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NASA Fiddles With Mars Rover

Posted by michael on from the fingerpoken dept.

binaryDigit writes "The San Jose Mercury News has an article detailing the delay in launching the next Mars rover. Apparently 'a guillotine like device designed to sever the cables could produce a short circuit'. I assume some sort of standard connector was ruled out in this case? Yet another setback for NASA, though they at least caught the problem before launching it and then not being able to do anything about it."

1 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. why? by bobba22 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Forgive my ignorance, but what does this umbilical system do? Surely it can't be to keep the batteries charged on the flight to Mars, especially as they'll be doing very little, comms with the rovers *I assume* will be via RF. I can't believe that a rigid docking system would be less practicable than a severing system. Won't a severing system be fraught with possible problems - dust getting in the mechanism could stop the guillotine action altogether rendering the whole thing useless. What point am I missing here?