"By Amanda Beck

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) June 8, 2008 - Dirt that the Phoenix Mars Lander scooped recently from the planet's surface may be too clumpy to be analyzed by the machine's onboard system, NASA reported on Saturday."

Dear NASA:

Cut the bottom off a yogurt cup. Take a dissecting needle and ...

Haha that is hilarious, thanks for the laugh.

Actually, I've had dealings with NASA before.

<brag>
The satellite-borne MODIS instrument was launched into earth orbit in late 1999. I headed up a team that wrote the initial image processing software, which is still in use today. We won the NASA Space Act Award in 2001 for this work, for which I'm justly proud.
</brag>

Zing™

If you worked for NASA, you would call it Polyvinyl Chloride specimen redirection and containment vessel, then agitate with a precision billet milled high carbon probe using concentrically overlapping circles. Then charge them $100K for a white yogurt cup and needle.

RapidCoffee wrote:Actually, I've had dealings with NASA before.

<brag>
The satellite-borne MODIS instrument was launched into earth orbit in late 1999. I headed up a team that wrote the initial image processing software, which is still in use today. We won the NASA Space Act Award in 2001 for this work, for which I'm justly proud.
</brag>

Actually, my office is in Pasadena, and there are senior JPL people in my Rotary Club. I'll suggest the yogurt cup to them (giving you full credit, of course).

Marshall wrote:Actually, my office is in Pasadena, and there are senior JPL people in my Rotary Club. I'll suggest the yogurt cup to them (giving you full credit, of course).

Make it the, uh...

cannonfodder wrote:If you worked for NASA, you would call it Polyvinyl Chloride specimen redirection and containment vessel, then agitate with a precision billet milled high carbon probe using concentrically overlapping circles. Then charge them $100K for a white yogurt cup and needle.

... what Dave said. We can split the proceeds three ways.

P.S. - I've worked with JPL before, on an interferometric synthetic aperture radar project back in the 90's. We did some pretty cool 3-D mapping work. But that's enough rocket science for a Sunday...

You guys are too funny, thanks, I needed a laugh today.

cannonfodder wrote:If you worked for NASA, you would call it Polyvinyl Chloride specimen redirection and containment vessel, then agitate with a precision billet milled high carbon probe using concentrically overlapping circles. Then charge them $100K for a white yogurt cup and needle.

This is why I read every post of Dave's, no matter what my level of interest in the thread.

RapidCoffee wrote:... what Dave said. We can split the proceeds three ways.

P.S. - I've worked with JPL before, on an interferometric synthetic aperture radar project back in the 90's. We did some pretty cool 3-D mapping work. But that's enough rocket science for a Sunday...

I launched a rocket once in the back field.

One of my uncles worked for NASA in Florida, the other was a chief engineer for Bowing, worked on one of those funny black plains.


At least they did not calculate their decent in metric and then punch in the numbers as feet, they did that once.