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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]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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