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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."
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....
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.)
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.