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21104-Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover
LegoRocco
Member Posts: 100
New CUUSOO set announced:
blog.lego.cuusoo.com
Best part is, LEGO Portal is still possible!
blog.lego.cuusoo.com
Best part is, LEGO Portal is still possible!
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Comments
I can't see people playing with that. And for display... meh, unless they give you a test chamber to build, which is actually pretty dull by itself, and not a good display piece.
Curiosity is still making headlines with its discoveries and its not even made it to its prime target yet. It's predecessor Oppotunity is still making the news with its work way after its primary mission has ended. Whilst I'm not saying that its going to be the top story on the news very often (unless conclsive proof of life on Mars is found) for people interested in the science and the exploration this is a very interesting project.
Whilst I enjoy all of the space themes that have come out over the years I think there is plenty of room for LEGO projects like this one, sometimes science fact is just as fantastic as science fiction.
If story behind this rover could help to inspire just one child to become an explorer, scientist, engineer or similar than it will have accomplished much more than its primary mission. If a LEGO set helps to inspire that as well then bravo.
I also voted for the USC Sandcrawler although I did not seriously think it would enter production, 10144 is on permanent display in my study and I'm afraid I'm not familiar on Portals.
So I'll be buying a rover, putting it next to Hayabusa and the Shuttle Adventure.
I've just seen this for the first time, and having just gone to the Space Centre in Houston, I love this rover set. Also awesome is the descent stage and sky crane.
Has anyone BLed these models? If so, would you mind letting me know what I price range I could expect if I purchased all the parts from BrickLink? I'm not certain, but it looks as though all three models by @Perijove use interesting and possibly rare-ish (therefore expensive) parts. I'd love to know a ball-park before I start the tedious process of sourcing all the parts on BL.
Thanks!
BTW, @Perijove, these are really awesome models, and at a great scale for display + playability. Nice work, mate, and congrats on the Cuusoo project!
The rarest part in my model is probably the 42446 minifig neck bracket, in white. It only appeared in an older X-Wing set #4502. The part used to be a little cheaper, until I posted my instructions. You'll notice that the model shown in the CUUSOO announcement video used grey brackets instead of white. As they work on designing the final model, they'll probably make more in the correct color or come up with an alternate solution. Some of the dark orange bricks in the baseplate are less common, but are not critical to the rover and you can just create your own unique landscape.
In response to some of the other comments, while there are a lot of space sets out there, they have mostly been based on science fiction. The only recent sets based on real spacecraft have been #10231 / #10213 Shuttle Expedition/Adventure and #21101 Hayabusa. The real shuttles (while awesome) have been retired for a while and the Hayabusa mission ended three years ago, but LEGO still saw fit to produce sets for them and I'm glad they did
Before that, was the Discovery theme, in 2003, which was ten years ago. There are kids today in LEGO's target age group who weren't even born when these awesome sets came out. I wanted to show that real spacecraft can be just as cool as those in science fiction. Of course, this model won't appeal to everybody, but I'm sure it will inspire a few young future scientists and engineers, which was my goal.
As LEGO knows that most people may like 'actual' space stuff like probes and rovers I'm not surprised they green lit it. It seems Cuusoo wants one off non-minifig sets that are neat but are forgotten about as quick...
They are Meh to most of us because they are not in the traditional fold of what we are used to, but could very well be bought by a parent or a child for educational purposes..
I am more surprised the BTTF Deloren is being made more than any of these 'scientific' models
The Space sets a couple years back did not have NASA branding, and the partnership with NASA was primarily a promotional/educational partnership, with NASA using the LEGO brand to educate kids about space exploration and LEGO tying in their LEGO Space web content with educational content generated by NASA.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the 2003 Discovery sets and own them all (I also love pretty much anything else space-related that LEGO releases); if LEGO decided on a 10-year update of the Discovery sets then that'd be fine by me - I'm sure I'd buy those too. My beef is that 3 of the 5 confirmed Cuusoo slots so far (Shinkai, Hayabusa and now Curiosity) are now filled with 'safe' choices which LEGO might be expected to have released themselves. That doesn't sound like the Cuusoo brief to me, unless "Make a safe suggestion that we might have released ourselves on another day" has become the new Cuusoo mantra....
Don't forget that it's not yet a year into its mission, which has already been extended indefinitely from the original two-year plan. There's plenty more news to come from it, so don't worry about that!
In the case of the Sandcrawler, the size and likely pricepoint would just have easily killed this prospect, even if LucasFilm said yes to it. In order to hit a size and pricepoint that would be practical, LEGO would have to shrink the model down to near the size of the original 10144. At that point, everyone hates it because it isn't even close to what they voted for.
My thoughts.... Do they make these dates up??
How in the world can they date a piece of rock on Mars like that? And how accurate is that? Is that to within a billion years?
Just all came across as complete sensationalist rubbish in the article.
MARS may have been HABITABLE, possibly, but we don't really know.
"This clay proves there was water on Mars once AND, it was drinkable!" What!?!
Seriously, so not only are the rocks 4 billion, give or take a billion, years old, but the water which there is none of now, you can tell was drinkable...
