Ah yes, spending millions on space is better than holding an Olympics?

Probably another film set journey?     Why is there a hand RHS doing the "devils horns", rock on.

Actually I think it is amazing. Maybe the older rocks from the bottom of the crater will give some more insight to the origins of Mars and by implication Earth.

The first view of Gale's crater is scary !

Sorry Stu... (Must be itching...)

Jokes apart, I find this -- and space exploration in general for that matter -- amazing. The autopiloted descent during the "seven minutes of terror" ending with the sky crane dance is just pure science-fiction ! And I'm hoping to see the planned experiments lead to formidable revelations.

And hopefully the show will last, since the guys at NASA seem to have learned something from the rover twins: as The Register brilliantly puts it, [As] the parts are all designed to last three times their expected working lifespan, Curiosity could be rolling for years to come.

Fortunately, a better logic was used for programming the thingy...

Drive safely C. Hope you'll find something to drink !

Maurice

What a complete waste of money .. for a dreary picture. The pinnacle of human folly to waste all those funds on something only two or three people have the slightest interest in. Is this a plot by a big corporate to open supermarkets on Mars or a plan to outsource the jobs we fought so hard for to the red planet? 

Hope none of my hard earned cash was wasted on this plaything for the rich. 

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids; in fact it's cold as hell. 

True that. A higher res image.

Ah that's better - now I can see it I withdraw my earlier rant and say it is worth every penny. 

TBH - I quite like the idea of going to Mars  - Mars 2020 for the Olympics after Rio? 

Pertinent. We might have to, one day.

That's why we need people with foresight and a passion for exploration like that bloke Columbus.

Now; £11bn to prove that someone can run very slightly faster than someone else. That's what I call a waste of money.

Go Curiosity! Enjoy your visit.

John.

I don't really think either are a waste of money, but I do think the London 2012 Olympics is the greatest show I've ever been privileged to see. I can't believe how lucky I am to have attend an event and to be going to see two more. I never I thought I'd live to see something as wonderful this and when I put my name down for some tickets it was more in hope than expectation. 

What. imho, is a waste of money is spending all that money on destruction and missiles and bombs to low people up. However some folk seem hell bent on doing such things. I'd much sooner we competed in and watched sport (admittedly my number 1 interest in life), created and enjoyed music (probably my number 2 interest in life) and made the world a better place for everybody. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. 

So hats off to Mars, it helps us work, rest and play. 

[Though I do detect a bit of corporate sponsorship sneaking in as the planet in question is named after a confectionary, whereas the planet the other side of the earth is named after a track from Shocking Blue At Home] 

And well done to our equestrian team ... (just thought I'd sneak that in while I was feeling so happy). 

All the best, Guy 

(on cloud 18)

Pasadena Control: It's looking good. It's going good. We're getting great pictures here at NASA Control, Pasadena. The landing-craft touched down on Mars 28 kilometers from the aim-point. We're looking at a remarkable landscape, littered with different kinds of rocks - red, purple... How 'bout that, Bermuda?
Bermuda Control: Fantastic! Look at the dune-field.
Pasadena Control: Hey, wait. I'm getting a no-go signal. Now I'm losing one of the craft. Hey, Bermuda, you getting it?
Bermuda Control: No, I lost contact. There's a lot of dust blowing up there.
Pasadena Control: Now I've lost the second craft. We got problems.
Bermuda Control: All contact lost, Pasadena. Maybe the antenna's...
Pasadena Control: What's that flare? See it? A green flare, coming from Mars, kind of a green mist behind it. It's getting closer. You see it, Bermuda? Come in, Bermuda! Houston, come in! What's going on? Tracking station 43, Canberra, come in, Canberra! Tracking station 63, can you hear me, Madrid? Can anybody hear me? Come in, come in...

Hope the Mars Rover has insurance, road tax, and MOT.

Those Martian traffic wardens are heartless, and they don't have heads either.

At least it will easily find a parking space.

Debs

This a potentially splendid thread spoiled somewhat by people with fatuous agendas to push. It's not a zero sum game.

It's actually possible to spend on both. And both are worth spending money on (or investing in) because they are both manifestations of human achievement - different but essentially the same.

