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Mars Rover Opportunity Lands Safely
JoeRobe writes "All indications are that the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has safely landed on Mars. After 10 minutes of bouncing and rolling, it has come to a rest and transmitted its signal. There are no fault tones, indicating that there were no errors during landing and rolling. The rover has landed in the Meridiani Planum, where there are large deposits of hematite, indicating the presence of past water. The lander has landed on one of its side petals, so the next step is to make itself upright and deflate its airbags." And loconet writes "Reuters and abc.net.au, among others, are of the first news sources to confirm that Opportunity has successfully landed on Mars. The probe had successfully made contact with controllers on Earth after landing at 0505 GMT on Sunday in an area of the planet known as the Meridiani Planum. The landing procedures achieved a best-case scenario on which all systems performed as expected. At first, engineers thought the lander had been rolling for a long time, but it turns out the antenna used to communicate with Earth was pointing towards the ground, which made the signal bounce off Mars and as the Earth moves, made it seem as if it had been bouncing for over 5 minutes. The lander is currently side petal down, and will take a while before it straightens itself out. California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ex Vice-president Al Gore were in attendance at the event in the JPL facilities." Many readers also wrote to point out the coverage at spaceflightnow.
woo hoo
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
And did we not need this on the anniversary of Columbia? Yeah, I think so. COngrats to all involved from the /. community.
The next band I form is going to be called Meridiani Planum and the Opportunities.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
Congrats to everyone who made this possible!
A blog like any other.
At first they thought it was rolling slowly for a very long time. Maybe the Martians were kicking it around & poking it with a stick. ;)
I was watching the whole thing on the webcast. I was personally disgusted when cnn & the others cut it off to run some interview with Nicole Kidman while it was still rolling across the surface.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
NASA should set Opportunity on a course to make the 6600 mile trek and kick Spirit's ass for acting up. A little sibling rivalry can't be too bad.
Reminds me of the old botwar games where you program your bots (rotate, move, or shoot) and watch them go at it.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Hurry and go press control-alt-delete on Spirit!
How long before the two rovers drag race each other?
I had the privilege of seeing Opportunity start its journey, and I'm glad to see it made it to Mars okay. Great job, JPL/NASA, and congrats!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Well, as a software engineer on MER, I must say that I and my collegues are all thrilled to see yet another success! NASA's Mars program has needed a success like this, and we are thrilled to get yet another chance to explore Mars.
I would like to thank all of the other engineers and scientists that have worked on this mission... many of which worked untold hours of unpaid overtime to do the things that the budgets couldn't afford (and that the mission couldn't live without).
I'd like to thank the leaders of our nation for giving us the resources to accomplish this feat, and their support politically.
But most importantly I'd like to thank the public for their interest, excitement, and moral/fiscal support. We're doing this for you and your children, that they might understand the universe better. Thanks for all of the fans out there!
Oh, and if you haven't already, now is a great time to grab Maestro, NASA's public science tool for visualizing mars data (which I helped to develop).
What a great night!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
yay
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Apparently, they didn't lose the signal from the rover all the way down like they did on Spirit. The Deep Space Network was able to see the signal from all the way from chute opening to contact. Also, the "bouncing" (which really wasn't) look of the signal is because of interference between the two signals coming to earth from the rover. Since both signals are heard, they had a "beating" effect, like the sound of two notes that are almost, but not quite, the same, which caused the signal to appear to change amplitude in a regular, periodic pattern (which looks like it's rolling).
I Love mars!
For the first time in my life I'm feeling completely amazed at the things we are finding out today. The space program is so exciting, finally we're pressing on to something we really don't know about. The re-envigorated space program, along with exciting news in robotics, make me feel like we're finally moving into the future.
There's no point here, I just felt the need to gush
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
More information on BBC and Space.com.
NASA TV is also broadcasting the Opportunity briefing with NASA officers as well as EDL Developers. A must see for interesting facts on what happened during entry.
To the people responsible for this great achievment once again, great work guys and thank you.
[alk]
OK... Anyone with scientific knowledge care to indicate how hematite in an area indicates the past presence of water? I'm fascinated, but clueless.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Well, as a software engineer on MER, I must say that I and my collegues are all thrilled to see yet another success!
As a martian, I would like to ask what the hell are you doing, dumping this big airbag robot thing in my backyard? You scared my kids half to death!
Are you going to just leave this thing here? This is private property!
- Z't'har q.d
Some junior officer of the Martian Interplanetary Defense Force just got evaporated via Phaser Death Squad for failing to down the extraterrestial invasion craft.
