Mars Rovers on New Missions

mycro writes "According to CNN, the Mars rovers are on a brand new mission. Because the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers are in such great condition and 'keep going and going', NASA will be using them for a longer period of time to study water, rocks, and formations on Mars." An anonymous reader writes "Today NASA has given its Opportunity rover a green light to enter the steep Endurance crater. Looking at deeper martian bedrock layers is considered now a rich enough science payoff to weigh favorably against the real chance that the rover cannot get back out of the crater."

Comments

Normal

[madaxe42]

They make it sound like the rover is undergoing a massive risk, and doing something utterly untoward, by entering the crater - this is nothing new in science - the majority of space probes are designed for limited function, and not to survive their missions, witness voyager and the like.

Re:Normal

[shaitand]

You do understand the rovers have already done everything their supposed to do and everything now is just whatever extra we can squeeze in before they die?

Why would they stop working?

[lancomandr]

Because the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers are in such great condition and 'keep going and going'

Could someone please explain to me what exactly would cause a rover that cost $400 million to develop and deploy to fail after several months? I'm not trying to start a ruckus. Perhaps I should've kept up more but I honestly wonder what causes these rovers to cease functioning. It seems like the expectations for home robotics kits greatly exceed those of the Mars rovers. Hopefully someone can explain it.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[twoshortplanks]

They run out of power. The units are recharged by solar panels which stop working as well over time as they slowly get covered by dust and dirt that can't be cleaned off.

Also every action the rovers take place them in danger, so there's risk associated with every day of their existance - if they get stuck, it's not like there's anyone there to pull them off a rock or turn them back over.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[SB5]

The solar panels get covered with dust, and NASA has investigated solutions to stop that even using windshield washer type things and what not... all the solutions turned out to be worthless, impractical, and a waste of weight... NASA likes to equip multiple backup systems and they simply can't with that. Ultimately the solar panel cannot collect enough power and the battery dies... Mars isn't exactly a very nice enviroment to work in either... dust storms that last for days or longer...

Home robotics kits couldn't do nearly anything these guys do... We would have to send HUNDREDs of home robotics kits to even get close to the results of a couple of our rovers... The failure rate would be higher on those kits too...

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Doppleganger]

Mostly, there's the problem of power. These robots are operating with only solar cells for additional power, much farther away from the sun, and in an extremely dusty/sandy environment.

The wind, sand, and dust puts a lot of stress on the rest of the mechanical workings, too.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[ErichTheWebGuy]

It seems like the expectations for home robotics kits greatly exceed those of the Mars rovers. Hopefully someone can explain it.

Now, I am not an astronomer, but when I apply common sense to this problem, I can readily see the following points:

• home robotics kits operate on Earth, within a stable atmosphere, relatively shielded from radiation, UV, etc.
• home robotics kits do not operate millions of kilometers from their bases.
• home robotics kits did not make a journey through the most hostile and unforgiving environment known -- outer space. Temperatures that would kill a human within seconds, radiation that would destroy conventional electronic components, etc.

Now trying to flame ya, just my $0.02 is all.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Pete Brubaker]

Seems like a prime opportunity for a nuclear powered rover! I mean seriously, couldnt we have a nice little home base nuclear reactor for the thing to plug into? Perhaps it's or even housed within itself?

That might actually make it more worth the $400m pricetag.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[SirCrashALot]

The next one will. Not fission but thermal.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Sven-Erik]

And to avoid the risk of launching rockets with nuclear material, this would be perfect for basing this on a lunar base that extracts nuclear materials, process it and launch rockets with nuclear-powered rovers, probes etc.

This lunar base should probably be based somewhere around Mare Imbrium where there most likely are concentrations high enough.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[mrright]

You can thank the fear of everything nuclear for this. Usually you would run a mars rover from a RTG. That way they would have enough power to run the rover continuously for years, and also enough heat to make sure none of the components fails because of excessive thermal cycling.

But since nuclear==BAD, they have to run the rover from a solar cell which gives only a tiny trickle of power during the daytime and none at all during the night. All components are subject to massive thermal cycling. So sooner or later either the solar panel will be too coated with dust to work, or the battery will no longer work, or components will fail because of excessive thermal cycling.

