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."

Comments

Spirit is indeed a software problem

[LedZeplin]

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

Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem

[orionbelt]

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.

Re:Dark?

[netfool]

No dude, aliens have much cooler things to do then lurking over silly little cars. Like, getting drunk off Listerine. Aliens LOVE Listerine.

Not exactly first look @ Meridiani

[calmdude]

A high-res color picture can be found here

Mars Raw Images

[Ghotli]

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.

the ground material

[rebelcool]

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.

Good News for Water Search

[schnarff]

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. ;-)

Re:Good news?

[Stween]

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.

Rover CPU

[dekashizl]

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.