. NASA had really lax security at the time. They found that someone had filled the nosecone with rubbish above the lander section to screw with it AND a separate sabotage was discovered which must have been performed at JPL (hence by a different group) that coated the camera lens with vasoline to ruin its resolution. This kinda stuff makes you wonder what political factions want Mars trips to fail and why?
 

# re: Can you hear me now...?

Wednesday, January 07, 2004 12:13 PM by fractalnavel
1. all the brits wanted was to make fun of our first moon landing, exclaiming "the beagle has landed !". too bad the joke was spoiled.

2. i think the mars figures were 30% failure for missions, 90% failure for landers. i don't know what the overall mission failure rate is for all interplanetary missions. there have only been unmanned "landers" for venus, mars, and, of course, the moon (and earth too, i guess). oh - didn't we drop something into jupiter's atmosphere recently ? maybe we should practice more unmanned landing missions to earth first. we could try and drop semi-autonomous probes into arizona, new york, the antarctic, an ocean, etc. - see if we can find life. maybe this could be a new homeland security project.

3. _tin_ foil ?! i've been using _aluminum_. well, no wonder ... thanks for the tip ;-)

 

# re: Can you hear me now...?

Monday, January 26, 2004 4:30 PM by fractalnavel
corrections: it's a 66% failure rate for missions, and the "can you hear me now" campaign" is verizon's. which explains my experience with sprint ;-)

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