I was watching the NASA TV live and there was an unexpected discovery on Mars. A few minutes went by and they showed a video with the Rover, and then an animation made presented a birthday cake for Sean O'Keefe. THIS REALLY SCRARED THE HECK OUT ME. I thought it was small little green men roaming around Mars. This scared everyone and especially almost gave Sean a heart-attack.
But you know, the whole time lag thing kept sticking in my mind... When you hear them say "We have landed on Mars," that event actually happened 10 minutes earlier that the telemetry indicates it did.
What's the best way for humans to deal with the inescapable fact of the speed of light here? Should we report things (for the history books and all) as happening 10 minutes earlier than they appear to?
Aw, heck, what do I know? I'm still weirded out by the 7 second delay on radio. :) Go NASA!
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
I'm assuming he was present because they used his Schwartz to power the rover, correct?
True story.
While overseeing the landing of Oppurtunity, Al Gore quipped to the NASA engineers that he actually invented the propulsion engine.
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[apologies to my brit friends]
Now we can be amused by another batch of Mars landscape pictures with Wal-Mart and McDonald's signs Photoshopped into them. Isn't science great!?
But seriously, kudos unlimited to NASA. It was about time they got a friggin' break.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Replica of Mars Rover Opportunity made of Lego Modified to Contain a 2004 PC in a 1984 Mac Stops Responding, Debugging Dumps Indicate Possible Flaw in Linux InstantOn Boot Loader and/or Flash Controller.
Its nice to have someone who has actually been to Mars congratulate the team at JPL. I'm sure he has lots of stories to share.
"The landing procedures achieved a best-case scenario" and the worst case.... landing directly onto Spirit
Yeah moderators, rate the parent offtopic. Because, ya know...lego art is soooo ON-TOPIC when you just landed on mars.
News for Nerds....no kidding.
I, too, would like to take this opportunity to thank those involved in the project.
True story.
Go find those Beagle pieces, little rovers!
The great thing about this is that it proves that innovation and thought still has some place in government. These vehicles where built with the tax dollars that you and I give away every year. It's a shame that our money is not spent in ways like this rather than (for example) the "war on terrorism" and the "war on drugs".
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
w00t!
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I kep thinking about those "airbags". Are they filled with "air", and if so, perhaps we can send a lot more probes to Mars, and sooner or later we'll have sent enough "air" there to start breathing!
I still think they should have sent some kudzu to Mars. Then, by the time that Man actually gets there, he won't need a helmet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Click on the rover picture on the upper right hand corner, or search for the work "Rover" on the site and choose the third link. Very cool Lego rover kit for about $80.
When I was reading the Summary, it seems like the signal was bouncing off something, because I got some repititon in there...
[blue] - The Ministry of Information approved this message...
NASA have employed a very cunning plan - send Spirit as a decoy, wait until they're sure the Martian army are screwing around with it, then land Opportunity on the opposite side of the planet.
Now what does a hermaphrodite have to do with finding water? Oh ... wait, never mind.
I'm as stoked about this as anybody, but geez... maybe they'd better wait and make sure the petals open, everything works, first photos back, etc. It's a little early to be pouring the champagne.
Slightly OT from the Opportunity landing, but has anybody seen the amazing picture made by Mars Global Surveyor? They not only can see Spirit itself from orbit, they also located several bounce marks, the parachute, the backshell and the heatshield! I have to look up the resolution again, but judging from this picture they achieve better than 1 meter after some image processing.
These pictures gave me the following idea (assuming Spirit will get healthy soon): Since the plan was to drive to big crater in the top right of the first image anyhow, why not drive to the impact location of the heatshield. Since this came down without a parachute, it should have dug a pretty deep hole. It is thus possible to study a fresh crater that is only 1 month old!
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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but I really don't like banging ugly chicks.
But a no-fault tone is not a fault tone, so they received both no-fault tones and no fault tones.
my brain hurts
Why? All I'm saying is that it's interesting that with the "success" rate of landing craft on Mars, our (US) last two attempts seem to so far have worked. Looks like we finally may have gotten it right. Now of course we can start to build off this and make a landing craft for manned exploration.
I think the EU just needs more practice. We lost one back in 1997, now look at us. Hopefuly the EU will finally get a robot on the surface successfully. I think this news article just goes to show that, I think, our hard work is paying off.
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Actually, if you count the Beagle, Arianne, and Columbia, this would be:
US +1, EU -2
methinks the two rovers are REALLY there to mate and CREATE martians....
