DeeJay wrote:
I am "highjacking" this post because I'd like to post this link to a Yahoo article from today on Curiosity which was accompanied by a very curious photograph (to me).
Does NASA actually send up high-tech photographic equipment into space with its entrails opened to Martian dust particles? Not to mention all the heat of blast off, friction, cold and whatever I can't even imagine. Look at all the wires and the internal nuts and bolts!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/ ... t-plastic/
This is extremely strange, and I'm about to say something that's counter-intuitive. What I'm seeing is the application of very old-school style electronic wiring loom assembly techniques. There looks to be waxed-cotton binding cord hand-tied around the cabling....this is extremely retro. The apparent cable insulation reminds me of aerospace standards circa 1980, it looks like a combination of kapton and teflon, feeding servos. This would never usually be visible: even in a prototype production, some form of physical cowling would be provided- and if it was going have to contend with heat/cold/dust/some kind of weather/drops, the whole concept of it being left revealed is utter madness. And what the blazes is that platted danish pastry of cabling in the bottom-left??
Precisely. There's an inexplicable lack of the protective carbon fibre panels you'd expect to be there.DeeJay wrote:I sent this to a friend who said that the reason NASA didn't worry about the "aesthetics" of the thing, is that all the wiring is secure and that their main worry is weight. Well. I'm not an engineer but if I were going out dune bashing, which I have done many times, I surely would protect my prized camera from sand and sun. Even airlines are worried about weight and yet they protect their in-flight meals with light-weight metallic coverings.
Indeed. And why did they come up with all this content.....DeeJay wrote:Perhaps you may think this trivial but I cannot look at the picture with this article and believe that it is real, i.e. realtime on Mars.
What...this is what we see in the yellow circle, as a semi-micrograph??Curiosity Rover Identifies Mysterious Bright Object As Plastic wrote:NASA’s Curiosity rover took time out of its busy scooping and vibrating schedule on Oct. 9 to inspect a mysterious bright object that it spotted in the sand near its wheels the day before. Engineers have identified the bright bit as “shred of plastic material, likely benign.”
“Yeah so last night was crazy. When we spotted the object near the rover, we had to quickly come up with a totally new plan,” tweeted Keri Bean, a meteorologist on the rover team, on Oct. 8.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wired ... osity.jpeg
Why has the surface of Mars now assumed the consistency of what looks like painted cement rendering?? What geological process has produced such tiny rounded/spaced-out pebbles?