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A First Look At Meridiani Planum

Posted by timothy on from the tastes-like-mordor dept.

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."

11 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Spirit is indeed a software problem by LedZeplin · · Score: 5, Informative
    After some more diagnostics, the flash memory is ok, and it's looking to be a software problem.

    2106 GMT (4:06 p.m. EST)
    "Spirit is still serious but we are moving toward guarded condition now," rover project manager Pete Theisinger reports. "I think we got a patient well on the way to recovery." In the past day, engineers have determined that Spirit's flash memory hardware is OK. A leading theory today is that a portion of the rover's software simply couldn't cope with all that was happening on Wednesday when the trouble began.

    Source

    1. Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem by orionbelt · · Score: 5, Informative

      You are indeed wrong. The two rovers are identical (PDF file). And indeed, they are trying to make sure that what happened to Spirit won't happen to Opportunity as well.

  2. Re:Dark? by netfool · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. Not exactly first look @ Meridiani by calmdude · · Score: 5, Informative

    A high-res color picture can be found here

  4. Mars Raw Images by Ghotli · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Spirit: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit. html
    Opportunity: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportu nity.html

    There are currently 132 Raw Images from Opportunity. Spirit has beamed back 1,855 Images.
    Enjoy.

  5. the ground material by rebelcool · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    -

  6. Re:Using the images by adlai · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Good News for Water Search by schnarff · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  8. Re:Good news? by Stween · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Rover CPU by dekashizl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Corrupted flash file system? by kune · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.