It finally happend that I watched M2M on the telly. Beating an already dead horse, here are a few things I haven't seen in Phil's review or some threads here.

When they scanned the base camp from that probe heading to Saturn, the camp was located nearby the middle part of the Vallis Marineris, I guess around 10S/90W. Later, it was said, the face in Cydonia is just 16km away. But this is around 40N/10W, that must be several hundred kilometers away.

This scene also uses some impossible capabilities of this probe.

Also, when the one astronaut builds this DNA from his M&Ms, not only the spinning would be impossible. Inside a spacecraft much care is taken into ventilation because there is no convective movement of the air. So we should expect an airflow everywhere, taking this model, whose construction surely would take lots of time, away with it. If no airflow would be there, the guy building it may have established a "bubble" of air with a high carbon dioxide level around him, so this would have given him some headache.

Depressurization of the craft was much too quick following the hull puncture, compared with the size of the punctures. During Apollo, it often took surprisingly long time to depressurize the LM through the dump valves. And every spacecraft has surge tanks to provide a much higher oxygen flow in case of a puncture.

This leads to the last point, the trouble with the computer restart. Okay, things have changed since Apollo, whose computers you could switch off and on and they simply continued with the next instruction in their program. We know the troubles in the ISS. But still, restarting the computers surely should be possible as the normal case, not the highly complex, nearly impossible thing. That would be very, very bad design. Such things have to be designed to fail gracefully.

Harald

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kucharek on 2003-03-19 04:44 ]</font>