WAG - Stupid Foreign-Made Piece of Junk!
We've all been there before.
Can you recall the time you got a brand new toy?
You know the one I’m talking about.
Some assembly may have been required and batteries were not included. It took some time to put it together. You may have needed a parent to play the “expert” mechanic to slap it together, but then you were ready for some fun.
Finally getting to try it out after that long wait must have been fantastic. Yeah. Bet it was real sweet.
It only took a short amount of time, however, before something went wrong. Just as soon as the fun had started, it was over.
No matter what you try, the toy remains unresponsive. You review in your head what could be wrong? Have the batteries already run down? Did one of the plastic pieces snap? Did a circuit come loose? Could it have suffered one two many accidental bumps?
Regardless of what the fault might be, the final conclusion is inescapable: your toy is dead.
I’m sure almost everybody can think of a toy story like that. Thus, that is most of us can easily relate to the joystick jockeys at NASA who have lost control of their Mars rover.
Yep, after countless years and development and more money than enough money to buy Pintos for everyone in Idaho (and have enough cash left over to spring for fuzzy dice), NASA’s little electric puppy dog, Spirit, has gone incommunicado.
Bad space rover! No biscuit.
So continues Earth’s love/hate relationship with our planetary neighbor. We’ve sent more probes to Mars than any other object in the Solar System (according to the facts I think I recall from all those old space books I used to read in Elementary School). That’s mainly because it’s close, neat looking, and less likely to melt our probes (an unfortunate lesson we learned on Venus).
Though it’s our favorite target, and we have a lot of practice shooting scientific space junk in it’s general direction, Mars also has the privilege of being at the center of the most failed space missions.
On December 25 of 2003, the British rover Beagle II was supposed to touch down on Christmas day. By most accounts, researchers think it did. Of course, since no radio contact has been made with the probe in nearly a month, the important question isn’t “DID the rover make it to Mars?” but rather “HOW MANY pieces is the rover broken into now?”
If you go to the Brit’s website, their most recent update is expressing their support and best wishes to the Yanks across the pond as NASA. Though not explicitly said, the message read between the line states, “We’ve been there chums. Sucks, don’t it?”
It had been a while since I reviewed a fact sheet denoting the number of space probes or rovers that Red Planet has prematurely taken out of commission, but a quick online search showed me the box score has been pretty poor.
Part of it depends on how you rate a mission (is it a success or failure if your probe lands safely buts stops transmitting 20 seconds after you turn on the camera, as in the case of Mars 3?), but out of roughly 30 Martian missions, only about 1/6 accomplished a respectable percentage of their projected goals. Mars can be deadly.
Of course, the mythical god of war doesn’t always get first shot at the probes. Does anyone else remember back in 96 when that plutonium powered Russian probe was aiming for Mars but ended up just a little bit farther north of Easter Island in the Pacific ? I seem to be the only one. At least that’s one we can’t blame on faulty Feet-to-Meters conversions.
Don’t remember that one? Here’s a brief refresher course, brought to you by our favorite instructor, Robin Williams: "You can't smoke pot and be a rocket scientist! Or maybe you can... considering all of the mistakes that NASA has made. Take the Mars Lander. 'Ok, ok. Listen. I did the calculations in feet... ha! and I programmed the Lander in meters! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! 150 million dollar ‘Whoops!’ Two years. . . SPLAT! Ha! Turned it into the Mars Burrier! Ha ha ha!”
Blame it on bad karma, that suspicious looking face, a finicky Japanese made bolt, whatever. All I know right now is that in the long-term standings, Mars is ahead… and just got another tally in its favor.
One last note: Some of you may wonder why the title of this piece mentions a “foreign-made piece of junk” when referring to an American made probe. There is a simple solution for this. NASA scientists speculate that origins of the rover’s problems came from the South Pacific.
A powerful storm hit Australia and interfered with a ground based satellite dish that was supposed to upload a regularly scheduled batch of instructions. Noting that problems arose after the missed appointment, some experts propose that the lag in expected instructions fouled up the computer’s brain.
See? It’s not America’s fault that our rover is bounding aimlessly around the red planet like it’s lost its master. It’s the Australians’ fault.
'Sojourner_you_made_it_look_so_easy'
