Mars Landers - Opportunity, Bedrock, Aerosmith?

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."

Comments

Rock This Way

[Skyshadow]

I wonder if any of the NASA dweebs tried to get Liv's number from her dad...

Seriously though, it's been a pretty good week for NASA so far, with Opportunity landing safely and Spirit slowly coming back to health.

My question is: When they locate a fix for Spirit, will they apply it to Opportunity as well? Are the two really identical, and if so wouldn't Opportunity run the risk of the same sort of major nervous breakdown that Spirit had? Or do they plan on leaving well enough alone?

Oh, Sure, Like I Believe That...

[ackthpt]

Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image

Yeah, right, that's really Tatooine, if you look closely you can see Luke's uncle's 'farm'. in the distance. I'm pretty sure there some sand people messing with these rovers. At least when the rovers burn out the Jawas will be able to clean things up.

Obviously they didn't launch rockets to put those there, they used the same hyperspace portal that George Lucas uses.

There's always Mars

[spun]

Bad economy, war in Iraq, dodgy dossiers, terrorists on the loose, no WMDs, Gov. Schwarzenegger (I live in California...), rising national debt, companies fleeing offshore in droves, corporate scandals, high unemployement. I'm depressed.

Then there's Mars. Drama, excitement, scientific adventure: I feel proud of our messed up little species. Stuck somewhere between monkeys and angels, we manage to pull off some cool stunts once in a while. Go Team!

Re:There's always Mars

[ehiris]

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."

Bedding plane

[Party_Pack]

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 :)

Re:Shame

[ttldkns]

After being launched into space, experiencing many Gs, travelling hundereds of thousands of miles to fall onto a big rock, bounce around and then to be controlled from earth... I think its a wonder they both work at all.
Kudos to NASA for doing so well

Message from Opportunity...just in (1 of 5040)

[djupedal]

The original message was received at Wed, 28 Jan 2004 17:50:53 -0500
from neomail03.traderonline.com [10.222.132.7]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----

(reason: 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown)

----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to neomail01.traderonline.com.:
RCPT To: ... User unknown
550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
Reporting-MTA: dns; neomail02.traderonline.com
Received-From-MTA: DNS; neomail03.traderonline.com
Arrival-Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 17:50:53 -0500

Final-Recipient: RFC822; Opportunity@nasa.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: DNS; neomail01.traderonline.com
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 17:50:54 -0500

From: Opportunity@nasa.com
Date: January 28, 2004 2:52:34 PM PST
To: earth@nasa.com
Subject: Hello

The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.

I can hear the envirowackos now!

[leftie_hater]

"Opportunity is contributing to global warming on Mars!"

Open Source the Rover Code ?

[ntsucks]

Why doesn't NASA Open Source this rover code? Not for the outside world to contribute to the development, but for review. The collective intelligence of the open source community could certainly provide productive and insightful reviews. Perhaps problems such as file management could be avoided. At the very least the open souce community would be able to document weak points in the design that could be improved or avoided in production use.

Its not like this is proprietary, for-profit code. I helped paid for it. Its for the good of all mankind.

If nothing else, I would love the chance to learn something from NASA. The rover code might be as beautiful as the images coming back (or not!).

Re:NASA isn't concerned with being slashdotted the

[the frizz]

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.

Re:Opportunity got really lucky

[linoleo]

if we could have picked any landing site on mars, it would be Opportunity's.

Actually, if we could pick *any* landing site, there are *a lot* more interesting ones on Mars to choose from. You have to decode Nasa-speak - what they're really saying is: "to be on the safe side, we always land in very flat regions, which tend to be (geologically speaking) rather boring. We are thrilled to have stumbled upon a flat region that looks *different* from all the other flat regions we've landed in before."

In other words, we've graduated from Kansas to Oklahoma. The Rockies, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Rift Valley, Himalaya, etc. of Mars are still waiting for us to develop more robust landers and capable all-terrain robots. Check out ESA's first Mars Express images for a taste of some more dramatic scenery. Can't wait till we get a rover into *that*!

- nic