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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."
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!
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Too bad it doesent have big lights to light up the place for an alien party :)
All I am waiting for are these guys to find "machinery" there too. :D
Who knows what the pixelated'n'smoothed zooms will bring.
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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 :)
No dude, aliens have much cooler things to do then lurking over silly little cars. Like, getting drunk off Listerine. Aliens LOVE Listerine.
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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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A high-res color picture can be found here
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.
He was quoted as saying, "Now get your ass to Mars!"
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.
I don't seeing any limp, melting watches.
P.S. Arizona You're now considered "surreal"
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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?
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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"
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.
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u nity.html
Spirit: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit
Opportunity: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opport
There are currently 132 Raw Images from Opportunity. Spirit has beamed back 1,855 Images.
Enjoy.
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.
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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 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.
RFC2119
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.
How To Get Humans To Mars
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.
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.
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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For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.