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Mars

From today on Mars won't be any longer just the candy that you buy when urgently in need for chocolate -and no Cote d'or nearby-
No, from today on Mars will be a planet that we know.
A planet that looks pretty dusty, but according to scientists once had water.
And ice.

Curious to hear about their discoveries.

Maybe there was once life there...

Nice extract from an article to think about:

I don't know how many people really and truly understand this, but we live in the year 2004. That is almost 40 years since the time of the design and production of the Apollo Command/Service Module and Lunar Excursion Module. When our forefathers went to the Moon in the dawn of the space age, it was with the computer equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. It is truly mind boggling to the modern computer engineer that we were able to go to the Moon with the hardware and software developed from scratch back then.

This is not to disparage but to honor those who made Apollo happen because in doing it, and in the aftermath of that program, many of those people went on to be a part of the revolution exemplified by Silicon Valley (my meaning here encompasses the whole American semiconductor and computer industry). Fast forward forty years and it looks like the engineering and technology from Silicon Valley has what it takes to make this new space era happen.

In 1969 the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) sported the most advanced and compact computer built up to that time. It had 16k of RAM and a keyboard to type commands and instructions in machine code in real time. It had a small monitor to display data. It could control the navigation and flight of the LEM using radar data as well as transfer that telemetry in real time back to NASA on the Earth. It had a processing speed of more than a hundred thousand instructions per second. It was a remarkable computer in every respect. However... compared to now, it was so primitive!

Posted on January 27, 2004
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