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'Something' Cleaning Mars Rover
bluenirve writes "'Something' has been cleaning the solar panels of the Mars rover Opportunity. "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity seems to have stumbled into something akin to a carwash that has left its solar panels much cleaner than those of its twin rover, Spirit. A Martian carwash would account for a series of unexpected boosts in the electrical power produced by Opportunity's solar panels.""
When NASA scientists had the rover examine its solar panels for dirt, it replied, "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Isn't it clear that homeless Martians have newspapers to clean the panels too?
That Martian is going to get pissed when the probe doesn't give him a tip.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Women are from Mars.
Is NASA going to have a stinky, unwashed, unshaven martian approach the camera and ask for change?
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
maybe one of the "lost" landers has a crush on opportunity ;) OK, enough slashdot, back to the egg nog....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
> Dupe from Yesterday
Yeah, but the panels are still being cleaned today!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So THAT's what Beagle 2 is doing all the time up there...
There seems to be no intelligent life, but there are homeless martians who will clean your car for a buck. Go figure. Interplanetary capitalism is here to stay.
I for one welcome our new Martian rover cleaning Overlords!
(That horse has to be a nice bloody pulp by now)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20041107
Something is cleaning the editor's memory of the past. Too bad it doesn't work more quickly.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I told those peskey custodians to NOT clean the rover while it was on the set!
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
... welcome our new solar-panel cleaning overlords.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
As evidenced by this image.
Maybe.... You didn't read the article did you?
You're new here, aren't you?
A similar phenomena used to occur in my room as a teenager. Perhaps the two occurances are somehow connected.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
wait, there's an article?
I didn't get that cartoon. What does it mean?
Well we're already polluting it with probes and extra craters ;)
-- Gone Crazy, Back Later
Martian gravity is lower than Earth's, and dust should be lighter and hence easier to blow off. Or shake off - couldn't NASA have built in some way to have the vehicle shake itself like a dog? Or at least jerk forward, stop, jerk backwards. At which point the Martians would groan and wait for the probe to start spouting rap lyrics.
Of course we'd like the moderators to have some basic understanding of the topic, but we'd also like them to act in a manner representative of the /. crowd. Makes for an interesting dilemma.
I think the guy on the set just actually used a rag and windex by accident.
Just kidding...
what are the odds?
You're new here, aren't you? No, I am.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP
For serious, who keeps modding this shit up? Is it really still funny? "I, for one, welcome our Soviet grits hot YOU goatse-Beowulf ????? profit run Linux?" Do I get modded up now, too?
Fucking idiots.
As anyone who's played a racing car game in the past twenty years can tell you, when you pass a checkpoint, you get more time. As long as they keep completing new areas, they'll keep getting bonuses. On the other hand, if the Spirit team doesn't get moving, they're going to have to put in another quarter pretty soon.
I bet there's already water on mars. Well.... only if the contractors have hooked it up from the main at the 6 Starbucks they've already started construction on.