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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.
The next band I form is going to be called Meridiani Planum and the Opportunities.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
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?
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]
While overseeing the landing of Oppurtunity, Al Gore quipped to the NASA engineers that he actually invented the propulsion engine.
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!
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
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]
Google told me about this Powerpoint, from the horse's mouth. Apparently, the conceivable mechanisms for hematite formation are:
I) Chemical precipitation - extensive near-surface water
1) Precipitation from ambient, Fe-rich water (oxide iron formations)
2) Precipitation from hydrothermal fluids
3) Low-temperature dissolution and precipitation through mobile groundwater leaching
4) Surface weathering and coatings
II) Thermal oxidation of magnetite-rich lava
I guess it's just that many of the possible mechanisms for hematite formation involve the presence of water. Though I guess thermal oxidation of magnetite in lava doesn't necessarily. Presumably they want to either rule that possibility out or identify whether the hematite in fact indicates recent or distant past presence of liquid water in the area.
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
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!!!"
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."
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
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
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...)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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