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."

Comments

Better Panorama

[inio]

A much better (and much larger) version of the panorama has been available at the NASA site for days.

Re:Better Panorama

[turnstyle]

The big one is really big (26.7 MB!) -- it's a composite of 258 individual images.

I suggest right-clicking the link and saving-as (to your local drive) if you want to give it a look.

And it is amazing, but my computer goes into deep churn for a long while before it finally opens.

For those of you not aware

[Anonymous Coward]

a summary of the Mars Rover mission can be found here

The plane

[roalt]

According to the article, the following plan will opportunity follow:

1. Make a round on the edge of the Endurance Crater to make measurements and see how steep the crater is.
2. If (with little risk) opportunity can drive in it and back out, it will do so before doing the following points, otherwise, do the following points first before moving into Endurance.
3. Examine the area around the heatshield, to check both the heatshield useful for future missions and to look in the deep hole the heatshield made into mars.
4. Examine some other place it passed before (but then did not have enough time) to check the composition of a rock that is different than others.

Re:Hmm

[josh3736]

Just how much battery power is there to last it?

Theoretically unlimited -- ah the joys of solar power! :)

Re:interesting formations

[ImTwoSlick]

Is it created by wind? Or maybe water?

Most definately wind. Those are essentially small sand dunes. A small body of water doesn't have enough surface area to get wave formations like that.

Don't follow that link - reason below:

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Ya know, considering the marssurface.zapto.org 'appears' to be a user's home computer, why not "slashdot" it ? ;-) Might as well get peoplesprimary.com as well (most likely the same person anyway)...

Re:Mars Rover gets us free Shrimp!

[afish40]

There's no real hurry. The offer is May 10th, so we have from 2-5pm tomorrow. Too bad there's no Long John Silver's around here...

Re:Hmm

[TheTimoo]

No, from what I've read, the Mars Rover has no way of cleaning it's solar panels, which means dust will settle on it and eventually render them useless for producing power.