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56 Comments
- MachineMessiah, on 05/22/2009, -2/+50But then, something goes wrong on the UAC facilities on Phobos...and it's up to one nameless fellow to set things aright. Leave it to the Russians to open gates to hell
- FreckleEars, on 05/22/2009, -0/+30This article is about Phobos more than Mars. The Russians plan to land a probe on the Martian moon and send samples back to earth.
Hopefully it won't be a bust. If successful, the details of the soil samples can give info on the satellites origin. Its orbit is low and fast, which allow a probe to keep up with the orbit nearly perfectly and 'dock' with the speeding moon. The satellite has one side that always faces Mars, similar to our Moon. The Mars aspect is more about the potential for Phobos to be a base station for mars landings. It is easy to get there and could potentially contain some life sustaining minerals for use on a Phobos base. - RealmDown, on 05/22/2009, -0/+23We should hope they succeed because it is a worthy endeavor regardless of political ideologies.
- MarineDigg80, on 05/22/2009, -0/+17I don't know why we haven't already done this, especially if it is believed to hold amino acids and could pretty much give us an idea about early civilizations in the universe. I hope this mission is successful and sheds some light on everything from the early years of the universe.
- paterade724, on 05/22/2009, -0/+12Space race 2.0 woot!
- RealmDown, on 05/22/2009, -0/+9Nothing like new frontiers.
I'm volunteering as long as I get a BFG-9000 to play with. - ilbbaicl, on 05/22/2009, -3/+12In Soviet Russia, Mars comes to you!
- rixinthemix, on 05/22/2009, -0/+8The Russians are not just retracing their steps, that have learned from past mistakes. They also seem to have the willingness to explore and are not just getting involved in projects that consolidatre previous missions. Phobos is an unusual if not unique object and it makes sense as a destination.
- FortyCaliber, on 05/22/2009, -1/+8Sure they're going to Phobos now... but what about the secret facility already in existence on Deimos?
- EvilJohn, on 05/22/2009, -0/+7They sound Doomed.
- Aquinas315, on 05/22/2009, -0/+7You are opening the gates of hell, cancel or allow?
- norman619, on 05/22/2009, -2/+8I'm glad they got over the loss of one of the their probes from years ago. The images it sent back just before it went silent disturbed them enough to not want to send another.
I hope they succeed. It will be another step for us towards leaving the cradle we call Earth. - impei, on 05/22/2009, -0/+6пошел на хуй!
- gte879p, on 05/22/2009, -0/+4I agree that it wold provide a lot of valuable information.
But I know why we haven't done it.
It's really really really hard to send things into space. It's even harder to get them to go to far off objects in our solar system. you might think 'well mars is closer than say... Jupiter' but it's still really far. And it's also tough to design, build, launch, monitor and process the results/data of a probe. They are expensive. And while the research from almost any interplanetary probe would be useful, they are all expensive. So you have to choose what's most beneficial.
Space is really big. - RealmDown, on 05/22/2009, -1/+5I'm intrigued by your phrase "disturbed them enough." Would you elaborate ?
- inactive, on 05/22/2009, -0/+4You may think it's a long way down the road to chemists, but that's peanuts compared to space.
- omgTHEPATRIOTS, on 05/22/2009, -2/+6Didn't the Ruskies find out how bad ***** gets ***** on Phobos's UAC facility in Doom?
- raydeen, on 05/22/2009, -0/+4Knee Deep iin the Dead baby! Just don't forget IDDQD and you'll be fine.
- mehan, on 05/22/2009, -1/+5IDDQD + IDKFA = only way to survive on Phobos.
- norman619, on 05/22/2009, -1/+4No I'm referring to a real life event not some movie.
- thefreehunter, on 05/22/2009, -0/+3Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is...
- aaron.dunlap, on 05/22/2009, -1/+4*insert doom joke here*
- BabyWookie, on 05/22/2009, -0/+2Good vodka is made from wheat grain.
- BabyWookie, on 05/22/2009, -1/+3This guy tracks all FP stories involving Russia, in order to say something negative about the country in the comment threads. He's been doing it for years. He must have been really burned by his Russian mail-order bride.
- DouglasQ, on 05/22/2009, -1/+3The 'cool word':'not cool word" ratio in the title is awesome.
- lbeaty1981, on 05/22/2009, -2/+4Phobos is a potato-shaped moon. Vodka is made from potatoes. Russia suddenly wants to send an expedition to Phobos; maybe they know something we don't...?
- Chirp08, on 05/22/2009, -0/+2We need a new space race.
