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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.
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.
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.
I'd really like to see what the Viking landers look like after all this time.
...
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