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Second Opportunity For Mars Rover
An anonymous reader writes "The Mars Opportunity rover faces a challenging survey around the rim of the stadium-sized Endurance Crater. In addition to what was previously described as the critical choice to go into the steep crater at the risk of not being able to get back out, this "most spectacular view we've seen of the Martian surface" may aid in answering how deep an ancient sea or lake might have been and how long it lasted. Endurance Crater appears much older and thus may pre-date arrival of significant standing water."
They got that far allready? Damn!
Well, then its time for me to push the button.
Cant have them snooping around my "lasers" you know.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
A much better (and much larger) version of the panorama has been available at the NASA site for days.
a summary of the Mars Rover mission can be found here
Quick! You have until 5pm to get the free shrimp at Long John Silver's!
They promised that if NASA found evidence of water on Mars that they would give free Shrimp to the whole country. They followed through! (Now if only Mir had hit that Taco Bell sign...)
n/t
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
Just to clarify, if there are any JPL or other people who were involved in the mission reading my parent post: it was a very well executed incredible mission and I am sure that it will produce a lot of data for scientists to pore over for decades. I am just impatient to know the question we all want to know: did life exist there?
This makes me wonder just how long exactly the rover will last. Another month? Year? Just how much battery power is there to last it? Will it last simply until a martian storm hits it? I personally think this is a great mission and every nugget of data is opening new doors. I would like to see it last for quite a while, even if there is no press coverage. P.S. The earlier comment about adding a mic to record the sounds on mars may seem trivial, but I say it'd be a great idea and inspire wonder (and a neato MP3 ;)
Life as we know it requires water to develop. Finding history of water on Mars is the first step in the seach for life. Hopefully this mission can influence our leaders to spend money on a project to search for life, which would be beneath the surface, which would be much more expensive. I think the missions were a great success as they found evidence of water and rallied the interest of the general population to push for more funding.
or does that panorama look very much like something done
on a hollywood special effects set?
There was more than one goal. It would have been nice to find existance of life, but this is a stepping stone for bigger things. Sending robots to mars and successfully landing them gets you good information for future missions. Especially if you want humans to get there. I would rather have some robots be the first to try landings on a different planet.
should have been included on the rovers to lower themselves down steep slopes.
True, but didn't we know that there was history of water on Mars? Just look at any detailed picture of the surface. The markings of liquid are unmistakable. The ice caps are water.
Well we didn't have conclusive evidence that formations on Mars were sculpted by H20. In fact, a competing theory is that many geologic features you see (including seasonal channels on crater walls) could have been carved by CO2 flows.
I'm about to go to work, but you can definitely dig around google for evidence, I found a few sites by just typing in CO2 flows.
The overarching goal of the Mars Exploration Rovers was not to determine if there was life on Mars. The goal was to determine if water existed in liquid form in the past. Hematite and cross bedding visible at the Opportunity landing site finally gave us the conclusive answer we needed.
Now that we know water did exist on the surface of the Red Planet, we can try to tackle new questions such as; Did life ever exist? What happened to the water?
.. at the bottom of the crater. ( seen here, 2M file). Is it created by wind? Or maybe water? Something like that can be seen at the bottom of a shallow round body of water on Earth.
A microphone? I would chance to say that all you would hear -- besides silence -- is the occasional sound of the wind slamming into the Rover. Or maybe the microphone could be sensitive enough to pick up the martians?
That incredible view is just fake
Look carefully to the shadows of the stones at the left side and at the right side... They are different!
Yeah... too bad Batman had to use his belt the day they were launching the rover. His bathook would have been really useful.
On a more serious note, the logistics of firing and using a grappling hook are far outside the realm of 'faster, better, cheaper' methods. Simple is where it's at, and Rube Goldberg devices to pull the rover out of pits are not on the menu.
I do hope they choose to go down... I wanna see what that ripply stuff at the bottom of the crater is made out of.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
then wouldn't there be enough science there to study until the end of the rover's life? They spent what seemed like a very long time just on that one small crater where the rover landed in. Granted, a lot of the initial time was used for calibration, systems tests, etc, but they spent a lot of time there. If this crater is the size of a stadium, I think it is safe to say that it will last them until the end of the rovers lifespan.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
I am going out on a limb here and say that this entire mission has really been a big disappointment to me. Although it did enhance our knowledge of the planet considerably, it did not even attempt to verify if there was/is life on the planet, which is the end goal.
The mission exceeded all it's objectives. I don't understand how that can be considered a disappointment. Detecting life, as discovered by the Viking missions, is not always an easy task. Instead, these two rovers have transformed our understanding of Martian geology, for the first time given unrefutable evidence of water's presence, traversed the greatest distance on any body's surface by an unmanned vehicle, and sent back some damn cool pictures. All for a fraction of what the war in Iraq is costing us as taxpayers.