As Gov. Schwarzenegger watched the landing from JPL, he commanded the scientists: "GET YOUR ASS TO MARS!"
A reporter reminded Gov. Schwarzenegger that "You blabbed Quaid! You blabbed about Mars!" Schwarzenegger ignored the remark, responding "I've never even been to Mars! What the fuck did I do wrong?"
Later that evening, Schwarzenegger pleaded with Cohaagen to increase the oxygen ration on Mars, by saying: "Giff des people eair!!"
Finally, he shot his wife, Sharon Stone, through the head, closing the press conference by saying "Consider dat a divorce!!!"
Since the Opportunity's hardware is identical to Spirit, it has on average 19 days before freaking out.
It is good that Spirit's problem seems to be under control, so if something similar happens to Opportunity, the cure is already avaliable.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
My wife and I caught the web cast and even she was excited as the Flight controller, Wayne Lee, was reading from the expected sequence of events. Very cool!
The question I had was since there is ten minutes from Mars to here for the radio signals, his sequence had to be ten minutes behind what was actually happening. Listening to the DSN "voice" confirming that some action had happened based on a doppler shift was amazing as well. So were they working ten minutes behind the actual sequence of events?
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
Just finished watching the press briefing on NASATV. I gotta say it's pretty damn neat to see these engineers and scientists realize the fruit of their labors. Congratulations to JPL, NASA, and anyone involved in landing both rovers on Mars. And thanks, too, because it's rekindled the young, bewildered, excited curiosity in me.
(a) If there's life on Mars, of course it will be different from life on Earth -- but we will still want to know HOW it's different. It would be like never travelling to a foreign country because you already know the USA (or whatever your home country is) is unique.
(b) GWB will never "tell you your taxes are going up." He'll "pay" for the "war on terrorism" by cutting taxes, not raising them.
(c) s/RAII/RIAA
(d) What does funding NASA have to do with political oppression?
(e) I agree with the 2nd paragraph. I'd like to add that I predict we will have cities on Mars (and the Opportunity landing site will be a historical monument, admission $5, kids under 12 and seniors $2, or free with a National Parks Pass or Golden Age Passport) before we win either the war on drugs or the war on terrorism.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Well, if you really want to keep score, dont forget about the polar landers, 3 failures in one fell swoop....
But will the JPL stand up in a real court? I am waiting to see how this SCO case goes. ;-)
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
Pathfinder and Spirit both used a petal arrangement. Out of chance, this is the first one to _not_ land on the base petal, so it will have to right itself by unfolding.
Instead of sending mechanical rovers out, why not send a conscious machine? The uploading of the self into a machine is a far greater goal than space exploration, and doable on Earth.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I find all this Mars coverage to be a pleasant distraction from the redundant SCO nonsense. I hope NASA starts testing their warp drive soon.
"Derp de derp."
Ah give 'em a frickin' break. They had to build the story out of Lego first, which takes time, and then they turned out to be short a few bricks (which we already knew, didn't we?) and had to run out to the mall for more.
The Han Solo story didn't take as long because someone else did all the work.
KFG
To land TWO safely and are target. Hats off. More importantly you have once again made the world look up, which we need so much now that shuttle flights don't make new unless something horrible happens.
And I must say, I tip my hat to your personally for being brave enough to post on
It's not every day you get to write code and develope systems that make history.
... after all, he invented Space travel!
It's about time they got a Mars rover to land right. I was starting to think NASA was playing Gunbound with those things.
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
I've been looking at a lot of old Viking info, but unfortunately there isn't as much easily available information about the details of the landing as there are about Spirit and Opportunity. Were the viking missions any easier to conduct? And why/how was the landing so different? Why wasn't that type of landing (reminiscent of apollo moon landings, it seemed) used for the rover missions? It just seems so radically different. Here we have an airbagged package slamming into mars at up to 40G's (well, 2-3G's this time) and yet the viking was a landing craft which I can't imagine being able to take a fraction of that force.
"Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas"
The Monorail at Disneyworld, right?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
True, you have to be moving pretty fast to get discrepancies of this magnitude in simultaneity. But correcting a misconception by replacing it with another misconception in the name of education isn't really productive IMHO.
Well viking didnt have complex rovers. And it was controlled from earth.. whereas the rovers are automated.. theres more reasons but im tired and confused about where i am
did i mention im drunk?
bye
In other news, Jenni from the online voyeur site, JenniCam has folded operations in California and moved her equipment to Mars. She will provide 24.6597 hour coverage of the rovers as they sleep, pick up rocks and even shower themselves off.
