Word: lander
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Recently, NASA released a report claiming the robotic arm on its Mars Polar Lander was a success. Last week F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., chairman of the House Committee on Science, ridiculed the report, pointing out that the whole contraption crashed on the red planet before the robotic arm was ever deployed. Was NASA trying to pull a fast...
...Technically, no. Long before the crash, NASA chose specific projects to include in its annual report. As luck would have it, the only part of the lander mission they chose to rate was the robotic arm, and when they tested it on earth, it worked like a charm. If you lost a $165 million lander because of a missing line of computer code, wouldn't you try to accentuate the positive...
...foundation-funded laboratories, with its robotic machinery knocking off 12,000 units every minute, has decoded another billion letters. That puts the group two-thirds of the way toward its goal of wrapping up the entire genome of 3 billion letters. "We're on the back nine," crowed Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead/M.I.T. Center for Genome Research. "The race is over. It's done...
...firms seek protection for agents they are hoping to develop from the newly emerging genetic blueprint. With the announcement last week by Collins' team, though, these concerns are subsiding because Collins has been making the data public as he goes by putting it on the Internet every day. Says Lander: "Now there is no doubt that a genome will be freely available...
...science writer Michael Lemonick says the failed December mission has suffered an unfair level of scrutiny by being linked to its sister mission, the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was lost because one of its programmers used inches instead of centimeters. Lemonick points out that the Martian region the Polar Lander touched down on has very few canyons, so NASA was right to expect a smooth landing. "Until the day when we can survey the entire planet with incredibly high precision, which is probably 100 years away, you can't control exactly where you're going to land," says Lemonick...