Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!
:
This is by far the most overrated Slashdot comment since Beagle II won't this year's Most Successful Embedded Device competition.
Re-read the phrase : "[a] landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars"
1 - Several probes have been to Mars already and photographed several different landscapes
2 - The landscapes we've seen so far were all similar
3 - That last probe saw a landscape significantly different from all the other.
Therefore, the phrase describe the situation accurately and you win your profoundness points back.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.