As the two rovers are the only known inhabitants, unlike Jenni they will not hook up with a fat goateed white boy.
Every country that has sent orbiters/landers/rovers to Mars has had a high number of failures, including the Soviet Union (later Russia), the United States, Japan, and Europe.
Take a look at this quality Wikipedia article on Mars exploration.
Mars defense is on code BROWN - another earthling contraption has landed
this is awesome. one rover kicked ass now there are two. good work NASA and JPL and anyone else who helped out. i hope i can work on something as cool as this mission when i get older. i wish more people paid attention to these missions. most people i know just say, "they sent a cart to mars. wow. who cares?" i hope people aren't this disinterested when we finally send a mission to Europa.
Or do various space agencies in Europe and the US have an infinate number of Mars probes at the moment? Seriously, everytime I switch the news//. on I hear about a new damn probe. When the hell are they going to run out?
Viking rovers made a rocket powered descent, which is inherently a more expensive design. I saw a NASA program which claimed this was done partly due to NASA budget's being much higher in the 70's, but the 1970 budget was $4b and last years was $15b, so I'm not sure if that is true...
If you thought that was impressive, stay tuned - we've got a few surprises in store for you. Do the words "Martian oil refinery" mean anything to you? (You didn't think Bush got excited about Mars for science's sake did you?)
We'll say this - pay attention to what the photos don't show you.
Combined budget for the Viking missions was over $1.3b in 1970 dollars. Compare that to $800m in 2003 dollars for Mars Express...
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This is bad news. Arnie shouldn't have been allowed into the NASA press conference. He's a martian spy!
I think this is a reference to the movie Total Recall. Which is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, BTW :) (that's a little slashdot interest for yous ;).
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
My first thought was of R2D2 giving out one of his high squeeling sounds when he was upset about something.
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As of 4:17pm EST, pictures are rolling in from Opportunity. It's opened and sending pictures back already. The magnetite ground "looks like a tiled patio" and is more ordered and flat than that of Spirit's landing site
g en/encode r/live.rm
Nasa TV has the RM stream:
http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ram
Air? Wonderful. Now all you need is some way of kick starting Mars' core, to produce a stronger (and complete) magnetic field. ;)
Otherwise you'd have to keep shipping air to Mars as it gets blown away by solar wind. Might get kinda expensive. Maybe you can work something out with UPS though, I hear they have good deals for long-term customers.
anyone else not seeing spaceflightnow pictures (just text?)
First, congrats for landing Opportunity.
Why don't they automate the mission control tech a bit more, rather than using:
(a) voice intercom (radio style) communication, where the mission commanders "poll" the heads of all the various departments, awaiting voice response before moving on? Human response is *so* slow w.r.t. real time events affecting the space craft.
(b) printed procedure books? Just prior to awaiting the 1st images (after petal opening) I heard the mission command say "we're at page 12 and beyond in The Procedure..." If pagination is necessary, this implies printed procedural docs.
Why not do this interaction "online?"
(a) voice comm may still be useful, but why not use IM for a group of people to "chat." Is the voice feed for the media?
(b) why not "follow the procedure" with some online, multi-user app that checks off the steps done on some browser sort of app? The engineering specs have to be changing up to the last minute; why commit to paper something that becomes obsolete once you press Print?
I know they're displaying the received images live on an X station (on a cool big screen). So clearly they are taking advantage of recent technology.
Just, PLEASE, why the voice comm and printed procedures?
Thanks for listening. Good luck, Opportunity and team.
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As of 4:17pm EST, pictures are rolling in from Opportunity.
Oops. 4:17am even.
Was watching the NASA TV coverage, and they got imaging at 1:24 AM PST. WOW! There is a rock outcrop about 30 meters away that had the geologist say he "Was speechless". The outcrop looks like an actual hematite outcrop! If this is true, this lander is in the perfect place even though it landed a little long in it's ellipse. Every image they got looked completely strange. It didn't look anything like the Gusev images (which look a lot like Viking and Sojoner's). I think this will be the most interesting landing site from the look of it. The images will probably be available at the JPL site within an hour. Go check them out.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
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The next mars mission will include a 4 wheeler with a video camera strapped to the gunrack..
