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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
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]
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.
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]
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
I hope you aren't trying to imply that this is somehow faked, like how people foolishly think the moon landing was faked, in which case I would give you a lecture of how "rediculously ignorant that is" and how "we would be better if people didn't act as if everthing is a conspiracty."
So, assuming that is NOT what you meant, I will give you a good answer:
The Deep Space Network is a world-wide network of radio dishes that NASA uses for sending and receiving communications from (you guessed it) craft in deep space. Some of these dishes are 70 meters in diameter! NASA said that "all eyes are on Mars," refering to this network, so all the resources of this network were focused on Opportunity. Also, the Opportunity rover had been transmitting just a simple signal, not a complex TV signal. Therefore, using some pretty well-written signal processing software, the Opportunity rover's signal was recognized, yes, all the way from Mars. It's not an easy thing, as you seem to understand, but JPL and NASA and the folks from the DSN are quite capable and have years of experience with such things.
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
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.
before anyone gets excited because of "Justin Wick"'s signature, realize he is not really a NASA scientist but a little intern guy.
:)
The above poster is correct. I state clearly in my Slashdot info that I am a university student. I have been working on MER since I was a freshman, and I have spent the last 3 years developing portions of the GDS software used by the scientists. (GDS = Ground Data Systems). I am one semester away from my degree in Applied Physics.
Yes, I am an intern, however I have been doing this long enough as to actually have some idea of what I am doing. When I post in a semioffical capacity, I try to stay within my realm of expertise, or synthesize information that was stated previously by someone who knows what they are talking about.
I'm merely trying to provide some "insider" views to slashdot. The big guys on the mission tend to have a few better things to do than post to slashdot, so I do
Cheers,
Justin
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.