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.

Comments

Thanks from NASA

[QuantumFTL]

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

Re:Thanks from NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations on your recent score for Earth. Now we are only behind 17:20.

Re:Thanks from NASA

[QuantumFTL]

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..

Austrailia has been a wonderful friend to the US, and the Canberra installation has been invaluable to many space missions. Thanks for all your help from down under!

Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

Re:Thanks from NASA

[Docrates]

Well, tell you what. The impact that this acomplishment is having ripples well beyond the US. I'm a Panamanian (from Panama in Central America, not the FL one) and I've been looking at the webcast all night (when NASA TV decides to broadcast since they cut off shortly after the thing landed instead of just letting the feed on)

I've been following the whole thing very closely to a point where I've neglected some other duties. I'm just fascinated by it and would expect a hell of a lot of people all around the world feeling the same way.

Congratulations and thanks on behalf of humanity.

Re:Thanks from NASA

[Frymaster]

Congrats on conquering the death planet :). Two for two. Nice job NASA/JPL!

mars isn't the "death planet" - that moniker is reserved for venus:

• surface temperature of 480c
• surface pressure of 96x earth's
• clouds of sulfuric acid

now that's a death planet... and yet the soviets managed to drop a lander on it successfully way back in 1982 and even sent back some pictures

Re:Thanks from NASA

[Tablizer]

mars isn't the "death planet" - that moniker is reserved for venus:

Despite the heat and acid, Venus is actually *easier* to land on because the atomosphere is so thick that probes can almost float down as if under water. It would be like a gradual transition between our atmosphere and the ocean.

The hard part of Venus is lasting, not landing.

They didn't even lose the signal!

[Robotbeat]

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).

Hematite

[FooAtWFU]

OK... Anyone with scientific knowledge care to indicate how hematite in an area indicates the past presence of water? I'm fascinated, but clueless.

Build your own Rover, sweet Lego kit!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

http://shop.lego.com/

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.

Fresh crater

[photonic]

Congrats to JPL, i can't wait till the pictures arrive in a few hours. I am now watching the briefing on NasaTV and it seems they landed some 24 miles downrange from bullseye, probably not because of navigation error, but a due to strong winds. This is still ok for the science, which is aimed mainly at a region of some odd minerals that have something to do with water.

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!

Re:Fresh crater

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are impressive pictures.

With the sort of resolution that's being achieved, would it be crazy to look for Beagle?

It's an idea that gets floated around on slashdot whenever hi-res pictures are shown, but really--those pictures are impressive. You can make out the shapes of things--they're not just one-pixel blips.

Re:Fresh crater

[MachDelta]

Looking for Beagle (or any other lost craft, like the polar lander) is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Sure, they *can* zoom in on Spirit far enough to see parts and impacts and whatnot - but that's because they know exactly where it is. The probable area you'd have to search to find Beagle is massive (especially if something went wrong). Its not like you can take a wide angle shot and go "oh, there it is, zoom in on that" either. They'd need to cover every square inch of the possible landing sites with their highest resolution shots - something that could take years.
We probably will find Beagle eventually, but probably not with the cameras we have up there currently. The little lost puppy will just have to sit it out for a decade or ten.

Re:Was this posted from Mars..?

[Burstgoof]

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.

Salvage Rights

[core plexus]

That brings up a question: Who has salvage rights to that stuff? I remember an old law of the sea where if you find an abandoned vessel you could salvage it, and mining claims are also that way in many countries. I know of the various Treaties that seem to prohibit ownership of extraterrestrial property, but does that include parts of landers and failed devices? When the Shuttle disintegrated and the parts fell on Texas, the U.S. Government prosecuted anyone who collected a part and did not turn it in. Of course, Texas is on Earth, in the U.S. The Moon, Mars, etc. is a whole nother country. Speaking of stuff crashing into planets, this is the anniversary of The COSMOS 954 Accident

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets

Re:Salvage Rights

[el-spectre]

Well, taking parts of Columbia would be a) interfering with a gov't investigation and b) potentially very hazardous to your health... sounds like a decent reason to outlaw it.

Re:Salvage Rights

[rijrunner]

The US government.

Salvage rights do not apply to government owned vessels and equipment.

A good case in point would be the CSA Hunley. Even though it's government no longer exists, all of the CSA's naval assets were transferred to the USA as part of it's surrender. So, when they went to salvage it, they had to get permission from the US government. Same applied to the CSA Alabama.

