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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."
This statement wins points for profoundness. Unlike any ever seen on Mars? I thought that was the idea of the mission, to see what's actually up there!
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
IIRC 'planum' is Latin for 'plain', which Meridiani Planum certainly looks to be from those pictures. Wouldn't it have been more worthwhile to drop this rover near some mountains, or like Spirit, in a crater? Seems like there would be more geologically important sites to investigate in those types of terrain. Also, shouldn't the heat shield make a crater of its own? After it seperated it just slammed into Mars without any kind of parachute. Is it close enough to reach and would it be worth investigated the hole it's impact created?
http://www.aaplblog.com/ - News about Apple Inc.
That guy can fuck anything up, given a decent chance.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
They would need to survive for more than a couple of years. Even if the day they landed someone found a breakthrough that allowed their recovery, it would take more than a couple years to impliment it.
That means we would need to plan on sending enough supplies that they could survive for many years even if we can't.
If these are standard astronaughts, I refuse to be a part of sending them on a one way trip where they will starve to death (or other death do to lack of supplies). These people are too smart and too well trained to throw away like that. I don't object to the one way trip, so long as they can keep busy doing real science until their die of nateral causes. There is plenty of science to do on Mars, so supplies are the problem. (Yes it is a high risk deal anyway, but if they die in an accident that is different from deliberatly killing them)
Now if these people were skum that we wanted to get rid of, I wouldn't object to a starvation trip. I'm not aware of anyone on death row (who really commited the crime he is accused of...) who is qualified to do research on Mars, but I'd be willing to send such a person on a one way starvation trip. I'd make sure there was plenty to do before he died, but anything that doesn't need human intervention isn't in range for him to destroy out of vengence.
it's not clear that this wasn't a means of hamstringing NASA in the long run...
Just raise the taxes on crack.
+3 Infomative!?? WTF??
Trying to put 2 and 2 together, it sounds like the file system on the flash storage was corrupted by software. That could prevent the system from properly accessing the drive, prompting an endless cycle of reboots.
Two things about that bothers me.
Why would the OS / driver allow software to corrupt the filesystem?
If the system can function without the flash memory ("cripple mode"), then why couldn't the system properly identify (or at least report) the failure, instead of going into an endless loop of reboots?
Finally, if it were a software problem, shouldn't they be able to play back the exact sequence of commands to a duplicate machine at JPL and reproduce the problem?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
It seems like a really lucky shot anyway
Not really. If you roll around a bit, like the air-bagged mass probably did, you are more likely to land in a depression just like a ball is more likely to stop in the lowest/lower spot of a lumpy surface.
Table-ized A.I.
Mars Polar Lander, which was lost in 1999, was designed to land on the edge of the polar ice cap and dig for ice.
======= ~\_/~\_O Burmese