? It’s all very clear to me now | Main | Deus Ex ?
May 26, 2008
Mosella
The BBC publishes images transmitted from Mars. Funny how yet another successful American Mars mission is presented by the British state press as a success for science and humanity whereas American missions that fail are presented as instances of hubris and the collapse American empire. Funny too it takes a Canadian news organization to point out the $30m worth of Canadian scientific equipment along for the ride which - at something like 8% of the cost - somehow makes this a "Canadian-U.S." mission. Such are the symbolic stakes.
Better to simply applaud the Phoenix Mission as another triumph for the United States and, by extension, for the freedom of conscience and religion that makes scientific inquiry possible and the free markets that enable these spectacular engineering endeavours. I am keeping an eye out for Phoenix to appear on Google Mars, another instance of the remarkable achievements of our civilization. That said, one is possessed with the sense these are precisely the sort of miracles the Romans were about before the plague and the Hun gave them a nasty surprise.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 26, 2008 07:04 AM
Comments
I think she is a wee bit too small to show up on Google Mars. You run into the same problem trying to spot LEM descent stages, lunar rovers or the Surveyor probes on the Moon. You need 1-2/pixel resolution to be able to pick something out even as a simple dot, and better than that to get anything like a recognisable form. They have the spots marked, but seeing the thing at 200m/pixel resolution (or worse) is beyond the realm of the possible, for now.
Posted by: Chris Taylor at May 26, 2008 08:34 AM
True dat. But you will notice Google Mars has a handy spacecraft tab on the top left showing the locations of various landers. I am a little surprised Phoenix did not appear within minutes of the news of a ping from the surface.
Posted by: Ghost of a flea at May 26, 2008 08:38 AM
"It's 406 A.D., again. Do you know where your Civilization is?"
Posted by: Clayton Barnett at May 26, 2008 10:04 AM
I keep wondering when our current technological marvels will start making a dent in the collective imaginations of X-Files-style UFO conspiracists and true-believers.
If you can cross stellar distances with relative ease and slip through SPACECOM's orbital tracking, why would you be sending large piloted craft down to check things out? Send an unmanned probe instead. After all we have been sending them to the moon since the 50s, and to the other planetary bodies since the 60s.
Apparently the little green men from other worlds would rather hazard their lives to collect data an automated spacecraft could do with zero risk.
Posted by: Chris Taylor at May 26, 2008 03:10 PM
Perhaps I am aware of it and it just goes as a given, but the US and Canadian economic infrastructures are SOLIDLY welded at many points so as to make them seamless, like a frame of a truck where the extensions cannot be seen as separate unless you know the history OR you take the time to section the metals.
Such is the effect when you park a Canadian built Chevy or Ford CMP truck of WWII Vintage at a US car show and the Chevy and Ford Motorheads walk by, see the bow tie (or Ford emblem) and stop in wonderment and look and start to walk around something that is clearly a Ford or Chevy to their experienced eyes, but is strangely not like anything they have seen before.
The amount of raw materials and finished goods which travel north and south are sometimes so common they're a given and are taken for granted, it's when we find something that we don't normally expect to see that it seems significant.
Perhaps for me, I am more aware of the Canadian Contribution to the US space program since I'm relatively aware of the Canadarm products. It does help that I have a friend who worked there a few years ago on previous projects which continue to be our left hand as it were in the operations in space.
Posted by: Montieth at May 26, 2008 04:08 PM
y'know Ghost, at 8%, the individual Canadian is pretty close to matching the contribution of the individual American... of course we hubristic Canadians don't ask of ourselves achievments commesurate with our mere numbers - see the world wars!