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

YAY

[dnahelix]

woo hoo

2 for 2

[Hello Kitty]

And did we not need this on the anniversary of Columbia? Yeah, I think so. COngrats to all involved from the /. community.

WOO HOO

[dnahelix]

yay

Re:Thanks from NASA

[identity0]

Wait... I have a lower Slashdot number than the guy who put 2 rovers on Mars?

WAHOOOOOOO!!

Oh, and thanks for advancing mankind's knowledge of the universe ;-)

Re:Was this posted from Mars..?

[kfg]

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

OT: Your Sig

[Jaysyn]

"Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas"

The Monorail at Disneyworld, right?

Jaysyn

Mars Exploration Project Soundtrack

[Elusive_Cure]

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.

Re:Thanks from NASA

[cheekyboy]

As a software engineer my self (unemployed thanks to greedy idiotic managers cancelling profitable projects while wasting $100m+ on new aquisitions) , Maestro sure does SUCK a lot of ram from the machine tho, but im guessing thats javas fault, since I am a c/c++ person my self. But hey, these days, whats another $100, it buys a hell lot of ram, though not when your not working, im just waiting to go to full 2gig once I work.

A big hello to fellow .com CEOs who are living with millions of dollars... Bastards, God wont save you thats for sure.

Time to write a specification for a W32.PhuKEtradeAccounts.Virus.

WOO YAY HOO

[dnahelix]

hoo yay woo