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).'"

Comments

Re:Golf cart?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen these rovers first hand and they are NOT each the size of a golf cart. Check this picture and get a better idea of their size:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/spacecraft/ hi res/roverteam.jpg

Earth hours?

[bravehamster]

An hour is an hour, regardless of where you are in the universe (relativistic effects aside). Days and years vary with the planet you're on. So if you want to compare the Martian day to the Earth day, you could say that a Martian day equals 1.0256945 Earth days. Just please don't ever use the words Earth hour or Earth minute ever again. Unless, that is, the reigning body of mars decided to create a new system of measuring time based upon the martian day as a base unit. If that ever happens, I would hope they have the sense to not use the same units (hours, days, etc.) Perhaps Marklars? Have you got the time? Sure, it's Marklar Marklar's past Marklar.

Re:Earth hours?

[bravehamster]

A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day

Actually that's not quite correct anymore. Look at the link you provided, or anyplace else where the SI units are spelled out. The second is the SI's basic unit of time, and is defined thusly:

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

That's the *current* definition of a second, not the historical definition that you were quoting. So, an hour represents 33,093,474,372,000 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, and is no longer defined according to the length of the day. This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long. While useful for writing high school term papers, the definition from Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate source in science.

This time around...

[kescom]

...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.)

Re:Golf cart?

[barakn]

Your link has an extraneous space in it. Here's the functioning version: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/spacecraft/hi res/roverteam.jpg