it was right here, Doug - either here, or at MSNBC - I can't remember which one, and it really doesn't matter which, as

I was the one who made the suggestion to use other ground based antennas, and I argued for it, but the idea was shot down, due to the extremely low signal strength of Sojourner -

However...

As you can see from the posts above, the practice became standard afterward, and that's because it does not make sense to rely on one or two antenna when you have a couple of hundred million dollars invested in a probe - in Hyugens case $500 million - there is seldom a radio astronomy observation which has a higher value than the probe's data, and the observations can usually be made at another time -

I'm gald to hear about the attemppts with the MERs, even though they failed - with the Allen Array coming online soon, perhaps we'll finally have a good enough antenna to work with very low powered rovers and probes.

If the attempts with Hyugens work, we'll have saved entire forests which would have had to have been harvested to print reams of unecessary bs.

Lest you think I'm delusional, I'll admit that its fairly certain that someone else may have had the idea as well, and it's also very likely that they may have been more effective than I was in promoting it. But I don't know that absolutely, and I can't find any record of their activities.

By the way, back in 1998 I also used to have to give the NASA PR people hell about their failure to mention craters on Mars.

One of my current peaves has been the lack of system independent bail-out indicators on or near the shuttle hatches. I am waiting to see if one of the oversight boards brings this failure to NASA management's attention in a more forceful manner. My guess is that they will, but we'll see.

Are you laughing yet?

ep