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Mars Landers - Opportunity, Bedrock, Aerosmith?

Posted by simoniker on from the don't-wanna-miss-a-thing dept.

Iphtashu Fitz writes "As was reported last week, the first Mars rover Spirit had some communications problems that the folks at the JPL have finally managed to trace to problems with its flash memory. Reuters is reporting that Opportunity seems to be having some power-related problems, too. It appears a faulty thermostat is turning a heater on overnight without being told to do so. While NASA isn't concerned about the rover overheating, they're exploring the long-term effects of continued power drain on the second rover." The article also notes: "The first three-dimensional, panoramic images beamed back from Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image. Finally, lightwaveman points to the Spaceflight Now status page regarding new priorities for the Mars mission: "The airing of today's Mars rover news conference is being delayed on NASA TV to show the band Aerosmith touring International Space Station Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center."

3 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. Bedding plane by Party_Pack · · Score: 5, Informative

    Interestingly there seems to be some sort of horizontal feature that in a terrestrial rock could very well be stratification, which would make it a sedimentary rock. I would guess that it's more likely some sort of weathering effect. Although you do quite often see this sort of effect in dykes. Very interesting :)

  2. Re:There's always Mars by ehiris · · Score: 5, Informative

    Then there's Mars. Drama, excitement, scientific adventure

    Or as Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 2001 a Space Odyssey: "After ten thousand years, man at last found something as exciting as war."

  3. Re:NASA isn't concerned with being slashdotted the by the+frizz · · Score: 5, Informative
    No they're not.

    I work at Speedera who is delivering their content and NASA TV. At 6pm EST when slashdot posted this story the traffic increased only about 100Mbps. Articles posted on AOL, MSN and Yahoo home pages increase the traffic much more. The NASA TV live stream when Opportunity landed was 4 Gbps. There are lots of other sources that are bigger than the slashdot effect.

    See the press release for more details on the traffic and our SpeedRank index for historical performance and availabilty of NASA's site.