Faster, cheaper, smaller! = NASA
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Some of the early pictures, gotta love predictable filenames, seems they like to put stuff up and let it sit around for a while, guess PR has to clear it before they publish the link:P
r tu nity.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/oppo
Sometimes when ya roll a d4 you get a 4... and sometimes ya get a 1... They were just unlucky this time, but that's okay because as you said it'll right itself by unfolding!
Pics at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html
I found a few flight software links about the two Mars craft... it's normal that little of this information is put on the web due to ITAR regulations...
PDF of a powerpoint about static analysis of the code
First and second links from GCN magazine.
And here is a chatty JPL page showing the key team members and their personal reflections
Some technical briefs on the science payload can be downloaded here or here
A list of Cornell's scientists and their bios etc is here
Here is an article about another software guy.
A cool technical power point about the computers, only available on google cache, is here
And lastly, a technical comparison of today's rovers against something called Fido.
I simply don't know what I did before Google!
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity .html
Looks like some interesting outcroppings nearby.
Will the 5 degree tilt nose up cause any major egress problems? I noticed that one egress point had the air bags completely retracted. Looks great!
I can't believe the difference in landing sites!
Great job once again!
Cheers!
77 pictures from Opportunity are now available for viewing.
You seem to forget that the "Eurotrash" did give birth to one of the most brilliant scientists of all time. Let me refresh your memory: Riemann, Bohr, Einstein, Minskowski, Cauchy, Hilbert, Planck, Poincare, Lie, Cartan, Lorentz, Lagrange, Ampere, Maxwell, Hamilton, Curie, Nernst and so forth.
So everything "we" do nowadays, the Yanks included, is nothing more than the confirmation of what these giants have done. I do congratulate you with those Rovers, but realise where our fundamental knowledge comes from. All our space engineering efforts, those of Russia, US, Europe and Asia are really not that great, except for the insane price tags.
It has never been a bad personal quality to show some humble attitude, especially if one cannot claim to possess a great scientific history such as that of Europe.
Yours Truly,
Eurotrash.
If anyone is interested in art in combination with science should go and buy the DVD version of "Mythodea" By Vangelis (Papathanasiou), the world known Greek composer/performer/musician. The Dvd is filmed Live in Athens (Greece), at the temple of Zeus in the heart of athens, a July mooned night. The whole theme "Mythodea" is composed as a theme to the Mars Exploration Held by NASA and the concert is a-b-s-0-l-u-t-e-l-y B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T-!-!-!-! I strongly recommend this as an nour and a half of pure entertainment, especially when seeing live or at least enjoy on a home cinema set up.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
Well done landing them both! At least two out of three of mankinds Mars landers made it. I'm very excited :)
Wow, what can I say? I'm in building 264 here at JPL and it's way past our bed time, but that's not stopping everyone from enjoying the new images! The enthusiasm here is just incredible; I've never been so on the edge of my seat as I was as I waited for my script to automatically bring up the first image processed from Mars.
:)
Steve Squyres (the principle investigator) is quite excited about the position of the rover... It's insane how many geologically interesting features are nearby the rover, especially considering it was a safe landing site. To quote the press conference, "It's like trying to land in Oklahoma and hope to find the Grand Canyon." It's simply amazing the details we are seeing on even the most compressed of images!
Geologists are excited, engineers are excited... Even people that don't know anything about geology (like myself) realize how important it is to find outcroppings like this... allowing us to see the stratigraphy of the local site... looking back millions of years into the past, it's incredible! I personally hope that we RAT the outcroppings. We're already seeing some hints of layering there... hmm...
But most exciting of all is the chance, as Steve Squyres mentioned, that we could be inside a crater. That would be an incredibly awesome place to start... The chance to study craters up close will be invaluable to our future interpretation of cratered worlds.
Once again I cannot get accross how cool all of this is. Thanks so much to all of you out there who are interested in this stuff... even if it is just which OS the rover runs
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Dude, don't feed the trolls. Nobody really thinks that crap the trolls spew. It saddens me to see Europeans getting all upset and running around talking about those awful American slashbots. They aren't for real, just trollin' - there are people in America who do believe such crazy nonsense, but they are a small fraction of the population, redneck idiots from the depths of Georgia. Please, collectively all you Europeans, stop mistaking that crap for some sort of "American" point of view and biting on their trolling. It just makes you look foolish and degrades the entire Slashdot community.
For more good stuff, go to my site...
Featuring COLOR IMAGES from Opportunity, before JPL has made them available. (By aggregating 2/5/6 filters together to simulate what the human eye would see).
Also, there are stereo anaglyphs up of the lander.
