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Two New Mars Rovers Will Be Launched In June
Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story which talks about the next two rovers to explore Mars which will be launched in June of this year. NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. From the article: 'The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart, will have more power and greater mobility than the Pathfinder's Sojourner rover. Both should be able to trek up to 44 yards across the surface every Martian day (24 Earth hours and 37 Earth minutes).'"
Is it me, or are these things getting really big? If I recall correctly, the first mars rover was no bigger than a PC tower. Guess they need the space for a lot more instrumentation and tools?
"NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. "
Either way, they should still call it Jupiter 2.
"Derp de derp."
The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart
They are so having a race!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
This will become a high profile project. So it won't be at all the skunkworks project that the earlier rover was.
It'll be full of egos, and every department of NASA will want to be involved.
We'll be lucky if it even lands on Mars.
I wanna sign up for the next packet tour. When's Dick Rutan getting his Marz-EZ lander done?
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
After reading the article, I again became frustrated after finding that the length of these rover's operational lives seems to be limited only by the amount of dust collecting on its solar cells. These new rovers were supposedly built upon designs and characteristics of the old Sojourner model operated in 1997. Why wouldn't they improve upon this restricted system and incorporate something to prevent the dust from covering its energy supply?
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
...the images you see should be true-color, too.
A large majority of publicy-available Mars images--particularly maps taken from orbit by Mars Odyssey and most of the Sojourner images--are not really color-calibrated at all. Mars is actually a lot redder than you think, and you really can't see clouds at all.
Here at Cornell, we're working on properly calibrating the images for the new missions. With some luck, everything that's publicly released next year will be sRGB! (Check out progress.)
I hope NASA get's the rovers onto the planet nice and safe, they have had a bad run lately, with Columbia and the previous Mars lander. More images of Mars will be awesome! Although they are landing in "boring" places, this means we are going to see images like we have seen previously, a flat landscape dotted with rocks.
Psi
"The European Space Agency plans to launch its own Mars lander on June 1. The spacecraft, named Mars Express for its streamlined development, should also land in January and is programmed to explore a large flat region that overlies the boundary between ancient highlands and the northern plains." I'm pretty sure the robot wouldn't be programmed to explore, but, rather, would be told where to go and marginally how to get there, no? Perhaps they've built in some path-finding software to ease the 30 minute communication delay, but I doubt it's programmed specifically.
I don't understand why so many people are constantly bashing Goldin's faster, better, cheaper (FBC) approch. And it's not only our own /. crowd I'm thinking about, but even journalist like the person that wrote the abcnews article.
/rant
I mean, the first part of the article somewhat describes that FBC sucks, then it explains that this new mission is going to use trusted technology like, [guess what ?], bouncing airbag landing, aeroshell insertion (probably aeorbreaking too). Guess when all this "trusted" technology whas first tested ?
I'm sure Goldin must have done some things badly, but I personally don't think that FBC is one of it. Given the budget cuts that NASA has gone thru and the pressure for more "exciting" science from the general public, I really think that FBC was the logical answer. Sure it fumbled on a couple of occasions, but I won't even count the loss of the Mars Polar lander (the Metric vs US, snafu) as a cause of FBC, more like the exact reason why having common standard is a Good Thing(tm).
I still think that some wonderfull experiments have come out of FBC, Pathinder is certanly one, DS-1 too (first autonomous navigation, first Ion Drive), and not to mention the Mars Global Surveyor.
I liked the idea of trying and squeezing every last bit of science out of a project. Like the NEAR Shoemaker's landing on Eros
Murphy(c)