Note that all of these problems would be trivial to avoid if you had 50W electrical power and 1kw thermal power continuously, like you would get from a tiny RTG.
--

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Think how many poor people the king of Spain could have fed with all the money he spend on Christopher Columbus' search for a new route to Asia. Had the king of Spain given the money to the poor, and assuming you are an American, I doubt you would be here on Slashdot trolling about the uselesness of science and exploration.

I'm an AC, a proud AC.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[aurispector]

Sure we could process the nuclear fuel on the moon! It's easy! All we have to do is set up an entire mining and refining and launch complex complete with those P2 centrifuges the Iranians aren't using. Then all we have to do is transfer it to the launch facility and put it in a mars-bound orbit.

Seriously; the cost for producing usable nuclear fuel on the moon would make the cost of the rover look tiny.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[Jugalator]

Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Why do these comments always come up when NASA's budget is neglible compared to others? In the big picture, NASA's funding has given them a hard time to find things already, since the government need the money for military funding. Oops, weren't you just argumenting against these things?

The Federal Pie Chart

NASA gets in total $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2004. Compare that to the billions in the pie chart above.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[david.given]

hey hey kids, and what happens when;

a) the thing blows up in launch before you get it out into space. = some shit on the bottom of a sea bed somewhere (yes I know there is little risk of it going into the atmosphere.)

They're in really, really tough boxes. If your booster explodes, you comb through the debris, find the RTG still intact in its box, and recycle it --- they're expensive. (This has actually happened.)

b) you get nuclear waste "stuck" somewhere on top of a rock.

It's in a really, really tough box. It's not going anywhere and it won't leak.

c) you use a shortcut with nuclear fuel. Sure it might be better "now" but in principle running things of solar is damned fine engineering. Not only that, but any tech advancements that are made for space (remember the public is paying for all your little space toys, while people starve no less) can filter down to people everywhere.

I'm sorry, this paragraph makes no sense. RTGs are made of nuclear fuel, that's how they work. Yes, solar panels are good engineering, but RTGs are far more suitable for solving the job at hand. Yes, the public is paying, but space exploration is a pathetically tiny amount of money compared to what's spent on welfare or the armed forces, and the extra knowledge gained by extending the lifespan of the probe probably outweighs the (tiny) extra expense. Yes, technology trickles down, but solar panels are fundamentally only useful for certain specialised tasks on Earth, and they're approaching the theoretical maximum efficiency anyway; there are a lot of tasks for which RTGs --- even on Earth --- would be really handy. And there isn't any research being done into those because people think 'nuclear' rhymes with 'evil'.

I'm afraid everything you've said indicates that you've bought into the anti-nuclear propaganda. Try doing some research and getting an opinion of your own.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[HeghmoH]

This has been discussed to death. The people working on these rovers are very smart, and they surely thought of this idea. Wiper blades imply a hefty wiper-blade subsystem, meaning less weight available to devote to other subsystems. Moreover, the solar cells are merely the first system likely to fail; find a way to keep them alive indefinitely, and you find something else that will die (such as the rechargeable batteries) in short order.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[foidulus]

What is even more interesting is that the interest on the debt is about 4.5 times what we spend on education, and about 18 times what we spend on NASA. Maybe we should reduce that number first, gives more money for everything else.
My offtopic 2 cents.

Re: Why would they stop working?

[photonic]

Seems like a prime opportunity for a nuclear powered rover!

I believe that's exactly the thing they want to do with the Mars Science Laboratory, to be launched around 2009. Some time ago I saw a presentation on Laser Induced Spectroscopy, which they want to include in that mission. Essentially what they want to do is to put a high power pulsed laser with a small telescope on top of the rover mast. Its light can be focused to a tiny spot some tens of meters away. You pick up the light that is caused by the heated/burnt/evaporated rock and analyse it with an optical spectrum analyser. In this way you can remotely analyse a rock in a few minutes, which costs them a whole day right now with the robotic arm.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[amabbi]

Seriously, do you think that NASA, with its team of experienced scientists and engineers, DIDN'T think of this? Considering how the Viking landers, the Voyager orbiters, and other probes use nuclear power, it's not like you just came up with a brilliant new idea. Spirit and Opportunity both have several pellets of plutonium to generate heat.

