Posted on 08/11/2012 2:09:57 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: You've just landed on Mars and opened your eyes -- what do you see? If you're the Curiosity rover, you see a strange gravelly place with a large mountain in the distance. You've landed on target near the edge of 150-km wide Gale Crater, with Mount Sharp on the horizon being the rise in the crater's center. As a car-sized rover with six wheels and a laser, you prepare yourself to go on a two-year mission of exploration, climbing Mt. Sharp, and looking for signs that Mars once harbored life. Currently you sit motionless, check yourself over, and receive a detailed briefing from Earth on things you will need to know while rolling around, trying to avoid flipping over or getting your wheels stuck in sand. Your rolling explorations will likely start in a few days. What will you find? What's out there?
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
Speed is definitely the immediate key to manned flight in space. If mars was only a few days or even hours away it would be no big deal to send men.
Now I want to see her with tourist guy and the beer looter.
OMG
you are so much better, have so much more patience than I, at photoshopping
great PIC
10Q
fantastic pic
“............nothing is next, this is the end of the line, nothing is planned for the future.”
muslim outreach and russian rentals.
LLS
Funny picture! It must be a photoshop job, since the John Kerry and Jane Fonda aren’t in it.
Where there’s cheese, there’s mice.
MEDICAL STUFF DOESN'T COUNT!
NO Internet, no personal computers and 40 million jobs and a 22% ROI on Apollo expeditures is not that important!
Read History don't liten to a two faced LIAR!
Of course there is always Anne Francis
Take the ISS and two old shuttles and put them in a polar orbit around Mars. String supply depots along the way, like cake crumbs on a picnic trail. Update some lander designs and let's go.
Sonoran Desert . . . just like I thought.
I agree about the ISS — after jettisoning the Russian modules, which are crap, and installing a boom or mast to guy the outlying parts (like the photoelectric arrays), a conventional booster on the end opposite the mast could push the ISS to escape, and a plasma motor could push it on a long, slow (and unmanned) trajectory to enter Martian capture after a few years.
Having the ISS in orbit around Mars gives astronauts both a destination and real-time remote control over numerous, next-gen (and probably small) surface rovers. Crews could be rotated in and out on a regular basis (maybe even using Buzz Aldrin’s “recycler” idea). All this would build in safety (which was a Von Braun priority) and produce a large number of astronauts with experience in long-duration spaceflight away from Earth.
The return vehicles would always arrive first, probably docked to, or tethered to, the ISS. When the first crew arrived, its return vehicle would already be available, and stocked with supplies to be offloaded into the ISS.
For the manned exploration of the surface, a large, self-contained, winnebago-style motor home (probably more than one, each on a different part of the planet) would be the target of the lander. Crews would suit up, board the landing vehicle, drop in near the exploration vehicle, walk over, board it, and thereafter (until it was time to leave) operate in a shirtsleeve environment. The vessel to reorbit and rendezvous would be very similar, but would carry more fuel, and drop in. The crew would direct their vehicle to an area near the craft, suit up, and leave the surface vehicle in good condition for the next crew.
Wow.....you see like the back of a black ship on the left and a black building on the right. Mars is cool!
“Check yourself over”?......ohhhhh.....to make sure your pants aren’t unzipped......
It would be bad manners to greet the martians with your probe hanging out.
In the next few years, when human pilots are getting CREAMED in dogfights with drones, it will become obvious even to action/adventure movie fans that machines are better suited to these jobs than people are.
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