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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."
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.
> Dupe from Yesterday
Yeah, but the panels are still being cleaned today!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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.
You're new here, aren't you? No, I am.
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.