I don't know the exact reason why solar power was chosen over nuclear power. Suffice it to say, an informed decision was made that weighed all of the pros and cons of all power generating technologies.

Furthermore, this "$400m each pricetag" is a red heering. The Mars Exploration Rover Project was funded with $800m. This included Spirit, Opportunity, and their identical twin rover which remains on Earth for testing (and certainly will become a museum piece sometime in the future). It pays for design, testing, development, and Q/A. It pays for the launch, cruise, and landing on Mars. The $800m includes the cost of staffing mission control around the clock, and pays for the time used on the Deep Space Network to send and receive commands and data.

Most importantly, the $800m pays for a mission that is done right. Looking at all the cost cutting the led to the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, the inadequate testing/contingency planning leading to the loss of the Beagle 2, the ongoing problems with the shuttle... I think the cost is cheap.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[barakn]

If you try to wipe off the dust without getting the surface wet, you scratch the surface and end up with a worse problem than dust. So in addition to your $20 blades (actually much more expensive because you'd need material that survives extremely cold temp), you'd need to find a fluid system that doesn't freeze at those temperatures, doesn't boil at that low pressure, doesn't interfere with any of the scientific instruments, and doesn't dissolve the panels or wiper components. To save weight you might try to recycle the fluid, introducing a filtration system, but there will be unavoidable loss to evaporation (it has to or it will remain and attract dust), so you'll need to bring more than enough for one wipe. Then one of your fellow engineers complains because the volume, mass, and energy requirements of your wiper system has bumped their scientific instrument out of the final design. An accountant finds your cost estimate was off by some 5 orders of magnitude. You're fired.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[david.given]

Now maybe nuclear tech maybe a way to solve this particual problem better, however in general we know today it's a dead end. Nuclear power does not pay of in the long run! [....] Why do I call it a dead end? Because when economically clalculating nuclear powerplants as project novists always calculate the break-even point. Thats a wrong calculation. You always have to take into account ALL payments that a project involves even those after break even point, and those after closure of the plant. And they are enourmous (e.g. to dismantle a nuclear powerplant costs more than 20 times than the costs to build it first place. Also we have nuclear waste FOREVER, with every year into all future we've to carry the costs. (calculated as irredeemable costs).

This is a gross simplification, I'm afraid. Yes, you do have to factor in decomissioning costs. But these days people do. It costs vast amounts of money to decommission a sixties-era reactor, sure, because they weren't designed to be decomissioned (despite being lousy ways to design a nuclear reactor anyway --- Chernobyl was such a disaster because its fail-safes were completely useless). Modern reactors are far safer, more reliable, cheaper (apart from beaurocratic and licensing costs) and more efficient --- take a look at pebble-bed reactors, for example.

The numbers I've seen indicate that the overall cost of electricity produced by a modern fission reactor is about the same as conventional power (it depends who you ask, and as you say, it's quite hard to find out whether decomissioning costs are factored in). The environmental cost, however, is far less, because the total amount of waste produced is very small and, let's face it, nuclear waste is just not that dangerous.

Nuclear waste doesn't glow, it doesn't cause three headed fish, it won't kill you if you just look at it. The wildlife around Chernobyl is doing really well. The really dangerous stuff, like plutonium, is far too valuable to throw away (plutonium's mainly dangerous because it's extremely poisonous chemically --- but it's less poisonous than arsenic, and lots of that is pumped into the sea, and arsenic doesn't decay).

There's basically three grades of nuclear waste produced by a fission reactors: the low-grade stuff, like the plastic gloves mentioned above; medium-grade stuff, like the materials that make up the reactor's plumbing, which is been irradiated; and the very small amounts of high-grade waste, your actual fission byproducts. Most of these are recycled because it's too valuable to throw away.

The safest thing to do with the rest is to seal the whole lot up into vitrified blocks and make a big pile in the middle of some desert somewhere. It won't get into the ecosystem, there are no animals or people to interfere, and you've got easy access in case you need it. It'll just sit there.

