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A First Look At Meridiani Planum
loconet writes "After Opportunity 's successful landing on mars , NASA has recieved the first images showing the landing site revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars. The terrain is darker than at any previous Mars landing site and has the first accessible bedrock outcropping ever seen on Mars. The outcropping immediately became a candidate target for the rover to visit and examine up close."
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No dude, aliens have much cooler things to do then lurking over silly little cars. Like, getting drunk off Listerine. Aliens LOVE Listerine.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
I love the analogy of the landing being a "300-million-mile hole in one."
Taken from spaceflightnow.com: As suspected overnight when the first images arrived on Earth, the rover has landed inside "a 20-meter diameter" crater, Squyres reports. The crater is estimated to be "a couple of meters deep."
A high-res color picture can be found here
Here is a link to most of the raw pictures beamed back. It's alot of the same thing, but if you just can't get enough of Mars.
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u nity.html
Spirit: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit
Opportunity: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opport
There are currently 132 Raw Images from Opportunity. Spirit has beamed back 1,855 Images.
Enjoy.
its considerably darker and smoother than the usual dusty red rust we're used to seeing and what spirit sent pictures back of. Take a look at the smoothness of it and the peculiar channels and grooves that have been carved into it.
On mars at least, we've never seen anything like it.
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I'm pretty sure they aren't copyrighted, since US government info can't be by law; (ianal, of course). Thus, you should probably be able to mirror the images legally.
It is probably a good idea to keep the attribution to Nasa/JPL there one way or the other, since you wouldn't want people to think that was just a picture of your barren backyard.
I would think that, given that the landing site was selected for its hematite content, and given the extreme smoothness of the landscape (indicative of erosion of some sort, possibly water-related), this is the best chance yet we've had to discover evidence of former large quantities of water on Mars. Let's all keep our fingers crossed -- imagine what that'd mean for our understanding of the universe, and the chances of the NASA budget going up!
;-)
Not to mention, of course, our chances of getting free shrimp.
How To Get Humans To Mars
I agree that it would probably be more interesting to drop the rover near some mountains or other geologic features, but I think there may have been big problems if the rover was a little off its landing site. It could easily get smashed up if it smacked into a cliff or something. I'm no expert, but NASA probably chose these sites to increase the probability of a successful landing.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Venus is an interesting planet. The trick is how to design something that will survive for more than a half-hour on the planet's surface. NASA has already done extensive radar mapping of the planet's surface from spacecraft in orbit around Venus.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Because some of these are in the "build phase". Like Mercury Messenger which will spend time around venus before moving on.
Messenger's Site
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I thought that the Hubble was going to come down because part of the requirements that the Shuttle will ever fly again are that it carries enough fuel to get it to the ISS in an emergency. This puts it onto a very different orbit from the Hubble, throwing out any chance of future repair missions to the Hubble. The Hubble will die before there is any replacement suitable for sending up a standard maintenance mission.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Can anyone explain to me why all the pictures look like they're taking through a fisheye lens? Why couldn't they have used a better camera?
The pancam has a field of view similar to a human being. It is 16.8 deg x 16.8 deg (0.293 x 0.293 radians).
The navcam has a wider field of view for use during driving, and to look at the immediate surroundings. It is 45 deg x 45 deg (0.79 x 0.79 radians).
You are seeing pictures from both of these cameras, because they are using both of these cameras. The navcam gives the appearance of a "fisheye" lens. The Pancam is in fact an extremely sophisticated and detailed digital camera, and it has two eyes to create stereoscopic (3D) images that make you feel like you're on Mars. Wait a few days and you'll see some more of these images. Click the link below to see some of the good ones from Spirit.
P.S. Anybody know how to make a degree symbol in a slashdot post?
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For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
I wonder what cpu is used on the rovers..
They use a radiation-hardened RAD6000 32-bit RISC chip made by BAE Systems. See their Press Release here. Bookmark the page in the link below.
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For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
if memory serves this already happend , on one of the apollo missions , they went to the crash site of one of an earlier probe that hit the moon a few years earlier, they removed the camera , what was left of it anyway, and brought it back to earth!
i would post a link or something but i'm way to lazy for that...
As far as I understood Mr. Theisinger, the problem is that programms and config data to operate the Rover are stored on the flash file system. The rover has no other mean to store data permanently. The computer is normally shut down at the end of each Sol (Mars day). So without the mounted flash file system, the Rover can't be fully operational. The software reboots after ca. 40 minutes in the failure mode. Now it seems, that they have to send always a command which prevents the reboot after 40 minutes. Probably they have to reformat the flash RAM, but before that the must transmit they complete flash-ram image to analyze, the cause of the problem. Transferring 256 MByte (2 GBit) over 60 million km is quite a challenge, even if you can compress it. Transmission for a satellite pass are around 20 MBit and the direct to link to earth (estimated 4 hrs a day)is 13 kbit/s maximum, which results in an estimated 182 MBit maximum per day. So we have a maximum capacity of 200 MBit per day, if all goes extremely well. So if half of that capacity could be indeed used for the flash RAM and the compression rate is 0.25, you need ca. 5 days to get the complete disk image. The real numbers will be of course different, but I think this estimation is in the right range. I think, that Theisinger's 3 week prediction before operational mode is not to pessimistic.
By magnifying the pictures, the pixelization causes rectangular artifacts (heh) in the picture that make them look somewhat artificial, i.e., manufactured.
In addition, the site authors seem to have quite an imagination when interpreting ordinary but unusual natural structures as artificial.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana