January 24, 2004

John Schutkeker wrote:

Thomas Lee Elifritz wrote in
:

With critical anomalies, daring and innovation are requirements. Of
course, no lives are at stake here.

I'm not sure that any daring is required. Either the boot-up sequence can
recieve a re-program command, before it checks for electrical faults, or it
can't. In the first case it can be fixed by bypassing the mirror's fault
check subroutine, and in the second case it can't, making it dead, dead,
dead.

Daring always helps in exploration and science, otherwise it's just
incremental, and we have plenty of that to go around. What we want are
breakthroughs. As an example, Mars Express has a penetrating radar, that should
help settle a few outstanding issues. I'm sick and tired of this White Mars
crap. Mars was/is glaciated with very impure glacial plates, that aren't
dynamic in the ordinary terrestrial sort of way. That's fairly obvious from the
imagery, regardless of what Squyres has to say about how science works. That
makes Mars a whole different kind of beast. We desperately need to get some
spectroscopy on some of the oddball smaller bits of rock.

Another example, if it was a power conditioning short (which it isn't)
rendering most of the motors inoperative, it would be nice to at least downlink
the Adirondack spectroscopy results before the thing dies. I haven't seen
today's press conference, but apparently they will be able to do some memory
workarounds, and most of the power subsystems seem intact.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net