Alternative solutions are to put the stuff at the bottom of a very deep hole in a subduction zone: eventually it'll get sucked into the mantle and dissipite. Since the mantle is loaded with radioactive isotopes anyway, then it's pretty much gone. Or you could take it off the planet entirely. This would actually be cheap, safe, and would get rid of it once and for all --- but there's perfectly sensible ways of recycling the bulk of it that would be even cheaper.

As for solar power --- yeah, very neat, but you get an absolute maximum of 1kW/m^2, and only during the day when it's sunny. Solar power is no use to me (I live in Britain). Seeing as a kilowatt is about 1.3 horsepower, try calculating the area of solar panel you'd need to run that SUV...

Re:Why would they stop working?

[RayBender]

Here's an idea - blow the crap off with compressed air.

Gee. I'm sure everyone at JPL is kicking themselves right now wishing they'd thought of that. I mean, clearly it's such a brilliant, amazing idea that only some /. troll could think of that. Maybe it turns out that the tradeoff between the 10 kg spent on a compressed air bottle vs. 10 kg of science instruments is such that it's better to go with the instruments... hmm?

Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Some children were fed out of that $400 million. Where do you think the money goes? To pay for the roughly 10,000 engineers, scientists & technicians who in one way or another worked on the mission. Even rocket scientists have children.

Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Or maybe he should discuss the appalling state of education in this country. Not to mention a discussion of how spending on basic research help bring health & wealth to the world in general.

Dumbass.

Re:Why would they stop working?

[SharpFang]

Yeah, people keep mentioning dust, solar panels, batteries degrading...
These can work several years if developed properly.
What is the worst nemesis that can change the fate of the rovers in matter of hours are the martian storms. With wind blowing 200-400km/h, object the size of the rover without a solid shelter firmly bolted to the ground will just take off and fly bouncing randomly at speed not much lower than the wind. Then just a random rock on route, *smash* and pick the pieces of the rover over next 5000 kilometers of martian desert.

On the other hand, there was an idea of "tumbleweed" style probes that would travel with the storms, designed with surviving the storm in mind. But Spirit and Opportunity will live only until the first storm and they are extremely lucky it hasn't happened yet.

Worth It

[ErichTheWebGuy]

Looking at deeper martian bedrock layers is considered now a rich enough science payoff

In my humble opinion, the geological data that might be extracted fom such a deep crater is more than worth it. Just think, potentially millions of years of Martian history, and who knows, maybe even a fossil or two? Wouldn't that be sweet?

Way to go NASA, for considering the bigger picture in the face of losing such a wonderfully resilient craft. Although, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that a manned mission could someday retrieve the rover, and bring it all the way back to the Smithsonian.

Re:Worth It

[Darkon]

I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that a manned mission could someday retrieve the rover, and bring it all the way back to the Smithsonian.

I'd like to think that by the time we have people on Mars with the equipment and time to go looking for old rovers and the like, we might have a museum on Mars itself to put them in.

Re:Worth It

[AndroidCat]

People being people, by that time we'd also have protests and demonstrations by the Free Mars Movement over the removing of historic artifacts of Mars' past from their native land.

well...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh it's so frustrating to watch. Its like on horror movies...

Don't go there. oh oh .. awww see now you are stuck with scary martians

Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[InternationalCow]

It's really exciting science. I am still marveling at the fact that we can see actual pictures of the surface of Mars, from millions of kilometers away, as if we are looking at someone's holiday snapshots... I do wish, however, that NASA (or ESA) would turn all this ingenuity someday to an area that is even less explored than the surface of Mars or the Moon - our deep sea. Every time a mission goes out there, new species are discovered. The pay-off that may be generated by having a good look at our seas may be much greater than that of space exploration. Some of the reagents we use in the lab are derived from sea animals and have enabled us to gain deep insight into molecular biology. And I should think that the technical challenges of deep sea exploration should be worthy of the best NASA engineers' skills. Come on, guys, down is the way to go, not up :)

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[Sycraft-fu]

Well NASA is the National Areonautics and Space Administrations, as in air and space, not deep sea. The jobs are different and the challenges are different. Just as you wouldn't ask a chip engineer from Intel to try and design a transmission for Ford, neither would you ask a space engineer to make a submersible vehicle.