You forgot Nikola Tesla....One of the MOST important guys.
Actually, the bigger reason for doing that was testing. We had done others in a Rocket Powered Descent (ah apollo anyone?) and knew that it worked. Had the ballistics down and the programming for it.
The idea of simply bouncing and then rolling around had not occured to anyone. To be honest, I doubt that we had the material back then for doing it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
more success for NASA... Did i miss the slashdot posting about hell freezing over?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
Relax. Far too many idiots around. People are electing to show off their politics by attacking others.
Besides, you missed one of the greats today; Stephen Hawkings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
you can see an alien in one
... ...
picture. i can't give you the link
but it's in one pictures with the
tile like stone formation.
the alien is kindda like a sea-shell
typ animal. it's coiled up at
the base of the tile rock formation
great job jpl.nasa!
But your last sentence is exactly why I hate American educational systems. "Let's dumb it down to the lowest common denominator" they say. Well, that's great for the dumb kids, but for anyone smarter who knows there is more going on, it's just something to un-learn then re-learn the real way.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Please start using Bittorrent for the large raw data files so all of us out here can zoom in really well on some of this and maybe study some of the science data ourselves.
Bittorrent will take all the load off your servers and put it on to everyone who wants the data, you just send it out basicly once and everyone else does the rest.
Thanks.
true, but not particularly useful. they would have received no fault tones if the lander had crashed, or burned up in the atmosphere.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html
First Color Photo is here!
Lots of photos of airbag imprints, but look at the photo of the tiled structure - intelligent life on mars enthusiasts are going to love that one! Looks a bit like the Giants causeway in Ireland (only less geometric!!)
Apropos competition. If you would send two rovers to mars, would you let them be controlled by two teams or by one and the same?
:)
Each versions has some pros and cons. Can we have a poll for that?
of watching the images returned by MER-B with a fairly prominent planetary geologist tonight, and what he had to say was "That ain't no [expletive deleted] lava flow."
The next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting, folks. And who said the Meridiani site was going to be boring?
Time to go to bed.
It is a little known fact, but Al Gore invented the space program.
The Rocket Assisted Decent motors used on the current landers are designed to bring the landers almost to a complete stop (ie ~zero vertical velocity) a few feet or 10s of feet above the surface. However there can be very strong winds on Mars. The landing site and time of the Viking lander was highly restricted to very flat, boring, featureless areas with low wind speeds to minimise the risk of sideways movement on landing leading to it getting smeared across the landscape.
The addition of air bags means there is a much greater range of safe geography that can be explored because the final phase of the decent can safely occur even with large horizontal and vertical velocities at parachute release.
Obviously even with this system it is prudent to avoid regions with lots of crevasses and cracks as it would be rather a shame if it bounced along the surface and ended up jammed in a crack and unable to open.
Naturally he was there, he did after all, invent spaceflight.
I see they are starting at Sol 1, but would it not make sense to continue with the Spirit timeline?
Of course, I was replying to the troll, not to the open-minded well-educated American, which I believe represents the majority of Slashdot, still.
:)
Anyway, the Rovers are a great achievement, and there is no doubt in my mind that we'll see some stunning results from them in due time. I can't wait to see them rolling
I see you have a few Marsdial images in there too. How come green/blue is so badly rendered both in these images and most of the ones offered by JPL?
i ri t/20040121a/Lander_Pan_Sol16-A18R1_br2.jpg
i t_ color_348deg_1503h_006sol.htm ...So it must be possible to get true colour images?
The blue foam that's wrapped around most cables on the lander appears bright pink in most colour images, like this one:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/sp
The only "proper" Marsdial I've seen that shows green and blue is this one:
http://www.redrovergoestomars.com/marsdial/spir
After 10 minutes of bouncing and rolling, it has come to a rest and transmitted its signal. There are no fault tones, indicating that there were no errors during landing and rolling .
Just replace the bold words with: "Genetic Information," and "you know what."
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
Any that incorporate infrared will render it purple-y. The blue chip is very reflective in the infrared spectrum.. and with 2 for most of the red value, infrared is incorporated into it.
That's why it's called pseudocolor, because the redpoint is off by 30-60nm depending on exposure. It doesn't mess things up much except for things that have a ton of infrared reflectivity. I also have "nearcolor" pics that take L2/3/4/5/6 filtered pictures together and combine them to be really close perceptually what people would see. But there have not been any qualifying sets of images downlinked from Opportunity yet, nor will there be many. (L3/L4 aren't so useful for science, so it's only things that they're really interested in that they take pictures with all filters---and that thus I can do it for).
