Discussion on:

NASA's rover, Curiosity, successfully lands on Mars

I'd hate to be a woman named Gail Crater, right about now.

I am so proud to hear our engineers at NASA made a safe landing on Mars. I hope the mission is a complete success

This is amazing news. This landing was a technical difficulty of at least...a 20. And it went off flawlessly (or flawlessly enough!)

What a tremendous feat!! Congratulations NASA

CONGRATULATIONS .ANOTHER GREAT SUCCESS BY NASA.WE WILL SEE SOMETHING NEW EXPLORATION THROUGH CURIOSITY ROVER AT OUR PLANET. NASA 'S engineers made a safe landing on MarsThe car-sized rover carries 10 science instruments whose total mass is 15 times those of the science instruments on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030s, and todays landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal.(AS MENTIONED IN NEWS) - BY RKS

JJW9, Obama is a liar and a BUMB!!

Are you talking about the same President Obama who defunded and ended NASA? The current Mars Rover mission is the last one we will have at least until he is out of office. The President has NO vision for NASA or space or Mars for the forseeable future, much less 15 years from now!

Congratulations to NASA & the contractors. I for 1, celebrate our robotic explorers.

I congatulate everyone who was conected with the sucess of this program and they certainly should celebrate. Obama had very little if anything to do with this milestone. I don't believe a socialist should be given credit.

Sincerely, this is a remarkable accomplishment and Congratulations to all.

Come on, $2.5 Billion Dollars to explore a planet 8 months away from earth.
I believe the money would be well spent advancing technology to protect our own natural resources and life here on earth vs. looking for life elsewhere.
For the first time in history did anyone notice that Greenlands Ice cap is gone; we should have sent the rover there to look for life.
Wont be long before we can get the same dust bowl photos here on earth.

Read the articles instead of just the headlines.

Do a search on Smart planet. type in "Blink, its gone: Greenlands surface ice melted two weeks ago"

...which will tell you that this happens roughly every 150 years, and then the ice comes back.

NASA glaciologist Lora Koenig notes that Greenland experiences such melting events, About once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time.

John, you are right and kbartleson is wrong in that it was only the surface layer of an ice sheet over 2 km thick that melted. But saying the cycle of these melts is 150 years is kind of misleading. The gap between the 1889 event and the one prior to it was 700 years. These surface melt events were concentrated in the first half of the Holocene and have been relatively rare during the last 1000 years. This graph:

http://www.gisp2.sr.unh.edu/DATA/alley1.html

shows there have been only 6 events in the last 2000 years, an average of every 300 years and 3 of the events were concentrated during the MWP. The frequency of the events in the early Holocene is probably due to orbital variations that don't exist today.

...but the fact remains that it is an observed cycle. At some point it melts, and at some point it accumulates.

that you didn't come up with the 150 year figure but repeating it is still misleading. Did you check out the graph I cited? Notice that the Greenland surface melt events are concentrated in the period from 4,000 to 8,000 years ago and particularly from 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Also not in the graph below the main one how much higher July insolation was back then.