And, if you care to look, we DO a great deal of deep sea exploration both manned (mostly via our nuclear subs) and unmanned. However, like space, it is not without a great deal of difficulties. The pressure is immense and only gets more so as you go deeper. It is not trivial to make ROVs that can go that deep. Communication is also often an interesting challenge.

There is payoff to all kinds of exploration, if nothing else for the science that gets done. Go and do a search for the things that have been a direct result of the space program (like ball-point pens). All other knowledge aside, it produces real advances in technology.

It is silly to suggest that an administration tasked with, staffed, and designed to explore space should drop that and try and do something they are unsuited for when we HAVE people that work on ocean research (like NOAA).

Also something to consider: There are vast resources in space, that outstrip our planet by many orders of magnitude. If we wish to continue to consume resources, we need new sources. The Earth isn't even near tapped out, but the day will come. Space is the most likely answer.

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Did you ever consider that the deep sea is one of the vanishingly few places on the planet that hasn't been destroyed by humans? The sooner we begin "exploring", the sooner the environmental degradation occurs. I don't think we need to work on an aquatic Cortez just to get you some more species to kill and extract chemicals from their dead bodies. Just a thought.

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[Sven-Erik]

Well, you have the "deep sea" equivalent of NASA, called NOAA - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration that explore the deep seas.

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[InternationalCow]

A is for aqua (water) and S is for Sea :). Just kidding. I'm not sure whether there is such a great difference between sea and space exploration. Both envirnoments are not meant for humans and will kill you if you're stupid. Of course, deep sea vehicles will have to withstand immense pressures, but so will for instance any vehicle that is ever to explore Jupiter. There's a great story about this by Arthur C. Clarke (I forget the title - someone?) where this parallel is drawn and a case is made for deep sea exploration as a kind of prelude to planetary exploration. There's not that much deep sea exploration being done that results in observations that the general public can have a look at. I doubt whether military observations made by subs will be made public. The advances resulting from space exploration are a continuing point of discussion so I won't go into that. Re the vast resources - you're right, but we have no idea whatsoever of the resources hidden in our seas.

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[M1FCJ]

You must be kidding. With all those ships moving around, do you think oceans are nice and clean? The bottom is full of muck, dead animals, plants and lots of junk. Check this Guardian article about what's happening to Titanic because of all the rubbish.

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[pipingguy]

things that have been a direct result of the space program (like ball-point pens)

Huh?

The history of the ball point pen

"By 1950, Paper-mate was making good, cheap ball-point pens, and in 1954, the Parker pen company, which had stood aloof from the fray, brought out a quality ball-point. In 1957, the badly wounded Eversharp sold its pen division to Parker, and Eversharp assets were finally liquidated in the 1960s."

Fascinating facts about the invention of the Ballpoint Pen by Ladislas Biro in 1935.

History of Office Products: Ballpoint Pen

Re:Exciting, but perhaps down is the way...

[tealover]

I believe he was talking about the space pen that was developed to work in zero gravitiy conditions.

I love it when people get facts distorted and toss them around anyway. It's so easy nowaways to just look things up. I guess laziness will never go away.

NASA should have consulted Q

[Alain Williams]

Looking at the picture of the crater, the rover presumably may not have enough grip to get out.

If only NASA had fitted the tyre grips used by James Bond in 'Die Another Day', it is not as if they cost a lot .

Either that,

[acariquara]

or they are trying to pull a "Thelma & Louise" stunt on us.

Guess it's better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fade away, I guess.

Falling down?

[anshil]

I actually wonder if the only real danger as the story posts constits of never getting out of the crater, but actually also to make a safe journey downward without stumbling, falling and bursting? (Then you've a wreckage without any scientific data to make it payoff)

Re:Falling down?

[Technonotice_Dom]

From the pictures in the link it doesn't look that difficult to get a rover into - I think the main problem is traction when trying to get it out.

According to NASA they're aluminium wheels and their main purpose looks like it was to absorb the shock and go over rocks than get the traction required to climb back out of a crater.

I'd imagine they have quite a bit of weight behind them too...

We're in the future

[aussie_a]

NASA hopes both rovers will remain functional until at least September.