See nearcolor pics near the top of my site.
Sweet pictures! Thanks for posting.
6 .jpg
:)
Couple of questions.
First, how are you gaining access to these pictures? Are they being placed on a public server somewhere? If so, NASA really rocks for giving everybody near real-time access.
Second, in these pictures does anybody have an idea of scale? For example... the following picture looks like a tissue sample I might see under a microscope.
http://www.lyle.org/mars/imagery/color/128287399-
Anyway, thanks for the pictures... they kick ass. You deserve double Karma points.
AC
HEhe, thank you.
They all come from the JPL raw pictures area. My scripts/code turn the raw pictures into color imagery and anaglyphs, and assist me in stitching images together into larger ones.
When it comes to scale, the pancam images (which all the color images are derived from) have a 16.8x16.8 degree field of view. This is about the same as 140mm telephoto lens when used with a 35mm camera. As to the size across the frame, this varies with the camera distance. The closest the camera will be to the center of the frame is about 7 ft, making the picture maybe about 2-3 feet across? The pancam is largely designed to mimic what human vision would see, in resolution and in focal length.
The microscopic imager takes pictures that are about 1.25" across when in focus. I may be able to produce crude color pictures with it because it has a dust cover that is colored orange, and sometimes they take pictures with it on... providing crude color information.
Thanks for the info. I have been bragging to my wife all morning about the stuff now "I know" about the Mars program. Kinda relationship karma whoring. :)
Anyway, thanks! It's great to have an insider around.
Of course, I am going to have to update my CPU to run Maestro comfortably... (crunch, crunch, crunch) but I've been looking for an excuse anyway.
I always figured space probes can glom on coding because the receive side on Earth doesn't have to do real time decoding. You can just capture it over the DSN and decode with computers at your leisure.
--- Ban humanity.
That's why they go all the way to Mars and send back pictures of themselves!
Someone please mod this -1 Troll. Somehow, these people find a way to work their Bush hatred into *any* story, no matter how irrelevant it is.
Of course I'm delighted that Opportunity landed successfully, but I'm dismayed at such comments by NASA personnel as "We done good!" and "I'm just blown away by this." Can't we get more dramatic and elegant quotes? Let's have NASA hire some unemployed writers to punch up their press releases, to read something like "One Rover to find them, and in the Martian dust bind them," or "With this landing our two civilizations will be changed forever, and not for the better." (See? These are terrible too, which is why we need real writers!)
And just an hour ago, I got a call that my programming job has already been offatmosphered to Martian programmers willing to work for trinkets and shiny beads...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.
The Maestro team has released its second data set. One can download it here. There is a new option to go to Opportunity's landing site, but no other Opportunity data is available for Maestro yet.
"California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ex Vice-president Al Gore were in attendance at the event in the JPL facilities."
Schwarzenegger has the excuse of it being his state, but why was Gore present? IIRC, he wasn't exactly in favor of space exploration in the 2000 campaign. Is there going to be an upcoming press release about "better ways" the money could have been spent?
So we DO have rights to the spaceship at Area 51!!
When is that moron teaboy at NASA will speak on behalf of NASA and thanks the geeks at Slashdot for supporting the "existence of Mars" with their lips?
Why is the Maestro license so restrictive? De-compiling, reverse engineering, yada yada, are all disallowed by the license. Since the taxpayers paid for it, why isn't the software completely open?
Who wants to play a game of "guess what Richard C. Hoagland's going to say about that photo"
0 01 /1N128285132EDN0000P1500R0M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/n/
For this photo, I'm guessing he'll say it's a giant fossilized skeleton.
There is a car in my parents yard that they are not using. I give you permission to take any part you want from it. (The engine is sitting in the backseat and isn't worth fixing so I can give you permission) All you have to do is find it, someplace on earth, so it shouldn't be a big deal.
Not very helpful is it? Earth is very large. Okay, so in most cases we know about where a particular rover is. So my parents live near [some town in the US]. Near meaning that you only have to search about 10 square miles to find it. No big deal, until you look at the location of the next car to salvage and realize it is in India, and the one after that in South Africa. Sure you can optimise the list anyway you want to, but there is still a lot of travel time. Unlike earth there is nothing inbetween (no oceans, but also no other refueling stations or repair shops)
hoo yay woo
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"Junkyard Wars Extreme"
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Congrats. This guy should go back to doing what he does best. Namely, fucking himself in the ass with a big rubber dick.
