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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."
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...)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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*