In space, it is even more restriction as the Space Treaty automatically make the national government the owner of record for anything constracted by it's citizens or corporations. It has not been run through and courts yet, but it might get a little wierd as things start picking up.

Viking missions easier than Spirit & Opportuni

[robot captain]

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.

Re:How to deal with time lag

[WhiteBandit]

Well the 7 second delay you are speaking of in terms of radio is artificially induced to catch callers and other people on the air from using swear words or anything else deemed inappropriate by the FCC.

A comparison I heard fairly recently while studying radio waves and the speed of light:

If there was a symphony being performed at Carnegie Hall (New York City) and it was being broadcast live over the radio, someone listening to the performance on the radio in Los Angeles would actually hear the sound before someone sitting in the back of Carnegie Hall! Interesting take on speed of light versus speed of sound.

Anyway, this was slightly off topic. Forgive me ;)

One question about their mission control tech:

[MMHere]

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.

Re:One question about their mission control tech:

[tmortn]

The voice comm system works great. You have to understand this is not like using a phone at home. Every position in that room has an open loop ( open party line basically ). Same for the various "back room" teams. The TV feed I think is a combination of a commentator loop and the flight loop. There are probably dozens more and like I said they are all open party lines. There is a whole protocol behind how loop traffic is managed, for one its highly likely not all positions have talk capacity on the flight loop.

It helps somewhat if you understand the organization scheme. Flight is the peak of the pyramid under which you have the front room operators. The back room teams are generally related more or less to a front room position. Thus flight recieves reports from the front room and a few select remotes, the front room positions talk amongst themselves and recieve reports and have discussions with various back room teams. As the information under discussion gets finalized and or needs command decisions from flight they then bring it to the flight loop. Thus for most every status report you hear on the TV there has been a great deal of discussion going on you didn't hear on the various other loops.

You are not limited to monitoring one loop at a time... you can punch up several and the importance of various traffic then dictates what you pay attention too. Off hand I think the TV feed is made up of a commentator loop and the flight loop. Each of those people in the front room likely has numerous loops punched up and is listening to a chacaphony of traffic that most people would find all but impossible to follow. Its deffiantly an aquired skill.

The closest expereince I can ascociate to monitoring voice loops in a NASA flight ops environment is like IRC where you are simultaneously monitoring and occasionally addind to the traffic in multiple rooms.

Sometimes it would be nice if voice loops had the same easy access to the discussion history as online chat but by and by voice works much better than chat rooms could ever manage. However I grant one day I think you will see chat lines creeping into the process. Alot of loop traffic invovles long nuemonics, settings, serial numbers etc... and voice communication can often break down at that point and you wind up resorting to alpha Beta charlie lingo for clarity and multiple reads and read backs.

As for procedures the reason they are printed instead of on screen is due to the same issue that faces E-books. On screen procedures are not very friendly. Secondly screen real estate is at a premium.. if I want to look at multiple pages of a printed procedure its a matter of desk/floor/wall space. If I want to on a monitor I am limited to my screen real estate which is far less and far more expensive to add additional space.

A few Spirit links about flight software

[Deton8]

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!

Re:I Love this

[snake_dad]

Almost every space mission has brought back spectacular new findings, complete surprises and incredible images... Think of Voyager, the amazing pictures of the big planets, Apollo bringing back samples to determine the origin of the Moon, Giotto looking at Halley, Venera bringing back pictures from Venus, and so on...

Still, the MER's are a tremendous achievement, and it is incredible that these days we can see the pictures coming in to a computer in mission control, LIVE on the internet! Woops, gotta go, next briefing is about to start :)

Images and Excitement

[QuantumFTL]

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

Interesting question

[EachLennyAPenny]

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? :)

I had the privilege

[rk]

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.

Re:Was this posted from Mars..?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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/spi ri t/20040121a/Lander_Pan_Sol16-A18R1_br2.jpg

The only "proper" Marsdial I've seen that shows green and blue is this one:

http://www.redrovergoestomars.com/marsdial/spiri t_ color_348deg_1503h_006sol.htm ...So it must be possible to get true colour images?

Re:Was this posted from Mars..?

[BoldAC]

Sweet pictures! Thanks for posting.

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/128287399-6 .jpg

Anyway, thanks for the pictures... they kick ass. You deserve double Karma points. :)

AC

Re:How Long?

[shaneb11716]

How long before the two rovers drag race each other?


They already have.