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

Hopefully fewer Mars-rats this time

[ewg]

Hopefully there will be fewer Mars-rats chewing on the cables this time. It would be a shame if they did to Opportunity what they're doing to Spirit!

Re:Hopefully fewer Mars-rats this time

[deathcow]

Dude, I told you, it wasn't Mars rats, it was the gang trouble, see.

Too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it doesent have big lights to light up the place for an alien party :)

Waiting for the "big" discovery.

[Bender Unit 22]

All I am waiting for are these guys to find "machinery" there too.
Who knows what the pixelated'n'smoothed zooms will bring. :D

Re:Waiting for the "big" discovery.

[Jade E. 2]

Whoa, that guy's really onto something. The top artifact in this picture is obviously a fury artifact from Activision's Battlezone! (I can't find a screenshot or my Battlezone CD... someone want to post one?)

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

[mrsev]

Bet they tried to compile the 2.6 kernel!

Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem

[shepd]

>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.

Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem

[bluGill]

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.

Re:Spirit is indeed a software problem

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Yep. That's real-time Java for you ...

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.

Well done NASA!

[Stween]

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 :)

Re:Well done NASA!

[0WaitState]

Bush has announced man will set foot on Mars within my lifetime, can only be considered good news

Paul Krugman put it best, referring to Bush's Mars initiative when he said something along the lines of "can't we save a great deal of money and take the photo now of Bush in an astronaut suit?"

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.

Surreal

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars

Or perhaps it landed right on top ot Beagle II, and that they see is the charred scattered remains of the ESA probe.

Re:Surreal

[Cranky_92109]

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.

Re:Surreal

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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 ...

Not exactly first look @ Meridiani

[calmdude]

A high-res color picture can be found here

Space Flight Now has a color photo

[Jordy]

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.

Re:Space Flight Now has a color photo

[kippy]

Very interesting stuff. I think we should launch another 6 or 10 of these things all over mars after fixing the problem spirit has.

I'd suggest sending 4-6 humans next. As advanced as these probes are humans will be able to do vast amounts more science. Not only will they be able to do in 5 minutes what it takes the probes 2 weeks to do, they will be infinitely better equipped to deal with the unexpected.

The tech has been around for 30 years. I'm glad humans to Mars is a priority again since dollar for dollar and pound for pound, it's a much better investment.

Props to the people on this project but I know for a fact that at least a few of the people on the Spirit/Opportunity team agree with me after seeing a presentation they gave at the local planetarium.

Governor Schwartzenegger was there

[mikeophile]

He was quoted as saying, "Now get your ass to Mars!"

Re:Governor Schwartzenegger was there

[kippy]

His support is exactly what Mars exploration needs. Anyone who can terraform the planet in 2 minutes as opposed to 2 thousand years knows what he's doing.

Opportunity Gets A Hole In One

[WombatControl]

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.

Where are the Watches?

[DumbSwede]

revealing a surreal, dark landscape

I don't seeing any limp, melting watches.

P.S. Arizona You're now considered "surreal"

IIRC...

[criordan]

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?

c'mon

[TitanOfire]

we landed there first why didnt the robot come with an american flag planting deally? It could have sent back an image of the flag and been like "One small step for man, one giant leap for robots"

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.

Light story on the solar cells

[AndroidCat]

I noticed this story Mars Solar Photovoltaics Offer Earthly Hope on how the work into making solar panels for space is going to pay off on Earth.

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!

Re:Oh wow...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Using the images

[adlai]

I'm pretty sure they aren't copyrighted, since US government info can't be by law; (ianal, of course). Thus, you should probably be able to mirror the images legally.

It is probably a good idea to keep the attribution to Nasa/JPL there one way or the other, since you wouldn't want people to think that was just a picture of your barren backyard.

QuickTime VR

[Trillan]

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.

Monolith Fun

[Helmholtz]

I want to be watching when the tech turns on the high-pitched squeal sound right when the rover gets close to an outcropping that looks strangely like a large monolith.

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. ;-)

What are the challenges of a RAM-only mission?

[Demerara]

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.

Okay /. - 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?

I ask out of curiosity and humility - I have NO idea!!

Re:What are the challenges of a RAM-only mission?

[SharpFang]

End all your activities 3 hours before sunset, fill up your batteries and doze through the night, keeping the RAM on battery backup.
Reformat the flash with high redundancy, store your data in 3-4 copies, mark bad bytes and exclude them from further usage.
Set up bootstrap to aim the antenna at Earth in the morning, to download complete OS as the first daily procedure.

Most probably the first thing though. Just run on battery backup overnight.

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.

Corrupted flash file system?

[Dan East]

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

Re:Corrupted flash file system?

[kune]

As far as I understood Mr. Theisinger, the problem is that programms and config data to operate the Rover are stored on the flash file system. The rover has no other mean to store data permanently. The computer is normally shut down at the end of each Sol (Mars day). So without the mounted flash file system, the Rover can't be fully operational. The software reboots after ca. 40 minutes in the failure mode. Now it seems, that they have to send always a command which prevents the reboot after 40 minutes. Probably they have to reformat the flash RAM, but before that the must transmit they complete flash-ram image to analyze, the cause of the problem. Transferring 256 MByte (2 GBit) over 60 million km is quite a challenge, even if you can compress it. Transmission for a satellite pass are around 20 MBit and the direct to link to earth (estimated 4 hrs a day)is 13 kbit/s maximum, which results in an estimated 182 MBit maximum per day. So we have a maximum capacity of 200 MBit per day, if all goes extremely well. So if half of that capacity could be indeed used for the flash RAM and the compression rate is 0.25, you need ca. 5 days to get the complete disk image. The real numbers will be of course different, but I think this estimation is in the right range. I think, that Theisinger's 3 week prediction before operational mode is not to pessimistic.

Re:Rover?

[Seehund]

If these are standard astronaughts, ... These people are too smart and too well trained to throw away like that.

Judging by the term you use, these people would be less valuable than astronauts.

Astronaughts: n. Expendable space exploration personnel sent on one-way journeys.

Hey, I've grown to like your misspelling. :)

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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