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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."
It's fantastic to see that both Rover's have now landed successfully on Mars (with Spirit to become operational again soon :) ).
This, that Colin Pillinger is discussing sending more Beagle II probes up to search for signs of life, and that President Bush has announced man will set foot on Mars within my lifetime, can only be considered good news :)
Space flight now has a color photo of the area which has a red tint to it and a decent article about how the surface looks like talcum powder.
Very interesting stuff. I think we should launch another 6 or 10 of these things all over mars after fixing the problem spirit has.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Could the outcrop be part of a craters rim. The pictures seem to show that Opportunity is in some kind of shallow depression?
siggy played guitar
Just some thoughts.
Ben
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
What's very interesting about the Opportunity landing is that they managed to come down in the middle of a 20-meter diameter crater on the Martian surface. This means that they can study sub-surface details that would normally be beyond the reach of the rover's instruments. Also, the crater isn't very steep, meaning that they should have no problem driving out of it and into the next crater over.
Meridiani Planum is certainly one of the more interesting parts of Mars we've yet seen. It will be interesting to get a better understanding of what's causing all that interesting surface topography as well as exploring the composition of the surface.
Point green types who are anti-space at this. After all, it's not like money spent on space was shoveled into rockets and fired to Mars. (No comment on the proposed manned mission.) Think of all the work on light-weight instruments that perform under hostile conditions--Turn them around and monitor the environment on Earth. We'd better learn how other planets work, because this one didn't come with a man page!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm not exactly happy with how this turned out... but be kind, it's my first time ever using the QTVR tools. :)
Here.
It's on .mac, so it will probably be overwhelmed soon enough. :( Enjoy.
I know that was meant as a joke, but I can't wait until the day when we have rovers or people up on Mars who can go check out some of these things.
I'd really like to see what the Viking landers look like after all this time.
And while I'm at it, I'd just like to say that NASA has done an excellent job not only of putting equipment on Mars, but of keeping us informed here on Earth. Kudos all around.
This has really reinvigorated my interest in space exploration and I hope that it has had a similar influence on others, especially those kids who are interested in science and technology.
Not really. You want to land something on the surface so you can examine the rocks, soil, atmosphere, etc. up close. However, you don't want to send humans because sending humans would make the mission far more expensive (humans would need a lot more food, oxygen, and energy than a rover, and also the humans would have to be brought back to Earth). With these requirements, you're pretty much left with landing an unmanned vehicle on the surface. By the way, NASA has been doing an excellent job with a very small (by space exploration standards) budget. These Mars rover missions are among the most efficient missions NASA has ever had.
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>I suppose that Opportunity may have the same software issue.
IIRC, the software for each rover was independently developed, and therefore totally different. I might be wrong, though.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Considering that Spirit seemed to work fine for seveal days, I suspect they will just scale back the missions a little bit until they figgure out what is wrong. If nothing else, since Spirit got outside succesfully, we can be pretty sure that Opportunity can leave normally.
The fix needs to be found (assuming it isn't some other hardware...) so they don't run into this again. However this gives some hope that they can work while looking for the fix.
Wow im glad you dont work for nasa
it might look plain but they saw stuff from the MGS that made them think there might be some of that hematite stuff which could mean there was water (although it could also mean volcanic activity)
and since we have 2 rovers, we sent 1 to a rocky place, why not send 1 to a flat place?... and now it seems we've landed on the most intrest place on mars that we've ever seen.. For example.. WE HAVE BEDROCK! We've never had that before.. all the previous landers landed in areas with rocks and sand that could have came from other crater impacts and dust storms and whatnot.. this bedrock was FORMED where it is rigth now, its also in big chunks, so we can examine the layers and the history of its formation. Also the soil is really weird, its almost powdery and darker than anything we've seen before.. this is the most amazing mission to mars so far.
I'd really like to see what the Viking landers look like after all this time.
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Probably simply covered with dust and with color paint and cables faded because of UV exposure. It certainly won't corrode with the very low amount of oxygen, and the total absence of water in the atmosphere.
This has really reinvigorated my interest in space exploration and I hope that it has had a similar influence on others, especially those kids who are interested in science and technology.
Agreed entirely. However, I'm a little sad that NASA puts all the hype on Mars alone. Sure, exploring Mars is cool and potentially useful for future colonisation programs, but I reckon that planets such as Venus (to understand how the runaway greehouse gas effect happened), Europa (to map whatever's under the ice, possibly an ocean teeming with life) or Io are much more interesting from a science point of view.
But I guess Mars-Mars-and-Mars-and-only-Mars is better than nothing to get people excited about space and justify spending money on exploration
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If the flash memory cannot be recovered - and it will take quite a while to figure that out - the team must develop new procedures to operate the entire mission with the RAM memory.
/. - you have no Flash memory but oodles of RAM. You have to go to sleep when the sun goes down. How do you reprogramme Spirit to deliver the objectives in these, new circumstances?
Okay
I ask out of curiosity and humility - I have NO idea!!
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Someone has spent to many hours finding shapes in the clouds!
:-)
There's a cool name for that - 'pareidolia'. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame has got a page on it, or more precisely on how he found Lenin on his shower curtain.
Some people seem to be more susceptible than others. I seem to be immune - in all these pictures of rocks from Mars, I've yet to see a single alien building or artefact. I'm very disappointed.
marsquestonline
There are also other Mars terrain flyovers, and current large pan and zoom pics from Spirit and Opportunity.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Don't forget about Cassini which will reach Saturn this year and drop a probe into Titan's atmosphere and land on the surface. It's taken 7 years for it to get there.
FYI, that picture is a computer rendering of Mars, "created using Bryce and MOLA topographic data from NASA" (info here). Which is not to take anything away from it, because it's a stunning image, but let's not try to pass it off as a real photographic image.
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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.
Do the Math. NASA's annual budget is $15.5 billion, and Bush is asking for an increase of $200,000/year for five years (that way he can say the word billion). That amounts to an increase of 1.3 percent in NASA's annual budget. Big? Big?? What's big about that? Is that even news?
The last professional estimate for a manned Mars mission was $500 billion and that hasn't changed. In the meantime, we've built a space station as the first step to Mars, but Bush is cancelling American participation. Make Sense?
What's changed is that this time Bush can rely on the media not even bothering to ask for a budget estimate, but to crow like stupid children "we're going to Mars!" Yes, we were, once upon a time when the professionals had control over NASA's budget, and California used to have a budget surplus too, until Bush's Enron buddies got their hands on the money.
Bush's rhetorical method, which he uses over and over, is to cover his agenda with an undisprovable assertion about some other grand project. So Bush cancels the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, the Hubble, the budget allocations for every existing space science project, in trade for the gooey phrase, "we're going to Mars in 2030," but meanwhile, NASA's budget decisions are to be made by a newly appointed committee of former Enron executives from Bush's administration. Look it up.
NASA is the next California, where a healthy economy and a billion dollar surplus ended up in the Cayman Islands accounts of the Enron boys, and the new governor is having to ask the people to borrow $15 billion from Wall Street just to fund the current year's budget. Big Mouth, Little Money, Control of NASA's Budget to Texas friends.
When Bush canceled Clinton's funding for hybrid car research, he made a big speech about the future "hydrogen economy" and asked for a small increase in Clinton's existing funding for fuel cell research. Big Mouth, Little Money, Oil Interests Happy.
When Bush wanted to attack Iraq, it was the undisprovable claim they had WMD. Ignore the professionals, fight for your agenda, get the money for your corrupt friends. NASA is just the next target on the pillage list. So celebrate the Mars Rovers and Shuttle while you can, dream about 2030, watch the cancellations, and wait for the bad news, because the funding for science is done, and the money is going with the Enron Boys.