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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.
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]
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Well, I believe that there are about 4 to 6 different ways of forming hematite. All but one happen only in the presence of water. The other way is through vulcanic means. With the vast assortment of tools on these rovers, it should be definitely possible to find out whether it was formed vulcanically or not. So, there you go!
Survey says: ARRRRRRGGNNNT!!!
Wrong answer. Challenger exploded on 28 Jan, and Columbia disintegrated on 01 Feb.
Just to let you know what sort of effect you guys have on the world.. I'm watching your guys right now on live web cast.. from Perth in Western Australia, and I gotta say.. I'm damned impressed with your accomplishments..
Well done guys and congrats..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
from Nasa
t e0 1.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/hemati
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Hematite is formed by sediments. Since a primary way of sediment creation is by water, it stands to reason that the presence of hematite is a possibility that water is/was there. I don't really know the mechanics of how it's formed (not a geologist), but from it's molecular formula of Fe2O3, I'd imagine that the water combines with iron to form it.
0 1/ast28mar_1 .htm/ www.minerals.net/mineral/oxides/hematite/he matite.htm
Some links about hematite's composition and how NASA thinks it'll lead to indications of water existence:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y20
http://www.mindat.org/min-1856.html
http:/
Demona's Law - "User data expands to exceed available bandwidth." ("User data" being pr0n, mp3's, vob's,
When acid-rich water comes in contact with sulfidic rock Fe bearing bodies, such as pyrites, it takes up some of the iron (leaching), which water then, being iron laden, comes into contact with a favorable deposition environment, then then iron drops out. Geochemistry is very complicated here on Earth, and I'd love to get a chance at some off-world geology.
On Earth, there is a suggested analog: THE TINTO RIVER BASIN: AN ANALOG FOR MERIDIANI HEMATITE FORMATION ON MARS? (*.PDF)
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
Great pictures... Unfortunate that it doesn't show the scale. How far from the lander to that crater?
From earlier reports, the lander stopped about 330 meters from the first bounce, so the crater is within 500 meters of it, eminently reachable if they get the rover problems fixed soon.( Just don't touch that heatshield if it's still hot! Tssssss!!.... "Houston, we have another problem..") On the other hand, NASA would certainly want to avoid any unnecessary source of non-Martian contamination, heat-sterilized or not. Best to keep looking for them good old-fashioned "organic" Martian craters.
Still, I'd be in favor of at least driving close enough to get a decent look. Who knows what they might dig up?..
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Correction: it was not 2 signals interfering it was the same signal taking two different paths to earth. One straight and one bouncing of the Mars surface.
Said so on NASA TV.
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.
Except that it's only the fifth that lands right...
In fact, it's the first one that hasn't landed upright...
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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.
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
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
Pics at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html
Beagle 2 was just a (relatively) cheap addon to Mars Express. I don't remember the exact value, but I ssem to recall that the cost of beagle was less than 10% of the overall cost of the mission - the main goal was the cartography mission.
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
Disclaimer: I work at JPL, but not on the Mars rovers...
Why don't they automate the mission control tech a bit more...
General observation about JPL and NASA: they're slow to adopt new technology. This is a good thing. They tend to wait until a particular technology is very mature and clearly useful before adopting it in a mission-critical environment. Individual scientists and engineers are welcome to experiment with all sorts of cutting-edge tools for number crunching, visualization, simulations, etc. - and they do - but mission-critical technology is kept deliberately as simple as possible.
(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?
Honestly I think that voice communication is far more efficient - most people can talk faster than they can type, and when you know the other person you gain more information from their tone of voice, etc.
(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 can think of many reasons:
1. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): If you relied on software to make sure you were following the procedures, that software now becomes mission-critical. The software has to be totally foolproof. It takes about 10x as much effort to write robust, clean, documented, verified code as it does to toss off a quick web app.
2. An online form or "procedure wizard" couldn't possibly be smart enough to anticipate any possible deviation from the rules that might be necessary.
3. With rules printed on paper, you can spread them all out in front of you. You can circle things with a pencil. You can make corrections or notes.
4. You don't have to waste valuable computer screen real-estate. Even though many of the mission people have 2 or 3 monitors, they want every last pixel displaying interactive real-time information, not opened to a web browser displaying a list of rules.
77 pictures from Opportunity are now available for viewing.
Well, having worked at NASA for a few years in the mid-1990's, I can say that they do in fact use computers to manage some of the information. If I remember correctly, at the time I worked there, they were putting some of their reference materials (drawings of various parts, etc.) on computer. The reason being that the reference materials cover every part of the craft in excruciating detail, so computers provide a real advantage here: with paper, you have mounds and mounds of dead tree, and it's hard to find stuff.
However, putting some stuff on computer doesn't make sense. Paper is just more reliable than computers. For real-time, mission critical stuff, you probably want it on paper because you simply can't afford to deviate from the procedure because someone's computer crashed. Certain things have to be done at certain times for the mission to succeed. (Or so I've heard -- my work at NASA did not ever entail visiting mission control for anything.)
And to answer the question about printed documents becoming obsolete, well actually it shouldn't be much of a problem. They launch that thing into space and then it takes a while to get to Mars. Opportunity landed today (January 24th), but it was launched July 7th, giving them six months to print out stuff and make sure the paper was in order. Since they are not changing the construction of the craft while it's in transit, it's safe to say it should be easy to make sure the engineering specs are up-to-date.
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.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html
First Color Photo is here!
Actually i think the count is more like
Mars: 28 Earth: 9
I think the Soviets set the record for most failed mars missions in row. Their first 12 missions failed taking nearly 14 years to get a successful mission in 1974 with Mars 5.
They don't call it the death planet for nothing.
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.
before anyone gets excited because of "Justin Wick"'s signature, realize he is not really a NASA scientist but a little intern guy.
:)
The above poster is correct. I state clearly in my Slashdot info that I am a university student. I have been working on MER since I was a freshman, and I have spent the last 3 years developing portions of the GDS software used by the scientists. (GDS = Ground Data Systems). I am one semester away from my degree in Applied Physics.
Yes, I am an intern, however I have been doing this long enough as to actually have some idea of what I am doing. When I post in a semioffical capacity, I try to stay within my realm of expertise, or synthesize information that was stated previously by someone who knows what they are talking about.
I'm merely trying to provide some "insider" views to slashdot. The big guys on the mission tend to have a few better things to do than post to slashdot, so I do
Cheers,
Justin
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.
No, I'm not sure it's proper to say that cause and effect would be violated. They would exchange places creating an "antiphysics," the most critical part of which would be the Anti-Second Law of Thermodynamics.
:)
However, what that would do is violate the Priciple of Covariance. The laws of physics would be variable with one's frame of reference.
Since it was the Principle of Covariance that led inevitably to the Theory of Relativity (or the Theory of Invariants, as Einstein prefered); and since the Theory of Relativity has withstood considerable test, one may reasonably assume that the covariance hypothesis has also withstood test.
I'm afraid I've always considered superluminal phenomenoa being treated as a mere issue of cause and effect to be a bit of a dumbing down of the subject.
KFG
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.
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.
Wrong, spirit's landing site is known to within half a metre: check it out yourself if you don't believe me.
But even with this knowledge, current technologies don't have the landing precision to land near to the rover. Opportunity landed 24 km from the target spot, spirit 13km IIRC. Those are considered very precise landings. And if you would send a rover that could drive 24km say in a few weeks, why bother trying to fix a rover that will only be driving 100m/day (and I'm being optimistic here).
I think it would be cheaper trying to cover the martian soil with lego bricks (if you get a large volume discount:)).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey