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Spirit Rover Lands Successfully
So, as I write this, the latest word is: the Spirit rover has landed and NASA has received a signal indicating it landed right-side up (so it shouldn't have any problems in the unfolding process) and will shortly be retracting the protective airbags which kept it from splattering all over the countryside. Y'all can fill in later news in the comments below. There's a nice site with up-to-the-minute text updates.
Hopefully we'll have as good luck in a few weeks.
Beagle 2 still has a chance when it starts ping flooding on the 5th.
If we get good enough at these, I'd love to have a rover to drive all over just to find all the missing missions.
I'm thrilled they got it there safe....this was the first landing that I watched live on the NASA channel. It had the feel of a local public access program. No one knew how to talk to or look at the camera. I also liked how the "reporter" was pulling people aside for short interviews....like they don't have anything better to do while the Spirit plumits through Mars' atmosphere. It was pretty cool to see all the different reactions in real time though. Good job guys!
-Steve
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
I may be playing the optimist here, but what if Opportunity also lands safely? Are they going to duplicate the tasking data, divide them, or will Opportunity get some additional assignments? I've been looking around on the NASA pages and couldn't find any answers. Thoughts? Conjecture?
I've been waiting all day to hear this in real-time. I wish the guys on CNN would have shut the f**k up. They didn't know what the hell they were talking about. It would have been much better just to hear the NASA people.
What an idiot. "15 watts worth of information" What the hell does that mean?
He actually then said "they could only transmit tones, because it was only 15 watts."
15 watts is enough to transmit from outside our solar system and has nothing to do with the data rate.
Anyway, it worked! Hurray for NASA and the Taxpayers!
http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/2003/details.htm
I put my name and those of my family on a DVD which was attached by metallic LEGO blocks to one side of the lander module.
It's nice to know that a tiny part of me just achieved a small measure of immortality on another planet in our solar system.
I wonder if in my lifetime I'll get to take a trip there and visit it in person?
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
Perhaps it's a sign we'll get back some of the 2/3 cut in spending Clinton did. Since that cut we've lost several lives & probes. You can't do rocket science on entry lvl I.T. salaries.
It's also a good sign that putting more spending in the program by Bush actually helped.
Premature but hopefully a good sign. Any president of either party that cuts spending on something so important gets my thumbs down. They use their cell phones developed by NASA to make the phone call to cut their spending.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I believe that the Cassini Saturn probe is using nuclear power (Saturn is too far away from the Sun to obtain enough power via solar panels). Enviornmentalists put up a big stink about Cassini having radioactive material on-board. Their argument was what if the stack blew up on launch and spewed the stuff around? I remember some sort of grass-roots effort to block its launch (which, of course, was unsuccessful, because Cassini is currently on its way to Saturn).
Like many non-US citizens I get sick of Americans thinking that their country is the best and that other countries are less important. But look at what has happened yet again: Where another country failed, the US has succeeded.
When I hear that the US has successfully landed a craft on Mars, I don't feel particularly surprised. I'd have been more surprised if the mission had failed. But when the Beagle mission (apparently) failed, my reaction was neutral, almost as if I had *expected* it to fail, and a large part of that was due to it being a non-US mission.
I guess my point is this: If you're one of the people, like me, who is sick of Americans thinking that their country is "all that", then this success should be another reminder that as far as the advancement of science and discovery is concerned, their pride may be less patriotic arrogance and more a statement of fact.
Oh and I'm not ass-kissing Americans, I'm just feeling a little angry that another country has thrown away another opportunity of doing something important, only for the US to step in and show us how it's done.
If you want to be the best then actually being the best might be a good place to start. This fundamentally competitive attitude is something that Americans seem to inherently understand and embrace, whereas in other countries it is often frowned upon as distasteful.
The hard part is the landing. If MER-B also survies, it would be nice if L-Mart can start a production line of this vehicle to be loaded with different instruments for different countries. While the price was 400 Million for each of these rovers, in a production line, I would expect the price to drop to 100 Million or less for the base model. Let UK, EU, India, Brasil, and Japan send up working systems with their instruments and their launchers (or with l-marts).
Personally, I am interested in seeing a bunch of these crawl all over mars with all sorts of different science packages.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nuclear power (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) is expensive. The fuel, pu238, makes platinum look cheap. Why spend the money, and give the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement something to protest about, if it isn't really necessary?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well, having been in building 264 at JPL (the MER mission operations building) I must say it was an exciting experience... Everyone was waiting really tense, jumping once or twice at some of the annoucements that sounded bad at first... six minutes from landing to signal confirmation, the longest 6 in my life!
When we got the signal, it was truely spectacular, everyone so excited, clapping, standing and hugging each other with vigorous congradulations. I was fortunate enough to be able to congradulate some of the higher ups (PI Steve Squyres, whom I work for, and Science Manager John Callas).
On behalf of all of us on MER, I'd like to thank everyone that's supported this mission, especially those slashdotters that have vigorously defended the purpose and existance of mars. What we are doing is hard, but not impossible, and we will continue to try until we prevail.
Today we had what I hope was the first of many victories on mars. We should be getting the first image back in a few minutes from the next odyssey pass.
