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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'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
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
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...
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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!