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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.
And did we not need this on the anniversary of Columbia? Yeah, I think so. COngrats to all involved from the /. community.
The next band I form is going to be called Meridiani Planum and the Opportunities.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
At first they thought it was rolling slowly for a very long time. Maybe the Martians were kicking it around & poking it with a stick. ;)
I was watching the whole thing on the webcast. I was personally disgusted when cnn & the others cut it off to run some interview with Nicole Kidman while it was still rolling across the surface.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
NASA should set Opportunity on a course to make the 6600 mile trek and kick Spirit's ass for acting up. A little sibling rivalry can't be too bad.
Reminds me of the old botwar games where you program your bots (rotate, move, or shoot) and watch them go at it.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Hurry and go press control-alt-delete on Spirit!
How long before the two rovers drag race each other?
I had the privilege of seeing Opportunity start its journey, and I'm glad to see it made it to Mars okay. Great job, JPL/NASA, and congrats!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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).
For the first time in my life I'm feeling completely amazed at the things we are finding out today. The space program is so exciting, finally we're pressing on to something we really don't know about. The re-envigorated space program, along with exciting news in robotics, make me feel like we're finally moving into the future.
There's no point here, I just felt the need to gush
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
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]
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.
Some junior officer of the Martian Interplanetary Defense Force just got evaporated via Phaser Death Squad for failing to down the extraterrestial invasion craft.
I was watching the NASA TV live and there was an unexpected discovery on Mars. A few minutes went by and they showed a video with the Rover, and then an animation made presented a birthday cake for Sean O'Keefe. THIS REALLY SCRARED THE HECK OUT ME. I thought it was small little green men roaming around Mars. This scared everyone and especially almost gave Sean a heart-attack.
But you know, the whole time lag thing kept sticking in my mind... When you hear them say "We have landed on Mars," that event actually happened 10 minutes earlier that the telemetry indicates it did.
What's the best way for humans to deal with the inescapable fact of the speed of light here? Should we report things (for the history books and all) as happening 10 minutes earlier than they appear to?
Aw, heck, what do I know? I'm still weirded out by the 7 second delay on radio. :) Go NASA!
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
While overseeing the landing of Oppurtunity, Al Gore quipped to the NASA engineers that he actually invented the propulsion engine.
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Replica of Mars Rover Opportunity made of Lego Modified to Contain a 2004 PC in a 1984 Mac Stops Responding, Debugging Dumps Indicate Possible Flaw in Linux InstantOn Boot Loader and/or Flash Controller.
Its nice to have someone who has actually been to Mars congratulate the team at JPL. I'm sure he has lots of stories to share.
"The landing procedures achieved a best-case scenario" and the worst case.... landing directly onto Spirit
I kep thinking about those "airbags". Are they filled with "air", and if so, perhaps we can send a lot more probes to Mars, and sooner or later we'll have sent enough "air" there to start breathing!
I still think they should have sent some kudzu to Mars. Then, by the time that Man actually gets there, he won't need a helmet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
NASA have employed a very cunning plan - send Spirit as a decoy, wait until they're sure the Martian army are screwing around with it, then land Opportunity on the opposite side of the planet.
Now what does a hermaphrodite have to do with finding water? Oh ... wait, never mind.
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]
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But a no-fault tone is not a fault tone, so they received both no-fault tones and no fault tones.
As Gov. Schwarzenegger watched the landing from JPL, he commanded the scientists: "GET YOUR ASS TO MARS!"
A reporter reminded Gov. Schwarzenegger that "You blabbed Quaid! You blabbed about Mars!" Schwarzenegger ignored the remark, responding "I've never even been to Mars! What the fuck did I do wrong?"
Later that evening, Schwarzenegger pleaded with Cohaagen to increase the oxygen ration on Mars, by saying: "Giff des people eair!!"
Finally, he shot his wife, Sharon Stone, through the head, closing the press conference by saying "Consider dat a divorce!!!"