As people we often take everything for granted. Unfortunately it's just too difficult to constantly be amazed by everything around us (take a moment to think about how a computer works, it's fucking amazing). But this article really does show this isn't the present but the future. We have rovers on another fucking planet.

I remember thinking that the rovers wouldn't land successfully. But now they have and they're roaming around another planet. I'm sorry, but that's just amazing to me. And the above quote just reminded me.

Taking the risk?

[SharpFang]

Heh, they risk it won't ever get out of the crater? Now what a pity would that be.
They shouldn't pack it into the rocket and keep it on earth because here it wouldn't be put at risk of getting damaged.

Okay, sarcasm aside: What reason would there be for Opportunity ever (before its technical death) to leave the crater? The surroundings are well examined and there's a strong doubt anything more interesting will be found outside the crater, and after all the probes are there not to PERFORM as much examinations and tests as possible but to FIND interesting things. You can ride around in circles and examine the same rock over and over for years finding nothing new, or you can move on into new, maybe more dangerous terrain, but find what you seek in matter of hours. Are we trying to make a progress or just to beat the time record?

Re:Hmm...

[AC-x]

I think it's a physical limitation of the wheels more then anything else, the reason they think it might not be able to get out is because they'll just slip on the sandy slope.

I mean, sure, they could've tried tracks on it, but they'd probably have their own problems. There's only so many situations they can guard against before the whole thing just becomes unfeasible.

Re:Hmm...

[jeff munkyfaces]

well they did aim for the flattest bits..

how exactly do you design a robot that can get out of very steep sided craters anyway? grappling hooks?

as for the oppertunity situation, as i understand it there is nothing else in the surrounding area anyway - and plenty within the crater to keep it going for a while.

in my opinion it's pretty well designed for it's situation.

Shadows?

[bigattichouse]

Going down in the crater will decrease the rover's daily income of sunlight, won't it.. granted maybe only a few seconds. But those seconds will add up to shave that lifespan down quite a bit.

Re:Shadows?

[mrright]

But there is also a positive side: being inside the crater, the rover is not as exposed to the cold night sky as it would be on a plain. And maybe they can drive the rover to a slope where the panels get pointed to the sun to compensate for the shadows.

The slope will also be a major issue for spirit once it climbs the columbia hills. It will probably avoid the sides that point away from the sun. Maybe it will drive to an especially good spot each day to refuel the batteries.

--

were the solar panels made from...

[zogger]

self cleaning glass?
I know there's no rain on mars, but perhaps any high winds, plus this type of glass, might extend the usefulness of the PV panels. Of course, I also don't know how much this new type of glass would degrade the electrical conversion rates with the panels either.

Re:were the solar panels made from...

[WhiteBandit]

Also, they also rely on water to keep the glass clean. Water is very heavy, and would be very expensive to ship all the way to Mars.

There is also the fact that water cannot currently exist on the surface of Mars in liquid form.

battery power

[CAIMLAS]

It would seem that the batteries in these rovers have lasted much longer than was originally expected - in a matter of maginitude.

Does anyone know what the science might be behind the battery longetivity? To me, the science of that is equally, if not more, interesting than what might be on the planet itself.

Re:puh!

[BTWR]

You can get that now for free. I've been using NASA's Maestro program since Spirit landed. You get EVERY raw feed from the probes (pics before processing, out of focus, ones with the wheels in the way, etc). It's very cool. Try it out.

American spending priorities

[drok]

Just think of all the children that could have been fed with this $400 million. :( Or all the landmines that could be removed. Instead, we get playtoys for stupid white men. Micheal Moore needs to do his next expose on "science".

Ok, do you think we get anything useful from the rovers?

Ok, should we stop spending $30+ billion a year on movies? (box office ~10, DVD and video sales and rentals 22+) How about what we spend on sports tickets for multi-millionaire athletes? Nah, a healthy psyche needs its recreation, right? So why isn't a productive scientific pursuit accepted in the same manner? Curiosity... the thirst to see 'what is beyond that hill' is part of a healthy psyche.

How about focusing on how much Americans waste on truly useless trash, such as junk food. And I won't even bring up they then spend weight-loss measures...

-Robert