- Hellahulla, on 05/22/2009, -2/+4They stopped sending probes because the Soviet Union collapsed, thus did the funding.
- mathyu21, on 05/22/2009, -0/+2hmm very curious about those grooves across its surface
- charlietuna, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1I'm tellin ya... in a few years China will upset the entire apple cart.
- tekproxy, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1I used _skill_.
- norman619, on 05/22/2009, -3/+4What happened is that as the probe was getting close to Phobos it started sending back images. The last few images had a strange object crossing in front of the probe. Then it went dead.
Do a google search on Russia's Phobos 2 probe. If I remember right this was the final straw for them. They were under the impression what the odd object the probe filmed was intelligently controlled and deliberately took out their probe. I remember soem interviews with some of the men who were running the project. They were convinced it was a warning to stay away. - BabyWookie, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1Trying to use software to translate colloquial slang sayings such as "get your ass", always produces ridiculous results.
Impei told you to "go on a *****", which is a common Russian insult, equivalent to a "***** you", but makes very little sense when you translate it literally too. - darkism, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1Cocytus, here we come!
- BabyWookie, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1"Receive your donkey damaging"?
Another Google translator fail. This doesn't make any sense at all. - norman619, on 05/22/2009, -1/+2cluck and foo:
I know it sounds crazy but their probe did send back odd images just before going offline. It's a fact. I spent some time in Russia and took the time to look into this while there thinking te Russian responce to it was tabloid BS. The Russians really did interpret it as an alien warning to stay away. - Culyt, on 05/23/2009, -0/+1It was Megatron!
- BabyWookie, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1Yeah. The last two probes were shot down by the Phobian defense grid, using EMP beams..
- Recoil, on 05/25/2009, -0/+1What's so bizarre about it?
Oh right, the zombies and demon hordes from hell... - pln2bz, on 05/22/2009, -1/+1Re: "Phobos’s exterior poses some riddles of its own. Its most striking visual structures (aside from the giant Stickney crater) are sets of crater chains that line up across the surface. Deimos does not have anything like them, nor do any of the half-dozen regular asteroids imaged by space probes so far. One theory is that the craters are old steam vents, relics of an ancient catastrophe that cracked Phobos’s crust and heated its interior, sending steam blasting outward. This would be good news for future human visits to Mars, as vents would mark the location of water-bearing minerals, perhaps even buried deposits of water ice. Another, less enticing possibility is that the holes are crevices opened by tidal forces or by impacts that caused the entire moon to flex."
People tend not to realize that the enigmatic nature of crater chains is purely a function of scientists' preference for the dominant popular cosmology. It is the cosmology itself that creates the enigma that these people are discussing. Replace the cosmology, and the enigma disappears.
Let me explain the predicament.
When you imagine that gravity is king in the universe, it's necessary to assume that bodies in space cannot acquire or trade electrical charge. For, if you can have charge accumulation on things like planets and stars, then that could create large-scale electric fields. Before long, you're wondering why the charge does not just leak out into space, and the conversation drifts into electrical circuits maintaining those charges, fields and voltages caused by them and magnetic rope transmission lines (called "Birkeland Currents" amongst those who work in the laboratory) connecting the electrical nodes. For an astrophysicist whose credibility (and funding) is completely tied up with the notion that gravity is dominant, the entire discussion becomes extremely uncomfortable because it suggests that the last 100 years in astrophysics might have been an unfortunate detour -- a blunder. It is the ultimate unthinkable thought for astrophysicists. Electricity in space is basically out of bounds.
Never mind that some radio astronomers (like Gerrit Verschuur) are already mapping out the interstellar Birkeland Currents that feed into our own Sun's heliosphere. So long as the public doesn't understand what radio astronomy or Birkeland Currents are, then it's easy enough for an astrophysicist to dismiss Verschuur's 200 correlations between interstellar hydrogen filaments and WMAP hotspots. And never mind that the Magellenic Stream looks exactly like what a galactic transmission line would be expected to look like (artist's rendition below) ...
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980826.html
An actual image ...
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/M/Magellanic+S ...
The fact is that space is filamentary plasmas on all scales that we observe: the interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic, galactic and supergalactic. This should inspire some consideration for why we observe filamentary plasmas. Is there something about plasma that tends to create filaments on all of these scales? Does it make sense to propose different explanations for each scale? After all, some plasma physicists will argue that plasmas scale over something like 16 orders of magnitude.
