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Homing In On Opportunity From Orbit
An anonymous reader writes "Finding its lander inside a 20-meter crater, NASA has further homed in its latest lander's location and a major science target for the Opportunity rover using high resolution orbital cameras from 400 km overhead. The lander's parachute even casted a shadow nearby this target [another 150 meter crater] during descent. Earlier, each bounce of the Spirit rover could be imaged, along with its backshell, heatshield and parachute debris. Even with dust and weathering, this method could find Pathfinder and Viking [barely], and a technical discussion with pictures is at Malin Space Systems, which designed the Mars Orbital Camera. Because of uncertainties in location, however, it would take 60 years to find the lost Mars Polar Lander, but they may look for Beagle if conditions aren't too dusty."
It's like as soon as GWB came into office, the folks at NASA have really come into their own as space farers.
Yeah, it's all thanks to the great GW Bush! Maybe we'll even find WMDs on the Moon!
Why, even Slashdot submitters are learning to talk like our Smirker-In-Chief:
The lander's parachute even casted a shadow nearby this target....
Or as Dubya might say, "Is our children learning?"
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
btw, I like this excerpt, about the 'Spirit' lander:
>Encouraging developments continued for Opportunity's twin, Spirit, too. Engineers have determined that Spirit's flash memory
>hardware is functional,strengthening a theory that Spirit's main problem is in software that controls file management of the memory.
>"I think we've got a patient that's well on the way to recovery," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager Pete Theisinger at NASA's
>Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
and if it where buggy, they'd at least have a patch within a couple of hours
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
"It's like as soon as GWB came into office, the folks at NASA have really come into their own as space farers."
I was thinking virtually the same thing. Only, I had correlated it with the filming of The Simple Life.
"Derp de derp."
successful mission upon successful mission
No.
Let's face it, most of the info that anyone who tries to leave this atmoshpre gives us
is so 'sugar coated' that after a while it starts to taste awefull in our mounths. And on
top of things, they only share 'limited info', keeping all the good stuff inside own
closed doors (even if NASA says they are forth comming, there is much much we never
will see...).
And no, I don't mean, build things, more a 'Think Tank' group, who tries to focus on
solving troubles/things, elaborating on ideas, finding solutions... etc; and at the end of they
day, everything is Open to everyone, to comment on & contribute.
*I know, I would like to contribute, if I where able to*... anyone, else?
ps. if yes, you know where you can find me ;-)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Every scrap of data from NASA science missions get released through the Planetary Data System, eventually. It's just the science teams that actually propose and run the missions get first crack at the data.
If you think this isn't fair, stop for a moment and think about the years of blood, sweat and tears that go into these missions. Do you think it is fair then that the scientist with the best internet connection gets to analyze the data first, just because he has a great internet connection? I guarantee you that would end space research because there's no payback for the teams who actually design the missions.
And if you think they did a crappy job with the analysis, well, eventually all the raw data is released and everybody gets a crack at it.
Its amazing how we've got satellites and rovers covering Mars at various locations. Its pretty different from the very first Viking landing. We can see the soft sand around Opportunity, the marks the rovers airbags made, and that there arent any martians running around, at least for now.
e s.htm>Venus landings</a> were more surprising to me because I thought we never landed on Venus. I guess its time to look forward to either landing people on Mars, or pushing spacecraft further to Mercury. The temp there is actually cooler than on Venus, and the lack of atmosphere will make it more like the moon.
The <a href=http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImag
Or maybe its time to start desiging spacecraft and robots to try and land/splash on Jupiter. Given the gravity, temperature, radio/radiation noise etc. we might not even be able currently to pull that off.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
+++ linux-user/debian/cli&kde/projects/slicker/dev/da
@@ -4,2 +6,2 @@
I kinda was wondering, if there couldn't be a 'OpenSource Space Initiative'
--Let's face it, most of the info that anyone who tries to leave this atmoshpre gives us
--is so 'sugar coated' that after a while it starts to taste awefull in our mounths. And on
++Let's face it, most of the info that anyone who tries to leave this atmosphere gives us
++is so 'sugar coated' that after awhile it starts to taste awful in our mouths. And on
top of things, they only share 'limited info', keeping all the good stuff inside own
closed doors (even if NASA says they are forth comming, there is much much we never
will see...).
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
's/would/wouldn't/'
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
does anybody have an idea what the 2 intresting lines are in the descent images. the lines are located in the main crater that can be seen in the descent images?
To see what's in store for planetary probes, have a look at this excellent index of missions. First, note the large number of operating missions - good. Now let's take a closer look at the rather smaller number of missions in development:
Hubble SM4 is cancelled. Herschel, Planck, and Rosetta are European; Astro-E2 and Solar-B are Japanese. Most of the NASA missions are near-earth: AMS, Cindi, Glast, Gravity Probe-B, Sofia, Space Tech 5/6/7, Swift, and Twins. Stereo is a solar observatory. That leaves just 4 missions that could be considered "planetary" probes: Deep Impact (cometary), Mars'05 Orbiter, Messenger (Mercury), and New Horizons (Pluto).
Now watch where the budget axe falls next... Messenger and, hopefully, Deep Impact should be too far along to cancel at this point, and anything with "Mars" in its title should be safe, but I do fear for New Horizons. Their problem is that flight time to Pluto is just too damn long for any president to care about. Perhaps they could arrange for a Mars fly-by and re-name the mission "Mars and Beyond"...?
Be that as it may, that (plus Cassini which thank God is already en route to Saturn, and Stardust's sample return) is *it*. Yes, there are many exciting missions under study, but given the new budget priorities set by Dubya, "under study" will buy you nothing unless it's got the Moon or Mars in it. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I foresee many, many worthwhile science missions, large and small, getting squeezed out. If we're lucky, ESA and Japan will take up some of the slack.
- nic
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
http://yo-duh.whitesidefamily.net/nasabsod/
Excerpt from spaceflightnow.com:
"Then, as we were getting ready to send the next beep command, the vehicle decided to communicate with us in one of its nominal communications windows at which point we got a little bit of data that had very little information in it. In fact, originally we started to decode it and it was from the year 2053 and we thought 'this is not good!' Eventually we found out the data was corrupted, and we were all cheering at that point because there weren't a lot of scenarios that would put us in 2053 on Mars."
Conspiracy theorists and UFO extremists are gonna have a field day with this.
Table-ized A.I.