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Opportunity Rover Encounters Its Own Heat Shield
blamanj writes "Mars Rover Opportunity, a few meters shy of the 2km mark on its odometer, has come across the remains of the heat shield from its landing. This map traces the path of the rover for the past 11 months. It's been averaging about 6 meters/sol.
Spirit, which had to stop to dislodge a rock, is still climbing the "Columbia Hills". It's tough going, and Spirit experiences slippage of up to 80% as it climbs the hills."
Sol 337 was in fact leet, as was this entire mission, dewds.
A "Sol" is one Martian day, btw.
They already knew where the heat shield was. They had a picture from the Mars Orbiter camera that let them know exactly how far away it was. There's actually been several pictures. I forget how long ago they knew, but they've known for some time where it was.
I don't think anyone thought either rover would last this long, so it's only now that they get around to looking at it.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Not at all.
The rovers are astonishing in what they can do, but a human would dramatically outpace them. What it might take a rover an entire day to do, a human could do in a 30-45 seconds.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Here's the photo. Look to the wheel on your left hand side. I wonder if they were anticipating this happening.
Lutefisk is a disgusting Norwegian dish, think of it as fish jell-o. You take some perfectly good pieces of dried fish (yuck) and soak them in lye (yes, really!) for 24 hours. Then you soak the fish in fresh water for 48 hours, before putting it in a pan and letting it simmer for about 20 minutes. Finally you wrap the fish in aluminium foil and bake in the oven at 200C for 30-40 minutes.
The result is a quivering mass of translucent, inedible fish that is served with potatoes, bacon, mashed peas and melted butter (or melted pork fat).
Now, what I want to know is, how did that disgusting dish of spoiled fish end up as the (informal) name of a rock on Mars?
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
There's also a divot where the heat shield bounced. With any luck, it dug into the Martian surface far deeper than Opportunity could dig. This will give them a chance to examine what's underneath the surface layer - they hope.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
I'd never seen this shot before, but I went and downloaded all of the relevant images. I'm quite convinced that the "icelike" feature is just a dust accretion. In this wavelength it does look a bit watery, but if you look at the other shots there's obvious continuity in features and texture with the dust lane running up the left-hand side of the rock.
Its a bit subtle, but consider when you drive your RC car around and it hits a rock, flops over, and you walk over and flip it over.
On Mars, theres nobody there to flip the Rover over, or even dislodge stuff from it's tires. They spend all day preparing for a slight bit of movement just so they don't make a mistake worth millions of taxpayer dollars.
In this picture taken by Spirit early in the mission, you can see "Husband Hill" labeled as "E", about 3km away. It's on this hill right now. Opportunity has spent more time carefully looking around a dangerous crater instead of going for distance.
Sojourner only moved about 100 meters and was a huge success. Its most popular accomplishment was taking this picture before it even left the lander.
The "90 days" was certainly something they expected - maybe even double that. But they also knew that the Martian winter was coming up and that Mars would go behind the Sun, causing Earth to lose contact with the rovers for a number of days.
I think they were really surprised both rovers made it through the Martian winter. That Opportunity is actually back up to the normal output for the solar panels is a welcome surprise.
Spirit doesn't seem to be doing nearly as well. There's problem with the lubrication of the wheels, the brakes may not be releasing - or the circuit that detects them releasing has gone bad, and the dust accumulation on the solar panels has taken it's toll.
There might be more wrong with the Spirit rover, but even I've been skipping some of the updates on the web site.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
I don't think anyone thought either rover would last this long
I was at a presentation by one of the members of the rover science teams six weeks ago.
If there are no surprises, he was talking about the rovers possibly lasting till June or July. By that time, he was suggesting that the rover's batteries would no longer be able to hold enough charge to keep the things operating.
For a while they had been expecting that the solar panels would fail first, but apparently the rate of dust accumulation is less than they expected. (Plus "martian carwash" events seem to have cleared off some of the dust. He felt such events were probably caused by dust devils that happened to cross over the rover.)
Also, see here for more on rover tech.
This has been pointed out before:
The cameras used on the rovers have wide sensitivity to the whole visible light spectrum + more than just a bit on each side. Greyscale cameras are more useful when doing science. You plunk a variety of filters over it (I think they have 9?) and you can 'see' from UV down to infra-red.