Cool -- new panorama is available. The outcrops of bedrock look awesome, but I was confused by the way it looked like the impressions from the airbags were coming from two different directions almost 180 degrees from each other. Huh?
Look carefully at the trail of round airbag impressions, and you can see how Opportunity must have rolled in from one side, down the hill, across the bottom of the valley, and up the other side of the hill a bit, before rolling back and finally coming to rest -- kind of like a marble dropped into a bowl. It looks like it landed in a crater, of which there are several in the landing ellipse.
The telemetry from the bounces is going to look rather weird.
there seriously needs to be a way to get even higher than +5... this comment deserves like a +230948732432
ok. has anyone noticed the small holes on the ground where the airbags retracted ? It's like, many of them, some are dark black, like they are hollow, some look like they have been filled by dust, or their walls collapsed filling them. Don't remember seing this on spirit's, wonder what that is.
you know whats gonna happen dont you? Theyre gonna take a bunch of pictures and say "hooray look what we can do!" and then as theyre puting the pictures on postcards and crap the half billion dollar robot is gonna brake. Thats when we send up the hyper intelligent monkeys. we dont need those back. send em up with advanced mechanic textbooks and theyll fix em up. its all good.
Great site, keep up the good work!
From space.com
"Spirit does not have a huge track record of testing, a source said, for fear of damaging the robot and not meeting an unforgiving launch window. "
Uh - sending a 400 million dollars robot and they didnt test the software? Gee, didnt they hire any software QA engineers to test the damn thing or do they have a bunch of software engineers with the mentality of "my code works perfectly - it must be hardware problem!!"?
I'm 44, and I was 9 years old when we landed on the moon.
Imagine how that felt.
Scratch that. You can't begin to imagine. The world stayed still...very still... for about6 days. There's nothing else to compare it to in my lifetime; I suspect very little else has happened that you could compare it to.
knowing how crude the technology is as a middle-aged geezer, those guys were *beyond* balls. Computers that were less powerful than an Apple ][ no redundancy, nothing. A zillion parts and it all had to work right the first time.
That's why we have to go into space. This landing has me thrilled. Imagine what its like if you're 9 years old. Imagine what it will be like when we go to the moon again.
Imagine (maybe in my lifetime) what it will be like when we land on Mars.
I can't imagine.
I think funding space exploration is important and necessary, however:
m l
"Velcro" - http://www.hookandpile.com/hook-loop-invention.ht
Invented by a swiss guy in the 40's.
"GPS" - Its a product of satellites, something NASA didn't invent; the Russians had a satellite first, and Arthur Clark argues that he invented the communications satellite (although thankfully, he did not patent the idea).
"Cellular Telephones" - Invented by Hedi Lemar. You'll think I'm joking, but I'm not. Invented during WWII, well before NASA and space exploration.
"discovery of the ozone hole which arguably launched the widespread efforts to fix our planet" - See my argument via GPS. Same idea here.
"Tang" - Okay. You got me.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Wasn't it: "Spirit's Flash ROM can remember it for you Wholesale"?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick
Of all the people they could invite, why would they invite Al Gore and Arnold Swlkjasdhhnegger? I can hear Al Gore now: "I invented NASA."
YOU might want to listen to a concert via ionospheric bounce - I would not. For AM, you get far too much phase shift as the ionosphere fluxes, for FM that is going to show up as massive noise - only the new digital shortwave would worth listening to.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Oh, I don't know; I thought that Sally Ride was a bit of a babe.
An easier way is to just substitute "it is" for every occurance of "its/it's".
If the sentence makes sense grammatically with "it is", then you can use its contraction, "it's".
Otherwise, you should use "its".
(E.g., "you can use it is contraction" makes no sense grammatically, so you should use "its", but "it is just one more goofy thing" does make sense grammatically, so you should use "it's".)
The problem is that pronouns are the exception to the apostrophization of the possessive form of nouns.
All singular non-pronounical nouns indicate the possessive form with "'s", but the pronouns don't.
It's just one more goofy thing about the English language.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
The reason that the ratio of failures is so high is becuase of the Soviet(Russian) missions.... the first 12 failed, no space program has a perfect record but the U.S. has by far the best starting with the Viking missions, and so far ending with 2 successful rovers on the planet now(one with a malfunction which im sure you all know about, but seems that they will be able to fix some if not all of the problems)so its hard to say that the U.S. has a high number of failures, as it has by far the highest number of successes on the red planet.
Burton Cummings is God
woohoo
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