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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."
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 ;)
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.
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.
You may be right but there are a lot of things that the rover wants to inspect beforehand, the heatshield for example that touched down just a few hundred meters away. They will go down eventually even if the rover might get stuck but not before they visited some targets ontop of the crater.
It's funny
on slahdot you can be branded troll for pointing out something. I once saw a picture on the MSSS site that looked like an entire area was replaced with "dunes". First, the dunes all looked alike including the size, shape and even the same little erosion lines running from the peak... all of them, some thirty or so were right next to one another so it was hard not to notice how similar they were...they were pasted copies of the same "dune". What was being hidden? we will never know but I have seen what NASA will do to hide anything that might not fit their paradigm.
If NASA finds life, wouldn't that be the end of the search for life? Hmmm... I wonder why they discredit any signs of life.
If I got paid to look for something... you better believe I'd never find it.
I know the parent is marked as a troll but if you look at this image (WARNING: 26.7mb image) parts of the rocks and sand (notice the wavy ones near the middle) look a bit rendered and not natural, though it's porbably due to some software enhancing to make the image look better (it's already passed through a filter to give it color, it might as well be touched up even more) or maybe my eyes playing tricks on me.
Who can decode the ancient Greek message ?
Or is it Russian ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.