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Mars Rovers Update
BoldAC writes "CNN is reporting that engineers will upload a software hack to decrease the recent power drain plaguing the rover Opportunity. The hack works by reducing the power supply to a poorly functioning switch." p3tersen writes "Opportunity has photographed a blue martian sunset (it's blue because of the optical scattering properties of dust in the martian atmosphere). In other news, the rovers are beginning to experience power supply problems due to the accumulation of dust on their solar panels."
I use Gentoo; how does this affect me??
"The hack works by reducing the power supply to a poorly functioning switch."
You know, they could just tell the rover to use its ACPI functionality and go into standby and spin down its hard disks....
print 'Hello world!';
http://compbrain.net
Actually it was revealed that the panel was sticky. The NASA engineers don't want to discuss about the source of stickiness.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Is this before or after the NASA guys visited the Rekall Corporation?
if we send men to Mars, hopefully they are wise enuff to get out of the rover (in space suits) and clean the solar panels. ;)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Another problem with rovers lasting forever is that they may gain AI, build themselves up with other technology, and go on a killing spree until a witty captain of a spaceship stops it.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
It just plain makes sense, when you think about it.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'm sure a bunch of half-baked ideas from random yahoos would get them much further than anything their silly engineers could come up with.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Once the robots find water, they could spray it on the solar panels to clean the dust off...
I suggest a solar panel Zamboni! If for no other reason that Zambonis are cool and a space Zamboni would be a magnitude cooler. Imagine the great PR if NASA could send back shots of there Zamboni working on another planet.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
would it be possible to set them into "violent shaking mode" to solve this?
Yea, well, but i suppose accumulated dust attenuates way more light than a few thin plastic sheets, no?
;)
And i know what i'm talkin' bout coz i park my car outside and never clean it
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
I like the way how you try to appear intelligent and how you capitalize "bad idea" to show what an eleet hax0r you are.
Ah, yes. My AC Fan Club at work again. I've been suspecting for a while that I have a stalker.
The subject line is the title of a diatribe, and in general, as a title, it should be capitalized.
If I wanted to be an "eleet hax0r", I probably would have capitalized the "A", for the full effect of "A Bad Idea". But I didn't.
Furthermore, I'm not gonna be much of a hax0r anyway; I'm an electronics guy, not a programmer. While I can make "Hello, World" in everything from TI BASIC to 680x0 assembly language, my programming style is so much brute force and ignorance that Microsoft keeps on trying to hire me to write Outlook security patches.
So there ya go.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Actually, this is justification for having women accompany the men to mars. ;>)
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
yea, i know what u mean, thats exactly what pedestrians say just before i smash 'em to pieces
I'm sure some guy with a squeegee will jump on it in no time.
E.G. Any at all
There's plenty of atmosphere on Mars. Just because it averages about 6mbar compared to 1bar on Earth doesn't mean there isn't enough. What do you think perpetuates those enormous dust storms way over there? Kittens?
it's blue because of the optical scattering properties of dust in
;)
the martian atmosphere
That's Scullys Xplanation.
Mulder says different.
Or it's because NASA's mission faking division forgot to photoshop the
images before releasing em.
siggy played guitar
They're so incredibly smart, in fact, that they don't even need to convert metric measurements to the archaic system they insist on using.
Go NASA!
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
On Soviet Mars, the Pink sunsets are BLUE!
Why slashdot? Why not?
Damn it! Rudy Giuliani made it to Mars first and
got rid of all their squeegee guys!
People like to conflate measures of "toxicity" to make it sound more scary.
Pu238 is an alpha emitter, which means you can stop the radiation with a sheet of paper or a few inches of air. If, however, you happen to inhale that Pu238, and it just happens to be of just the right particle size, it can lodge in your lungs. At that point, you have an increased risk of various cancers. In this one particular application, Pu238 is fairly dangerous.
Chemically, it's not particularly toxic.
The odds of actually getting particles of just the right size distributed world-wide and lodged one particle per human lung are preposterously low, of course. It's sort of like expecting all the air to rush out of your house and suffocate you because all the molecules just happened to move the same way.
The analysis for Cassini concluded that even in a worst case scenario, stipulating all the various improbabilities needed to release any Pu02 in the first place, an area of about 7 square miles would be affected in excess of existing EPA regulations. Assuming all of the Pu affected people on land, the effect would be about 1 extra millirem over 50 years, a period in which you normally get about 15,000 mrem. Excess cancer deaths would have been about 120 (and before you say something like "even one life is too many", please check some OSHA statistics for accidental causes of death). I'll neglect the argument about the effect of extremely low doses of radiation here; there's some evidence such might even be beneficial. But we'll stick with the 120 number assuming a linear effect far below the threshold at which anyone has been able to measure an effect.
It's pretty simple.
Do you really think we would give the aliens on Mars nuclear capabilities? How long before they created their own warheads and held the people of planet Earth hostage for 1 million dollars?
My goodness, not even Mars is beyond the reach of Disney!!