Author Topic: ExoMars faces uncertain future  (Read 8532 times)

Offline Dalhousie

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Re: ExoMars faces uncertain future
« Reply #20 on: 01/08/2013 11:08 pm »
Everyone needs a hobby, me, I am a party time resurrectionist.

Beats my hobby. My hobby is beating my head against the wall. The wall always wins.

But you feel so good afterwards, right? :-)
Apologies in advance for any lack of civility - it's unintended

Offline Dalhousie

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Re: ExoMars faces uncertain future
« Reply #21 on: 01/08/2013 11:11 pm »
Had to laugh at the spokesperson from Astrium on Stargazing Live on the BBC tonight bigging up the ExoMars rover stating that it will be better than Curiosity in some aspects such as its automatous driving ability and its drill.

ExoMars drill has always been designed to go much deeper than those on MSL. 
Apologies in advance for any lack of civility - it's unintended

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ExoMars faces uncertain future
« Reply #22 on: 01/09/2013 03:05 am »
Everyone needs a hobby, me, I am a party time resurrectionist.

Beats my hobby. My hobby is beating my head against the wall. The wall always wins.

But you feel so good afterwards, right? :-)

Or at least light-headed.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: ExoMars faces uncertain future
« Reply #23 on: 01/09/2013 03:22 am »
Had to laugh at the spokesperson from Astrium on Stargazing Live on the BBC tonight bigging up the ExoMars rover stating that it will be better than Curiosity in some aspects such as its automatous driving ability and its drill.

Well to be fair it's true, not surprising since it's newer technology that they've had plenty of time to work on.

All things considered, it's not an unreasonable comment.

My guess is that the guy was asked "Will your rover be better than Curiosity?" and he said "We will have things that Curiosity doesn't have, like autonomous navigation and a drill." And that might be true.

But you cannot expect the guy to say "The Americans have been doing this since 1997 and have launched four rovers. We have a long way to go to equal them."

But what he _could_ say, which would be totally accurate, is something like: "It's not about being better than the Americans. We're all doing this for the same reason. We're going to learn from them, and we're going to use their spacecraft, some of them equipped with European instruments, to pick a good landing site, just as they used data that we supplied them to pick their landing sites. And we're going to perform great science and I'm sure that they are going to use our science so that we all together can learn more about Mars and possibly the existence of life elsewhere in the solar system." That's the way to spin it.

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