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
As soon as we finish drilling in your rock garden we'll roam off. Keep the heat shield and air bag with our compliments.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I find all this Mars coverage to be a pleasant distraction from the redundant SCO nonsense. I hope NASA starts testing their warp drive soon.
"Derp de derp."
It's about time they got a Mars rover to land right. I was starting to think NASA was playing Gunbound with those things.
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
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.
True, you have to be moving pretty fast to get discrepancies of this magnitude in simultaneity. But correcting a misconception by replacing it with another misconception in the name of education isn't really productive IMHO.
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.
Your resoning is flawed:
:), and rocketry as a whole were all results of NASA innovations (not to mention within-the-next-decade cancer drugs and other crystaline drugs they are experimenting with in zero G on the ISS eventually). And no, we didn't decide to send men to the moon to create pocket-phones, but low and behold it's an offshoot. Who can possibly tell what else we have to find out there?
1. Let's say, for argument's sake, there was no 9/11 and no subsequent wars. We'd have (at least) $87 billion more in the budget. So in that parallel universe you believe that homeless people are all living in co-ops?
2. I do believe there were quite a few impoverished people before the founding of NASA. The creation of NASA did not take a sandwich out of a homeless guy's hand.
3. Velcro, GPS, Cellular Telephones, discovery of the ozone hole which arguably launched the widespread efforts to fix our planet, Tang
4. And... does everything in your mind have to deal with profit? So, if we find unlimited diamonds and platinum on Mars/Asteroids/etc, then it's worth it? If it's "just a few microbes thus PROVING we are not the only inhabited planet in the universe" then it's no big deal?
5. Lastly (I could be wrong on this one - if this is the one I mess up then fine), I believe GWB wants to lower taxes (not that I agree with lowering them either, but I'm just correcting you on that...)
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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
Air? Wonderful. Now all you need is some way of kick starting Mars' core, to produce a stronger (and complete) magnetic field. ;)
Otherwise you'd have to keep shipping air to Mars as it gets blown away by solar wind. Might get kinda expensive. Maybe you can work something out with UPS though, I hear they have good deals for long-term customers.
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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
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!
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.
(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?
Because IM is even slower than voice comms. Remeber why people want headsets to communicate during multiplayer egoshooters?
(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?
Because nothing changes at the last minute. Also, paper is more failproof than a computer app.
I have to admit, this approach does actually have some merit, but not because of the reasons you mentioned here, but rather because it cuts down on the voice communication needs.
BTW - pagination doesn't necessarily imply printed docs, they might be using an app that doesn't use scrolling. Not scrolling might be actually a good thing, because all you need at this moment is there, easily visible, without having to navigate - cuts down on possible error sources...
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Naturally he was there, he did after all, invent spaceflight.
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
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 .
Just replace the bold words with: "Genetic Information," and "you know what."
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
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.
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
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.
And just an hour ago, I got a call that my programming job has already been offatmosphered to Martian programmers willing to work for trinkets and shiny beads...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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
Having worked on three missions in the past (though not any Mars missions), here are some random thoughts. The communications done via voice are fairly routine (unless something has gone wrong). The polling is always arranged to happen during a quiet spot, so there is plenty of time to get it done, and clear procedures if someone has the audacity to say "no go" ;)
Since it is routine, you can casually half listen to the comm, waiting for your call sign, and in the mean time concentrate on doing "real work" uninterrupted. Having to sit there constantly reading IM messages, waiting for yours, would in my opinion be a serious distraction. And as others have mentioned, most people can talk far faster than they can type.
Printed procedures? An easy to keep, and easy to access archival log. Easy to mark up, and for the artistically inclined, frequently acquire lots of extra decoration. I will admit that at times during a mission, I felt like I was drowning in paper. Certainly some of it could be done online. But I suspect that I am like a lot of people, and like to print out long documents to read them, rather than reading them on a computer screen.
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.