Maybe I am not reading the right articles and there is some scientific basis for these claims, but so much of what is reaching the general public seems like it is either pre-faced with 'suggesting', 'potentially', 'could have', etc.. leading me to believe it is just to make headlines.
As others have said, I have a feeling that portals is being kept over to excuse neither of the next batch going forward. The mascot is awful (and should be used to quash any idea that just because something gets to 10,000 makes it a desirable product) and the space troopers thing is too close to galaxy squad so surely TLG won't take that one. Presumably TLG are looking at the minecraft numbers and thinking that Portal could follow suit, if they can do/get around the custom parts and sort out a licence.
For example, we know the rough age of the Earth because of techniques such as carbon dating and measurements of radioactive decay. (basically, every radioactive element decays into simpler elements over a period of time. that period of time is different for each element, is known and is consistent. The time taken for half of the sample to decay is known as the half-life. So if you know how much of the element you have, what the half-life is, and a few other factors, you can work out roughly how long it's been there for).
We can extrapolate the age of the Earth to Mars and the other planets (and indeed the Sun) because we know that they formed at the same time. There are real scientific explanations for how we know that, but again, I'm not a scientist, so unfortunately I can't give them to you.
Regarding proving that water was once on Mars, I don't know for certain, but I would postulate that the chemical makeup of water (H2O) will have an effect on certain substances, of which the clay/soil is probably one, and the rover will be able to detect this effect through analysis of the clay. It's like soaking paper in water then drying it out - you'll still be able to see by looking at it afterwards that it's been soaked in water at some point, even though it's now dry.
More to the point, the bonds between atoms will have been changed by the water, and this means that not only would it look different, but that if it was analysed at a molecular level (as I think the rover can do), those changes would show up there too.
Even more to the point, because we can test here on Earth what changes water (and other substances) have on clay or rock etc, the rover will most likely be able to compare the results it gets to results from tests here on Earth, and arrive at the conclusion that Sky News reported :)
EDIT:: Also, by definition, water is drinkable. Well, technically oil is drinkable, but you know what I mean! ;) Water can be filtered so that it is drinkable by us, whether it is mixed with salt or dust or whatever.
If something is 50,000 years old then it is ten half-lives. So a sample would be expected to contain (1/2)^10 of the C14 it started with. If something is only 20,000 years old, then it is four half-lives so can be expected to contain (1/2)^4 of its starting C14. These are different enough to be able to tell apart. But half a million years is already 100 half-lives, whereas a million is 200 half-lives. Can we tell the difference between (1/2)^100 and (1/2)^200? No. So you'd need to monitor an element with a much longer half-life.
It also assumes that the ratio of C14/C12 in the atmosphere is constant over the time period you are measuring. This is thought to be a just about reasonable approximation for up to 50,000 years, but not going back millions. Although there is evidence that going back just 3000-5000 years is enough to start to get errors due to variations in the atmospheric ratios. So for you longer half-life, you need to approximate that the concentrations have been constant for a significantly long time. Which is why these sort of estimates are just that. Estimates, based on assumptions which may be valid, or maybe not.
And then there is the approximation that radioactive decay is truly exponential, especially for atoms with very long half-lives. This is a debate that is currently going on in the literature (such as here http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/97/5/52001/).
Of course, carbon dating is accurate enough to prove that creationists are wrong based on their really quite short timescales - that, or just about the whole of science is wrong.
I always see things like this a bit like the results of historical digs on timeteam. There is evidence based science there, but then there is a bit/lot* (delete as appropriate) of intuition from experts based on other similar systems. Then when the news story gets picked up, they treat it as fact, and not evidence based speculation which is often the best a scientist can do. And most scientists will tell you the approximations they make, it is just that sometimes they get glossed over by reporters if the story is good.
Just in case you can't tell, I'm pretty excited by this model and can't wait for all the parts to arrive and get stuck in. It looks like such a technical, fiddly, and clever build, just the way I (apparently) like 'em.
I will definitely upload pics once I'm done.
I've built 98% of @Perijove's rover, and all of the descent stage and sky crane stand. I just wanted to say these are awesomely technical builds. A lot of fun and so much SNOT I had to build them with a box of tissues (haw haw) (The front radar section of the descent stage is particularly great!)
I hope LEGO keep the rover as close to the original design as possible.
I screwed up somewhere in the BrickLink ordering and don't have enough parts to complete the wheels so I've ordered the remainder + a few extras to customise the wheels to attempt a closer representation of the actual rover, namely doubling the width of the wheels (and adding black rims), and also giving it a crack with a bunch of these "wheels" in black (won't drive as well, but as a display model I think it'd look more accurate).
Again, sorry if I'm hijacking the thread, just super-impressed happy with this model.
The thing is that they're the sorts of things that non-Lego buying gamers would buy as one offs to sit on their desk net to their computers which means as The_Mack suggested, there's probably a large market there.
I have a friend studying Physics who is going to buy the Curiosity Rover set but that is entirely uninterested otherwise in my Lego collecting. I think the thing with Cuusoo is that it helps create products for people that wouldn't normally buy Lego rather than just simply produce sets for people who would've bought some existing Lego sets anyway.