WOW that's amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing. It makes it all worthwhile. And straight from the horse's mouth via The Guardian, so who can argue with that? Not moi. "“Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,” said Bruce Banerdt, the InSight principal investigator at Nasa’s lab in Pasadena, California. “But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/07/sounds-of-mars-wind-captured-by-nasas-insight-lander 'an unplanned treat'? Anything to big it up.
From the earliest moon launch coverage I heard on a little transistor radio, to watching video from the moon on an almost round black and white CRT, to watching live streams of SpaceX Falcon launches on YouTube, I still get chills of wonder down my spine that we can not only have grand visions but can actually figure out how to work together to achieve them. Yes, hearing the wind on Mars may seem a trivial result to some, but consider the context. We built a little electronics box, shot it off our planet and exactly hit a moving, rotating target 300,000,000 miles away (483,000,000 Km), established a deep space communications network, and are now continuously receiving audio, video and telemetry data from the surface of another planet in our solar system 140,000,000 miles away (225,000,000 Km). To me that’s a stunning accomplishment. The more you know about computers, radios and engineering, the more you understand and appreciate that there are so many links in the technical chain that have to work to be able to do this. After wading through a steady stream of examples of human failure, apathy and stupidity presented as news in the media, this kind of achievement is one of my few sources of hope that if we humans actually decide to roll up our sleeves and do it, we can develop real solutions for today’s complex and pressing problems of climate change, clean energy, agriculture, automation displacement, health care, immigration and exponential population growth. Cheers!
LOL. It's not even "wind noise". It's the solar panels rattling. It's a sound that wouldn't exist, if the lander wasn't there.
As you are new here I think it best to explain Cereberus before you find it out the hard way and leave disappointed. This member is something of a court jester here....perhaps the offspring of a Troll and Tweedle Dum, and its posts should be considered accordingly. Mind you it is harmless and the entertainment value is exceptional.
Beautiful. I love it. I'm one who watched the first moon landing in Bangkok Thailand. Dreams were really big then. I imagined a moon base by 1980 and from there on to Mars NLT 1990. That would be the first man on Mars. Not just a lander, but an actual manned landing ala, just like the moon. It almost seems we've been spinning our wheels between 1969 and now. Back then with the cold war, it was important to beat the Russians to the moon. We did and established our dominance in space. Today, I wonder if the Chinese won't be the first ones to set foot on Mars.
Did we though? Now you're talking - stuff which actually affects all our lives, and could bring about our extinction if we don't practice real science to resolve them - especially (to use your words) the world's exponential population growth, which apart from militant Islam is our biggest threat. So let's stop making effing space rockets, and funding bloody 'space science' and concentrate our wealth and intelligence on addressing them?
lol The point is, how long do you have to sit and listen to 'wind noise' before you get fed up with it? It's even less interesting than watching the proverbial pain dry?
Oh no, 'we' mustn't let them dang'd *****s and Russkies set foot on Mars before 'us' . . . anything but that!
You quoted the distances involved to a poster who believes that the universe is less than a billion miles across