Just scrap expensive vanity projects (in the UK these would include Trident, huge publicly-funded IT systems which never work, HS2 etc), bailing out failed private corporations and clamp down on tax dodgers and offshore tax havens, and there would be more than enough money.

I'm in general agreement with what you say, but I'm not so sure they're essentially the same. Competition (like in the olympics) is relative a achievement. Why do we think Phelps is fast? Because he's faster than the others. Why is the Mars Rover special? Because it is one of the most complex things that we, as a species, have ever done. It is great in an all-time and absolute sense. Not just better that what someone else can do. There's also no cheating and no gamesmanship in space. No judging either - you succeed or you don't.

The Mars Rover is a win-win. To win a gold medal at the olympics, someone else has to lose.

Usain Bolt is the fastest man on earth. He once ran 100m in 9.58 secs. That is a great achievement. It is worth celebrating that, not the fact that he beat 7 or 8 people to do it. It is just an incredible feat. 9.58 seconds - just think. Just think about the reaction time needed to get anywhere near that time. Think of the mental and physical strength needed for such a feat.

Similarly, the LHC, the most complex machine ever built, is an incredible achievement. So is the Curiosity project, the Cassini/Huygens project (amazing that we could land a probe on a body over 1.2 billion miles away) and Voyager 2 - which taught us more about the outer Solar System in 12 short years than the entirety of human history

Perhaps the human race's greatest technological achievement in this field - certainly the one that captured the world's imagination, at least for a while - was the manned Moon landing programme. And what was that borne out of? A desire to beat the Russians. The Russkies lost, the Yanks won. Does that make the achievement on men walking on the moon any less remarkable? It didn't really matter why it was done. It was done.

Bolt or Curiosity? It's all human achievement. One might be notionally "better" or "bigger" than the other in a particular individual's view, but they are both worth celebrating, and neither is worthy of being denigrated.

Agree.

The "space race" is interesting to contemplate. The competition aspect was indeed what captured the public's imagination, but so was the human exploration aspect. Had Kennedy said that the goal was to land a fully functioning, cutting edge science probe on the moon before the decade was out, it would have had less impact. But it could be argued that the competition aspect also caused misguided policy. Less was learnt from a manned lunar program than would have been learnt from the same investment in unmanned exploration; but the the "manning", as well as the competition with the Russians was what made the funding politically acceptable. Scientifically and economically efficient? I'm not so sure. Game-changing and inspirational? - yep. But public interest died down pretty quickly.

Relative success (winning a race, either space or running) and absolute success (a new world record or cutting edge scientific achievement) are different. Both have the capacity to inspire, but only the latter is true advancement.

Why some people feel the need to make fun of such immense achievements I have no idea but here is a wonderful photo from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter.

Yes, that shot is amazing.

A sense of humour will not be tolerated!!!

You seem to misunderstand. It wasn't the "race" (or "competition") bit that captured the world's imagination (although it might have done for some members of the US population), it was doing something that men have dreamed of for thousands of years - visiting the moon. 

The race bit is only important in so far as it created the political will to make the landings happen. True, comparatively little was learned from the manned moon landings (and they were unsustainably expensive) but that wasn't really the point. It was to do the impossible. And we did it!

The reason why it failed to hold onto the imagination was that once the obstacles were overcome and it was done, it got boring very quickly for most people (except for a very passionate minority) - and "most people" were the ones paying for it. The moon landings could only have been planned and executed in the 1960s, an essentially optimistic decade with a belief in progress. By the time the 1970s - a more troubled, more complex, inward-looking and deeply pessimistic decade, particularly for America - came along, the idea of putting men on the moon was deeply unfashionable.

The moon landings remain one of the two or three greatest achievements - technological or otherwise - of our species, and will always be so. They are, in your parlance, an "absolute" success rather than a "relative" one, even if they were a dead end in some ways.

We should also remember the great astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, who died today.

Click here

I think I do understand. We're not really disagreeing on anything here.

Our (previously) very own DrBri has just commented on an old episode of QI that exploration led to the MRI scanner. So there.

Where's my dead (or is he?) cat?

Schrödinger

No issue with my sense of humour whatsoever. The issue is that I see no humour in some of the silly comments that were made, just sneering for the sake of it. Sadly it's so typical of a continuingly dumbed down world.