Live data from Hacker News

Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

gizmodo.com

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#21
post #2

[flagged]

I assume you're downvoted for pedantry (understandable) but it is a real pattern. Whenever it's a space topic it's always "we" or "Japan" or "America". Nobody is so vague on other topics. I suspect it's a throwback to the Cold War space race when the major players did flights in a geopolitical context. If the institute's name is very long, like here, maybe "Scientists detected ..." or "Researchers ..."

> Whenever it's a space topic

It relates "us" to "earthlings". We, as in "humans", live on Earth. Space is "outside". We humans look outside to space and discover things there.

I feel it's more that sense of making clear that it's "us", humans, doing the discovery vs some other species or entity out there.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#23
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you reject the use of "we" for any group that doesn't include you?

I assume it is essentially more about if it includes the author of the article. In the specific case, the author is a journalist not a scientist part of the actual group that did the work, so their "we" seems to forcingly include everybody in the planet, thus also OP here. I dont think OP would have an issue if one of the scientists in this case used "we".

Ah good shout, I was assuming the author of the article was also on the team of the discovery, but it's Gizmodo, so I shouldn't have thought that.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#24
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you reject the use of "we" for any group that doesn't include you?

It's specially annoying when people use it to latch on to achievements they had no part in. Like Americans today going "We stopped Hitler" etc.

Ah, in that sense yeah, I also feel similarly. I thought that the article was written by someone on the discovering team, hence my confusion.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#25

What blows my mind is that we had not before. I would think that with all that dust flying around it's got to be pretty common. And we have satellites orbiting Mars for decades and apparently we didn't see any.

...perhaps resolution and FPS provided by these orbital cameras are not exactly what one would expect.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#26
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you reject the use of "we" for any group that doesn't include you?

It's specially annoying when people use it to latch on to achievements they had no part in. Like Americans today going "We stopped Hitler" etc.

For this reason I've never understood the emotion "pride" when applied to anything you didn't personally do.

For example pride in getting a bug fixed, or running a personal record lap, makes perfect sense. But "proud to be an American," or "proud of our troops," "proud of some sports team," I just don't get it.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#27

This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars. The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky t…

> The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky to use, so that was never activated. And on all the rovers since then a microphone wasn't deemed important enough compared to all the other possible payloads

There was exactly one Mars rover, Curiosity, between 2008 and Percy.

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#28

This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars. The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky t…

How does this work in practice. If a microphone is up there, it's constantly listening for things right?

So how do humans here on Earth go over it to know if a sound was picked up knowing there's hours of recording?

Is it that the whole system is programmed to show a spike when sound is captured?

Re: Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars

#30
post #28

This discovery is thanks to Perseverance having microphones. It's crazy to think about that 2021 was the first time we had working microphones on Mars. The first Mars Microphone was originally supposed to land in 1999 on the Polar Lander, but that one didn't survive the landing. The next was in 2008 on Phoenix 's Mars Descent Imager, but in integration testing a bug was discovered that made the Descent Imager risky t…

How does this work in practice. If a microphone is up there, it's constantly listening for things right? So how do humans here on Earth go over it to know if a sound was picked up knowing there's hours of recording? Is it that the whole system is programmed to show a spike when sound is captured?

Listening to hours of recording doesn't even seem like a lot considering this is the only microphone we have on another planet. You would need like 4 people doing this full time, which is a drop in the bucket for a project on this scale.

Of course this is not how it's done and almost all of the recording will just be wind or noise from the rover itself, which can easily be filtered out.

Post reply on HN