ExoMars Probe Is Ready To Be Launched On Monday (cosmosup.com) 18
An anonymous reader writes: Run by the ESA and the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos, ExoMars is set to launch to Mars from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 14th with an orbiter-lander combo set. The orbiter, called the Trace Gas Orbiter, will look for trace gases in the Martian atmosphere. In its search for compounds made of carbon and hydrogen, and chemicals containing sulfur, the orbiter will be able to map the hydrogen on Mars up to a meter below the surface. The mission will create a map of Mar's water ice with ten times the resolution we have now. ExoMars 2016 will also include a small test lander known as Schiaparelli. The small lander will be testing the ESA's Mars landing technique, which will help when the ExoMars 2018 mission arrives with a more advanced lander and rover. The mission was originally scheduled to launch in January, but back in October the ESA discovered some issues with Schiaparelli's sensors used to monitor fuel pressure. Instead of risk the sensors leaking fuel and ruining the mission, they delayed the launch and removed the sensors altogether. The launch window of the mission stretches from March 14th through March 25th. And the launch will be live streamed from the ESA's website.
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"Space programs should concentrate on how to begin exploiting the resources of the planets in our solar system."
Which is exactly what this orbiter will do.
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No, but neither will the next social media platform, or app, or IoT-enabled toilet.
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Humanity can work on more than one problem at the same time.
Besides, what is the point of the everyday existence if one cannot act on wonder or curiosity in such grand scales!
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That knowledge won't help us mitigate climate change, stop terrorism, or solve problems like world hunger
Carl Sagan would have disagreed with you:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi
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We could solve world hunger and terrorism by eating terrorists!
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Posting on slashdot won't do any of those things either, and yet you are wasting resources doing it.
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I don't think a humanity that doesn't care about "useless" things like space exploration is worth saving...
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I don't think a humanity that doesn't care about "useless" things like space exploration is worth saving...
To put that another way, natural selection favors species that explore, colonize, invade, and use up resources. The endangered species of the world are the koalas that will eat nothing but eucalyptus leaves and lack the self-awareness it takes to even grow more eucalyptus trees.
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"We should be solving humanity's problems, not catering to the space exploration fetish that some of you have."
Had this principle been applied in earlier times, we would never have left the Olduvai Gorge. We still haven't solved some of the problems that plagued us there.
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That knowledge won't help us mitigate climate change,.....
It actually might. One of the problems studying climate is that we only have one planet. Exomars (and the larger endeavour of which it is part) might discover atmospheric processes at work on Mars which are important but hard to see on Earth because they are masked by something. Or something even more surprising.