Finding life may be the "end goal" for public relations, etc., but I'm sure there are plenty of planetary geologists that have found these missions to be among the most important endeavours in the history of unmanned missions.
Why would you be interested in an audio recording of another planet? It's not like you're going to hear someone whispering, or a jet flying by overhead. I'd venture to guess you'd hear very little with the exception of some occasional wind. Maybe if a storm broke out, which I imagine would be something of a catastrophe for the mission in general, you might get some other noises. Otherwise, nothing happens on Mars. There really isn't anything to hear, and adding a microphone seems like a waste of space and resources. I'd rather they add more cameras... maybe video cameras.
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RumorsDaily
lol - you're tryin REAL hard to get people to follow that dumb link aren't you ;-) Well, just so ya'all know, i followed it so ya'all don't have to. It opens up to a page that (using javascript) grabs the contents of your clipboard (if it can) and sends it off peoplesprimary.com or some such place. Afterwards, it forwards you to peoplesprimary.com where a picture of a half naked lady appears with what appears to be fesces on her face and an embedded audio loop that says something to the effect of you looking at gay pr0n -very- loudly. Note: it also seems to lock up mozilla - haven't tried with explorer yet...
;-) Might as well get peoplesprimary.com as well (most likely the same person anyway)...
Ya know, considering the marssurface.zapto.org 'appears' to be a user's home computer, why not "slashdot" it ?
MR: *blip* SCANNING AREA
Houston: Receiving data.
MR: *beep* FOUND SCATTERED ARTIFACTS
Houston: (operators go quiet) Zoom in on the artifacts, Mars Rover.
MR: *bzt* REGULAR GEOMETRIC FORMS FOUND. SIZE NO LARGER THAN 5" RESEMBLING FRAGMENTS OF METALS
Houston: Ah, that's the Beagle, Mars Rover, continue.
MR: *bip*
I guess dried up river beds was refutable._ jpg_ctx_map/E05/E0502144.jpg
Finding out that there was once water on Mars...hardly something worth all the effort cosidering THE DRIED UP RIVER BEDS.
Hey did they finr anymore TRICKS OF LIGHT.
check out this picture at MSSS:http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/full
WTF is that...wind erosion?
Bwech 32 bit braincells at work? Hate to talk about karma etc but heck...
Well, if I get to deal out mod points I prefer to hand out + points, apart from the rare "overrated" if someone's really gotten too much mod on for example an extremely biased/shaky (think near-troll) view on the subject.
Read this: I was clearly making a JOKE. With so few comments it does make one wonder how 'Redundant' that is. Perhaps I insulted a right wing baggy with patches on it (yes a patch literally means a band-aid talk about revelations) or something at some point. Perhaps the expresion was used many times long ago (although I don't avidly follow Mars stories I'd be pressed hard to have missed a common joke but who knows, any URLs?)
But then again got too much karma anyway so what the heck. Rejoice. Live up to your projected mentality. Hehe I've already won that's kinda nice.
Beep Beep. Playing my part.
> NASA really has everyone believing the "dust on the panels" routine.....but if you ask me...
Thanks, but we'll ask actual _rocket scientists_ about rocket science, rather that Joe Ignorant on the internet. But we appreciate the offer!
Looks like it could be a job for the "Boys from the Dwarf" and the Jupiter Mining Corporation...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Who can decode the ancient Greek message ?
Or is it Russian ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
What we need is to establish permanent Mars and Moon colonies.
As long as we are a species that exists on one planet only, we are a species that is one errant asteroid or comet away from extinction.
I know this sounds ass backwards, but we need to get colonies setup first, the science can come during and afterwards.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The mission exceeded all it's objectives. I don't understand how that can be considered a disappointment. .... All for a fraction of what the war in Iraq is costing...
Indeed, they have. Both rovers are navigating down the path of extended missions with limited team support. NASA is being tasked to do more with less money, in less time. On the other hand, the executive office is taking more money and more of our kids to throw into the ever less productive war in the middle east, watching as oil prices (and gas prices) climb through the roof. So I agree with your response.
To the disappointed:
There are plenty of positive outcomes from funding robotic exploration of space / solar system. For a relatively small investiment the rovers have changed models of planetary evolution (at least for Mars). If, in learning about other planets, we understand more about our own, we end up benefitting from the missions in ways not calculable by the bean-counting conspiracy theorists.
If you understood the stated and imlied mission goals, you'd understand that we've done more than what the Rovers were sent out to do, and every day brings more bonus knowledge back to Earth.
-AC