Is Mar's Mission an Impossible Dream?

[Jacob Petersheim]

@SallyForth Thank you, I never heard of this Movie!

Oh, it's pretty eerie. Not to mention depressing. It positively drips with... well, I can see why it resonates so deeply with a certain demographic.

I've heard it is the middle of a trilogy of films indulging in such depression, but I don't think I've ever heard of the other two.

 

[Nancy Hart]

Why NASA's Perseverance rover keeps taking pictures of this maze on Mars (LINK)

"The maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known as SHERLOC. Perseverance detects organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where this Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool comes in."

AI says ... "According to NASA, the SHERLOC maze is solvable."

Close up of center

 

[Joe Riley]

Shocking Signs of Life Found on Mars — And It’s Not Sci-Fi Anymore

 

[Joe Riley]

Can NAA' troubled Mar ample Return mission be aved?​

Can we really outspend China...so we can say "our rock collection is bigger than yours!"

The now vetoed NASA Mars Sample Return architecture made use of a set of machines, including use of helicopters, to collect Martian soil, rock and atmospheric specimens for return to Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"There appears to be an unofficial robotic space race underway involving the Red Planet. Both the U.S. and China are scripting strategies for bringing goodies back to Earth from Mars via their respective Mars Sample Return (MSR) endeavors."

"For America, things are currently happening in real-time on Mars. NASA's Perseverance rover is busily wheeling about within the ins and outs of Jezero Crater, biting into and snatching primo chunks of Mars for eventual pick-up by a future MSR mission. But early on, for NASA, the space agency found itself caught between a Mars rock and a budgetary and timing hard place. The space agency's plans for MSR eventually rang a price tag upwards of $11 billion. Additionally, NASA estimated that samples of Mars dirt, rock, and atmosphere wouldn't be returned to Earth until 2040."
"That plan, as blueprinted by NASA and its cooperative MSR partner, the European Space Agency (ESA), was unacceptable and declared so by NASA leadership. What followed were a set of studies for NASA, from within and outside the agency, to help pinpoint avenues to cut MSR costs and shorten the calendar time for return to Earth of prime-time Mars collectibles. Now, yet another shoe is set to drop thanks to an additional review by an independent committee looking into the MSR program."

NASA wants new ideas for its troubled Mars Sample Return mission​

 

[Axel Slingerland]

Put Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a rocket and send them to Mars and see if they could survive.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

Mars trilogy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning 187 years, from 2026 to 2212. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.

These were good books. I could imagine a TV series based on them.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

This item is dubious and critical of a project on the docket:

The TRUTH about the Moon base is now coming out, here's their disclosure plan

It seems to be about building a nuclear reactor to produce power for Moon Base use. Er, and there is a railroad involved as well. Surprise, surprise, what's given as reasons boil down to "national security."

But I'm not sure this skeptical reporting is as sane or as honest as those pushing for these things. The entire thing might also be part of an information war with China with no real substance to it. Yeah, I'm getting cynical.

 

[Joe Riley]

How can we go to Mars in a single day?

Scott:
Practically, it is not currently possible for lots of reasons. But why stick to the practical? Here is a few ways we could get to Mars in a single day:

1. Teleportation: You could beam yourself there. Light travels fast enough to cover the distance to Mars in less than one day. All you need for this to work is a functional teleportation device and accurate destination coordinates (so you don’t end up in empty space where Mars was previously when you pressed the “go” button). Make sure you pack a teleportation device with you though. If you don’t, you will end up stuck on Mars with no way to beam yourself back.
2. Warp Drive: It works in Star Trek, so it must be possible, right?? I think the best way to design this is an engine that curves spacetime tightly in front of the direction you want to move and expands it behind you. This allows you to ride like a surfer through the spacetime continuum. The best part is that you don’t actually move much, per se. The spacetime moves around you. This enables you “travel” much faster than the speed of light without the acceleration effects crushing you into goo. There are minor considerations like how to avoid the compressed spacetime from ripping you and your ship apart into its component elementary particles and energy and the necessary physical theory that would permit such technology from being developed, but otherwise, it should be straightforward.
3. IID: The Infinite Improbability Drive works by calculating all of the probabilities that you find yourself at any given point in the universe and then specifying a particular improbability to become actualized. I have no idea how this would ever be possible, but Douglas Adams says it is in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so I am going to assume it is.
4. Star Gate: This one requires you to tow a portal or gate out to another location such as the surface of Mars. The other side of the gate is here. Because the two are somehow entangled, you just activate it and then you can step through. Wear warm cloths and a pressure suit. The physics are a little hazy but I did see it done in a movie and read about it in “Ring” and other books by Stephen Baxter.

Those are few way I can think of off the top of my head.

 

[Joe Riley]

 

[Joe Riley]

 

[Joe Riley]

A Martian Chronicle - Mars and Movies. A Survey in Five Parts​

by Christoph Huber



0 Dim Childhood Memories

Die Abenteuer der Maus auf dem Mars (The Adventures of the Mouse on Mars, Temesi Miklós, Branko Ranitovic, 1976-1982)
When I was small there was a five-minute-long slot for little kids called “Betthupferl” (“bedtime treat”) every day at 5:55 pm on Austrian television. My favourite program in the rotating schedule was this animation series about a mouse stranded on Mars, which, for some reason, was said to be Czechoslovakian at the time, although the show was actually made in Hungary with major German input. Its picture book style animation and psychedelic ideas were irresistible to me. The image forever imprinted on my mind is of the mouse running around a planet about half its size, which must have been in the credits sequence, because in the stories themselves the mouse would only become huge from eating the sugar-cane-like plants that grow on the planet. I felt I had learned everything there is to know about Mars. Scientifically and poetically, it was all downhill from there for me, though not without its rewards.

Die große bunte Bunny Schau (recycled from the material of many masters, from 1983 onward)
Another fixture of my youth was this German-dubbed compilation of Looney Tunes classics, similar to The Bugs Bunny Show, from which it drew most of its material, including the framing sequences with Bugs and Daffy. Usually, four Looney Tunes cartoons would be squeezed into 25 minutes, so surely there was some meddling going on, and yet the greatness was undiminished – to this day, there is no better encapsulation of the classical Hollywood style than the work of Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Robert McKimson, Frank Tashlin, et.al. It’s both the perfect condensation and ultimate parody. Back then, such considerations were beyond me; it was just pure hilarity, introducing me to many things, including Marvin the Martian, whose considerable significance in film history I would rediscover later in an unadulterated form (→The Golden Age). At that point I felt I had learned everything there is to know about Martians, and possibly aliens in general. Aesthetically and comically, it was all downhill from there for me, though not without its rewards.

(CONTINUE)