What is cooler than a roving explorer and lab landing on Mars?

Uh, like nothing, dude. It is the best!

PS – there’s a great demo… let me look for it.

Found it

Find live creatures on Mars holding up signs that say “Welcome to Mars” – now THAT would be cool.

@zensky:Wonderful link; both accurate and clear. I am really glad, again, that I took some physics and calculus courses long ago

@josie; Perhaps we should appoint NASA engineers to fix health insurance, social security, income taxes and estate tax issues.

But don’t you know it’s all staged in Area 51?

@zensky Great link. Thanks

What is cooler? A roving explorer lab with a death ray that can melt rocks.

i.e., Curiosity. :)

Sure thing.

Here is a picture that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took of the recent landing.

“Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Captures Amazing Image of Curiosity Rover’s Descent”

My daughter’s ex SO of twenty years is a planetary geologist at Brown and helped design the experiments on the MRO.

It is all cool.

It would have been better if men and women were driving the rover and setting up the lab on Mars.

A rover on Mars is kind of cool, but universal health care would be much cooler and a better use of that huge amount of money IMO.

It’s not nearly that much money, @Kardamom.

@Qingu Maybe not, but that money could have been put to better use on Earth.

@Kardamom The money is still on earth.
It is being used to pay for everything and everybody from engineers to janitors.
Their earnings are used in turn to buy food and consumer goods and pay medical bills which other people work to provide. Every cent of the money is in the economy.
The only thing on Mars is a few dollars worth of metal.

@Kardamom I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels strongly inclined to rain on Curiosity’s parade.

@Kardamom, maybe. Or maybe not. At some point in human history, we will need to visit and colonize other planets. Earth will probably one day become overpopulated, or too polluted, or even succumb to a natural disaster. At some point we will need to spend the time and resources developing extraplanetary technology. If not now, when?

I felt the same way as you about the large hadron collider. The greatest and most expensive scientific experiment in history, all built to find what for most people is the answer to an incomprehensible physics equation? I thought that money could have better been spent feeding the poor. And maybe that’s true. But then the flipside to this is, at what point do you allow the money to be spent on scientific research instead of solving intractable social problems? Can we only spend money on physics and astronomy when there are no more poor people?

And then there’s the unpredictable nature of the fruits of scientific research. The higgs boson has absolutely no value today. But in 50 years, who knows? That finding may lay the groundwork for something that is of huge social value—just like research into quantum mechanics laid the groundwork for computing decades later. Sending a robot to Mars to melt rocks has no social value now, but what about in 50 years? NASA solved a series of very difficult problems in landing that rover on another planet, and the solutions to those problems may one day have immense value to human society. You just can’t predict this stuff, which is why I support a “wide net” of scientific research.

Here’ is a photo of the little son of the planetary geologist from Brown who designed an experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that captured the photo of Curiosity as it was about to land on Mars.

Note the NASA onesie.

The PG from B was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for the entry and landing and said that it was a thrilling moment.