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Spirit Rover Makes Longest Trip Yet
ivan1011001 writes "Spirit traveled just over 88 feet in an attempt to visit the crater "Bonneville" to look for evidence of water on Mars. Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way. This is longer than its earlier PR of 70 feet."
at least it moves faster than my grandmother...
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
After successfully completing a journey of 88 feet yesterday, the Spririt Mars Rover completed a journey of 88 feet 2 inches today. This is a new Mars distance record.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
it was up on a hill, and the brakes malfunctioned...
It was probably cloudy out (negating some of the efficiency of the solar panels). I hope that it finds water.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
OOOOOH, Shiny!
can't resist urge.
Go SPEED Racer! Go Speed Racer!
Sig it.
"Spirit! Quit playing in the dirt! We have 100 more feet to go!"
"(sad R2-D2 sound)"
Do we have to put blinkers on the little fella?
Eibhear
How do we know it was actually studying rocks ... maybe it was, oh, working on that Q-36 Illidium Space Modulator Death Ray?!?!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
... as there is the wrong type of dust on the ground.
Are they sure it was 88 feet? Could've been meters...
It must be Thursday... I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
What if there were an impending rock-slide and instead of maneuvering out of the way as mission control told it to, it decided to look at the shiny rocks instead and got crushed in the process?
;)
You have been watching too many SUV commercials
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way So they sent a robot with ADD to Mars?
> Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but
> Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more
> time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the
> way.
Sounds like the li'l guy could use some Ritalin! Hey stop playing in the dirt!
My grandmother in the last 5 years has had an average speed of 0.000004mph. This is because she moves only every now and then.
The Spirit rover does 0.00000000001mph on average since it landed on Mars because most of the time
it does nothing.
They need to give the remote controls to some punk kids that dont know its importance.
If they did that they would have found beagle,
discovered that Mars is just a shitty desert, overloaded Nasa's database of names for every shitty litte rock they find, and eventually drove
off a cliff giving us spectacular images of Mars!
GTRacer
- IDIC
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
88 'feet'?! You mean Mars hasn't gone metric?!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
This is almost exactly the same way that Captain Scarlet woke up the Mysterons...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It had it's left turn signal blinking the entire way :)
Computers may not yet pass the Turing test, but it's pretty good that we've managed to get them up to pooch standard.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Anyone who has tried to go for a walk with a 2 or 3 year old kid knows what I'm talking about. You want to walk, but the annoying little brat will stop and examine very carefully every piece of litter, little stone, gravel or mark on the floor. Half way through the whole thing you'll get tired and just go home.
The Spirit Rover breaks its record once again by travelling 185 feet - unfortunately, this was due to it getting a bit TOO close to the crater, and was 185 feet downwards.
Anyone who's been hiking with a 4 year old knows what that's like.
Do you have ESP?
I wonder if they used Inform for the control interface.
Mars
You are on the surface of Mars, millions of kilometers from Earth where you started your journey. The sun is rising in the red sky, only slightly easing the chill of the Martian morning.
There are some rocks here.
> look at rocks
I only understood you as far as you wanting to look at the rocks.
> take rocks
rocks: That's hardly portable.
> examine rocks
You see no rocks here.
> quit
Are you sure you want to quit? y
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
The thing is that the rover is not looking for signs of life, just for rocks and possibly signs of water. Its obvious that the aliens that control the U.S. government had NASA design it that way. The aliens don't have as much clout with the European Space Agency so they weren't able to keep the creators of the Beagle from designing it to look for life. They had to disable it once it got to the planet. This way they won't find any evidence of life that gets to the surface from the underground Martian cities.
Actually, the crater was named after the Bonneville Salt Flats, because they anticipated being able to achieve these tremendous speeds.