BTW, I'm not sure what the press releases said, but we were very fortunate that the lander landed base petal down, which should speed up deployment significantly as there is no need for the actuators to push against the weight of the rover.
As I said earlier tonight, tonight went so well that it was as if we won the lottery, and by that I mean not just us at JPL but everyone on earth that will benefit from the knowlege we acquire. Congradulations all!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Support Staff
Mars Exploration Rovers
You deserve it.
During high profile missions (like tonight), though, they tend to get swamped no matter where you go. I got kicked off a few times but was able to reconnected almost immediatly.
Beagle-2 and MER-A (Spirit) are not close enough together to do a search. MER-2 (Opportunity) also won't be close enough to Beagle-2.
You should consider downloading (for free) Mars24, which is a Java application that shows a map of Mars, and you can configure it to show you where all the successful landers (and Beagle-2) are located in relation to each other, plus where the Sun is shining, and other stuff.
All the same there's only one thing worse than a sore loser and that's an ungracious winner. There's really no need to go strutting and preening and engaging in dominance poses about it. It shows quite a bit more class to just win and then be decent about it. To me, this wasn't a victory for the United States, this is a victory for all of mankind! We would be foolish not to aknowlege that much of the technology used on this mission came from other countries (and the ideas for them). We may not always see eye to eye, and we may fight ourselves constantly but we are all in this together folks. I will tell you that no one I"ve met here was anything but sympathetic towards the Beagle guys, and we really hope they re-establish contact (though it seems unlikely). Thanks to everyone around that world that contributed to this tremendous success!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Support Staff
Mars Exploration Rovers
.... which is a lot more power than the Hubble Space Telescope has. Hubble has the equivilant of a Intel 486 (it may be a real 486, not sure). And that was installed during the 1999 servicing mission.
The total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.
Note that with multiple cameras at 1024x1024 resolution, the Mars Exploration Rovers could easily send quite a bit more information than that if the bandwith was available. I work in the Machine Learning Systems group at JPL, and one of our goals is to eventually put some artificial intelligence software onto a future Mars rover so that it can take far more pictures than could ever be transmitted, analyze them onboard, and send only the most interesting ones back. It's very tricky to pin down exactly what makes one image more interesting than another, of course, so that's the real challenge...
I said basically, I'm sick of all this anti US, and said go US
Actually (my 2 cents here) this is more the fault of the (stereotypical) "arrogant american types" than anything - it is BECAUSE of them that people like you are no longer able to just say "yay! go USA!" without being lumped together with the assholes who want to bomb everybody.
It's a little like how because of the things the various racist bastards have done, that the whole scene has been so polarised, that professor (I don't have a link, can anybody help?) can no longer even use the word "niggardly" (which has nothing to do with the derogatory word... see, I don't even feel like typing it out) and effectively got fired because of that. The reaction by the black community to that is way crazy, and also counterproductive because the closet racists will get to chuckle and laugh about how "those poor sad ignorant niggers really don't know English that well, do they?"
That's insane, that is.
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There were a lot of space-related exhibits and vendor booths set up at the Pasadena Civic Center, with a promise of live telemetry from the Pathfinder craft and Sojourner rover. The images were slow in coming and not very clear. Not too many people I felt interested in talking to (although I missed a chance to chat up Robert Zubrin), so I headed out by myself in a GPS-equipped rented Taurus that always kept me on track out there. I drove past the San Gabriels which glowed eerily red from wildfires, and out to the Mojave, where hot dry winds blew hard all around me. I got out of my car and experienced the numbing silence and total darkness of the desert. I drove back a few hours later, and couldn't fathom returning to the Civic Center, so I simply alternated between visiting the desert and eating lots of Thai and Vietnamese food.
here
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
...which is a lot more power than the pathfinder rover, which was controlled by an 8086.
But NASA TV... you blew it. Again.
I got to watch it with about 600 other people at my local science museum (via satellite feed). They had 300 chairs in an auditorium, playing it on a huge screen. When that filled up, they quickly scampered to get it playing on the ceiling of the planetarium. When that filled up, they played the audio in the hallway for everyone left.
I admit it was pretty damn dry, but watching it with a few hundred other people helped fill in the dull moments. A hush over the entire room as we wait for word from the relay. Cheers when the word was recieved. Fun stuff.
And I only saw one guy in a cloak.
remember that each NASA lander costs $545m, whereas beagle 2 cost a mere $35m. EU should have thrown 31 Beagles at Mars and some of them would have worked!
What about sending back thumbnailed or greyscale images and then having the option of telling it which to send back? Is that currently in use? Sure, you're using bandwidth, but maybe it would still be more efficient?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The AC is correct in that the US does not send almost all of it's aid to Israel. More goes to Russia than Israel, and US foriegn aid is pretty well spread out. Of course, if you measure US aid as a percentage of its GDP, the US doesn't send very much at all, less than many other nations, including much of the EU. Denmark tops the scales with nearly 1% of it's GDP going to foreign aid. The US manages ten times less.
:)
Whilst it isn't a bad aid program, it's certainly not "unmatched". The EU member states together send out twice as much aid as the US. 27 billion dollars of aid compared to the US's 12.9 billion.
But it certainly doesn't go all to Israel