"Simple" Red+Green+Blue cameras are a poor equivalent in comparison. For example, different minerals are clearly visible at certain wavelengths. Your "standard" colour camera will have a hard time picking out a mineral if it reflects light somewhere between red and green, where a specific filter on the greyscale camera can highlight it without trouble. To drastically simplify a whole heap-o-science, imagine a colour camera with Red+Green+Blue PLUS IR+Yellow+UV+Orange+Purple+Pink sensors. That's what's on the rovers.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
[I don't think anyone thought either rover would last this long...] It seems I hear this just about every mission that doesn't explode/crash within 24 hours of launch. Do you really think that they had no idea how long it would last under ideal conditions?
The Pathfinder/Sojourner rover lasted longer than expected, but did conk out after about 30 days. They suspect battery fatique. The new set of Rovers are intentionally better built than Sojourner (which was an experimental probe), but it is basically the same kind of power technology.
Table-ized A.I.
After the heat shield, what will Opportunity look at? There's really not a whole lot--not even very many rocks--on that plain.
There is a large plain of exposed bedrock a couple of miles south from the current position. And further south there is a crater that is something like 5 times larger than the one the rover just crawled out of. However, the larger crater is a long-shot. Oppy would have to log roughly 3 times the distance of Spirit to get there, and Spirit's wheels have been showing multiple signs of wear. Robots get repetitive motion problems also it seems.
But, if the rover can move by even two wheels, it could possibly drag itself there the hard way. NASA has vowed to "run them into the ground" to get the max science out of them. That is if thermal cycling does not crack some circuit first. Oppy is also showing arm wear, so it may not be able to do much more than take some snapshots by the time it gets to the mighty crater and has done some "white plains" work.
Table-ized A.I.
Beagle 2 was supposed to land on Isidis Planitia (10.6N, 270W). Opportunity landed on Meridiani Planum (354.4742E 1.9483S). Spirit landed in Gusev Crater (175.4785 E 14.5718 S). Neither are nowhere near Beagle 2. I couldn't find a high resolution map of MARS with the landing sights, but this should give you an idea.
Superior for science isn't the same as superior for viewing. They were designed towards the goal of geologic investigation, and to that end, aren't actually all that great at capturing 'true human vision color' at all. The filters are narrow and don't overlap in coverage, missing entire segments of our visible spectrum.
Also, a good deal of the 'debate' comes down to how to process the true color images from the auto-contrasted, separately exposed frames released as JPGs by NASA/JPL on a real time basis. The folks at NASA (and those that are using the calibrated files released by NASA through the Planetary Data System) are working with good data, whereas a huge number of people are working with the jpg's that weren't designed to be combined to make color. That alone is the source of most of the debate over the MER missions.
It is very easy to create wildly different colors simply by balancing the frames in a certain way, which has to be done anyway to undo some effects that aren't calibrated out by the time the raw jpg images are released. So a person who is sitting down to "properly" balance the frames will see a variety of possible outcomes, some of those balancing acts produce images that agree with the calibrated (true) view, and others will produce blue skies and green dirt, further fueling the debate.
Yeah, if only. Viking II was accidentally powered down by mission controllers. It'd be a (moderately) interesting engineering exercise to look at the what it would take to recycle the logic in situ. However, even if the two MERs were bullet proof designs, capable of 1k+ miles of travel, they wouldn't be able to make it, Viking II being too far north for the rovers' solar panels to generate sufficient juice.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Its highly unlikely that its either liquid, or ice. We're seeing a smooth area of sand falling down into the crater from above. Keep in mind that although it may look flat, it is actually, quite steep
The naming scheme is designed for a computer to work with. The file name itself allows you to locate photographs by rover, camera, time, image processing, and a number of other things that I found boring. If you go to the web site, you'll find an interface that makes use of those names and allows a human to find photographs based on some of these criteria. I wonder if the name of each photo is assigned by the Rover itself. It's a simple way of attaching useful information to the photo without having to embed it in the image file itself. Also, I'm sure that the naming convention seemed like a good idea at the time and alcohol was involved. If you've ever read how the Declaration of Independence was created, you'll realize that it was developed using those two criteria.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....