Ares Express Issue 2
This week’s issue of Ares Express looks at the continuing Spirit and Opportunity saga, with stories on the Mars Express spacecraft, the Mars Society’s new policy paper in response to the Bush initiative and more.
Just like every other New Mars member and advocate of Mars exploration, practically all of my friends and relatives know that a sure-fire way of staarting a conversation with me is to talk about Mars. Lately, almost every other conversation involves someone mentioning Mars - despite the fact that I rarely bring it up!
Obviously I don’t see this as a problem. Rather, I’m glad that the rewards and challenges that the NASA Mars Exploration Rover team are facing are being watched and shared by people worldwide. As I write this now, Spirit has emerged from its bafflingly almost-silent state and has in fact been babbling debug and technical information back to Earth - a step in the right direction, if nothing else. What’s more, the Opportunity Rover has perfectly landed on Mars to join its twin, halfway across the planet. Clearly NASA’s new strategy of using airbags to cushion landings is an unqualified success.
The frantic activity on the New Mars forums has shown no sign of abating over the past week and I’m happy to welcome a whole raft of new members who are already joining in the discussions and debates. As usual, the focus of the talk on the forums is on Spirit and Opportunity…
This Week on the Forums
This week, (relatively) new member Rxke has arguably won the title of ‘Most Informed Poster’ from Josh Cryer by his unflagging coverage of practically every NASA PR conference and Mars news site on the Internet. Much of this week’s posts were given over to worried speculation on the fate of Spirit which has in the last day been replaced by celebrations over Opportunity’s landing in apparently a very fortuitous area of Mars. Chief scientist Steve Squyres said about the landing site, “This is the sweetest site I’ve ever seen.” Josh Cryer was a little more uninhibited in saying “HOLY CRAP! This is the greatest thing ever!” before enthusing about the layered rocks.
Clocking in at 227 posts, this topic on the two Mars rovers is well on its way to starting up its third thread (we cap the posts contained in a single thread at 300).
Even with all the excitement over NASA’s rovers and the disappointing loss of the Beagle 2 probe, our forum members haven’t forgotten the Mars Express spacecraft which has quietly been streaming enormous numbers of highly detailed and beautiful images of Mars back to Earth.
– Mars Society Responds to Bush Initiative
Jim Burk of MarsNews.com drew our attention to the new Mars Society policy paper responding to the new space exploration initiative by Bush. New Mars members differed in their opinions of the Society’s policy paper, with most showing guarded approval. I have to confess that I haven’t read the paper yet (and there is no excuse!) but from what little I know of it, it seems to be a pragmatic approach based on the fact that Bush’s initiative may be the best - and the only - chance of getting to Mars any time soon.
This topic on the Sun was started by Cindy (ecrasez_l_infame), our most prolific poster, and while it has not garnered as many replies as other threads, it is full of fascinating information, links and insights into the workings of our Sun.
In Free Chat, members have been talking about what they think will be happening in this year. Somewhat predictably, many of the posts are about who the next US President will be, but there’s a lot of other interesting speculation on who will win the X-Prize (Burt Rutan is a clear favourite of New Mars) and NASA’s new direction.
As always, this is only a selection of the most popular or interesting threads on the forums - please browse the forums to see many more posts!
Forum News
There’s very little to report about the forum administration this week - a couple of bugs have surfaced, none of which are particularly significant. Also, I am musing about switching the forum’s database to another type, or even switching forum software completely. It’s highly unlikely I will do anything about this any time soon though.
Mars Links
The Martian Soil weblog has more links and stories about Mars than I could ever conceive writing, so it’s a great place for any Mars exploration fan to visit. MarsNews.com is another similarly comprehensive weblog.
Signing Off
More of the same next week - coverage of Spirit and Opportunity will continue. If you’d like your website or forum thread featured on next week’s issue, just reply in the Ares Express Issue 3 thread on the forums or add a comment to this story below.
Filed under: Editorials on January 25th, 2004
As usual, very charming coverage. Glad you made the time for it. :D
is water is present on mars