We see filaments of plasmas pretty much everywhere we look -- even now in the WMAP data (although it appears to be interstellar rather than supergalactic). In the laboratory, plasmas form filaments when they transfer charged particles. In other words, the filaments are electrical transmission lines. Although astrophysicists would prefer to deduce the causes for these filaments, we are still bound to consider the behavior of plasmas in the laboratory. It's called the empirical method.
Never mind that we've observed regular magnetic ropes connecting the Sun with the Earth. Magnetic ropes are the hallmark feature of plasmas conducting electrical current. You cannot create magnetic ropes with gravity, and they are not the characteristic behavior of fluids, winds or gases. When you see a magnetic rope, you know that the twisting is the result of electromagnetism.
Never minding ALL OF THAT, chains of craters are pretty good evidence for electrical discharges. This is just the type of thing we'd EXPECT to see if bodies in space could acquire and trade large amounts of electrical charge. We see these canyon-like features ("rilles") all over the solar system, in fact, and we know that they are related to the craters because sometimes these rilles will actually become chains of craters, and vice-versa -- as we see on Phobos, actually. Importantly, in some situations, we can observe the rilles to defy gravity by crossing over impediments. This is an important clue that tells us that the rilles are not always the result of fluids subject to gravity.
And at this point, we should consider our own enigmatic terrestrial features like the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River punches straight through a major plateau, the Kaibab Upwarp. This observation poses a major problem for theories trying to explain the Grand Canyon. Rivers don't punch through plateaus. They go around them. Arguments suggesting that the Grand Canyon may have been the result of an electrical discharge are difficult to discount actually because not only is all of the supporting evidence there, but a simple observation of the Grand Canyon from above suggests that very explanation ...
http://www.frankfurnessresources.com/rickimages/Gr ...
We know from high school that we can charge up a pith ball and it will exhibit an electric force. This is called electrostatics, and it's the study of isolated charges in space. But the features we observe in space strongly suggest an ELECTRODYNAMIC explanation, which is the study of moving charges and their accompanying magnetic fields. Consider, for instance, the soar wind ... Charged particles that fail to appreciably decelerate even as they pass the orbits of the planets suggests an electric field surrounding the Sun. Astrophysicists still cannot explain why those charged particles move as they do, and yet a simple electric field would explain it perfectly. This movement of charged particles is not a "wind", but rather an electric current. And that means that the bubble that surrounds the Sun (the heliosphere) is not some "bowshock", but rather a plasma cell -- like the ones we observe to surround charge accumulation in plasma physics laboratories.
But we don't even have to go that far really. Plasma is, by definition, electromagnetic. And it fills space. 99% of all visibe matter in space is matter in the plasma state. Not solids, liquids or gases. It's ionized gases that contain unbound electrons and protons. And we know from the laboratory that given less than 1% ionization, a gas will begin to ignore gravity and respond to electromagnetic fields. We see huge magnetic fields associated with galaxies and pervading the universe. The current galactic simulations never even predicted their existence. In fact, astronomers actually argued against the creation of radio telescopes back in the 80's on the basis that the dominant cosmology doesn't predict them. Well, they're there, guys. And in every OTHER discipline of science, magnetic fields are the result of electricity. The problem is that we're teaching the astrophysicists to not believe that electricity does anything of any importance in space. So, they don't even know how to recognize electriciy doing things of importance when they see evidence for it.
Go figure!
http://www.thunderbolts.info/
http://www.holoscience.com/ - inactive, on 05/22/2009, -0/+0Oh wow, that *is* retarded. It's supposed to be get your ass to mars. I fail.
- royalol, on 05/22/2009, -4/+4I think he's referring to the beginning of the movie Transformers
- jrburkh, on 05/22/2009, -1/+1I agree. Is this just poor choice of words... or is there more to it? Damn you, Norm, for making me wonder.
- MrLlama, on 05/22/2009, -1/+1[ ] Building a base on Mars
[x] Building a base on a small moon orbiting Mars - inactive, on 05/23/2009, -1/+1Nope. Just a committed cold warrior. We killed the vampire but never drove a stake through its heart.
- tekproxy, on 05/22/2009, -1/+1Cool picture with a bunch of super-cool looking white jump suits and futuristic stuff going on everywhere. But did anyone notice, in the bottom right of the picture, what appears to be a bucket? Anyone have any idea what the _bucket_ is for?
- norman619, on 05/22/2009, -1/+1Not my take it was their public take on what happened to Phobos 2.
- clutchdude, on 05/22/2009, -3/+3Is it time to get out the tinfoil hats?
- mulock, on 05/22/2009, -1/+0I so didn't see this coming! LOL got me!
- joshikus, on 05/22/2009, -2/+1Why can we not even go back to OUR moon?
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