Beautiful animations of Spirit's journey to Mars...

[Lynn49]

http://www.youtube.com/embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0

Very impressive! Enjoy!

[anisa]

neato!

[Patty Smyth]

and of course the "real" first image, as we all suspected

[ninna]

That was pretty cool but I got to admit--during the first 2 minutes of the video, I was watching all that extra "stuff" getting discarded into space and thinking, "hmmm. Aren't we a bunch of litterbugs?"

Makes you wonder how much crap is floating around up there from all of the missions over the years, doesn't it?

[Lynn49]

Ninna...evidently it's "lots"...I don't remember where I heard it...some documentary or other, but the space junk is really accumulating in space. I guess destroying our own planet wasn't good enough.....

[Darth Penguin]

Wiki on space debris

The vast majority of the estimated tens of millions of pieces of space debris are small particles, less than 1 centimetre (0.39 in). These include dust from solid rocket motors, surface degradation products such as paint flakes, and coolant released by RORSAT nuclear powered satellites. Impacts of these particles cause erosive damage, similar to sandblasting. This damage can be partly mitigated through the use of the "meteor bumper", which is widely used on spacecraft such as the International Space Station. However, not all parts of a spacecraft may be protected in this manner, e.g. solar panels and optical devices (such as telescopes, or star trackers), and these components are subject to constant wear by debris (and to a much lesser extent, micrometeoroids).
A much smaller number of the debris objects are larger, over 10 centimetres (3.9 in). Against larger debris, the only protection is to maneuver the spacecraft in order to avoid a collision. If a collision with larger debris does occur, many of the resulting fragments from the damaged spacecraft will be in the 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) mass range, and these objects become an additional collision risk. As the chance of collision is a function of the number of objects in space, there is a critical density where the creation of new debris occurs faster than the various natural forces remove these objects from orbit. Beyond this point a runaway chain reaction can occur that reduces all objects in orbit to debris in a period of years or months. This possibility is known as the "Kessler syndrome", and there is debate as to whether or not this critical density has already been reached in certain orbital bands

[Lynn49]

I "liked' your post, Darth, but only for the fact that you did the research, lol, and certainly not for the content..
That's some very scary stuff!