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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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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
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!
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 :)
karma capped
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
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.
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
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
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.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
They already have.
I love teh int4rw3b!!!!!111one1