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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."
Straight line? You act as if the goal of the mission is to actually have the rover cover distance. When I look at that map, I see the rover going from one interesting object to the next. It's cool that they've covered two kilometers, but it's the stopping and looking, not the moving, that is the point.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I'd assume the value in looking at the heat shield is to determine how well it performed. I'd guess that's one thing you can never adequately test and maybe getting pictures of the shield can determine if it performed better, worse,or as expected. Obviously this could make future missions more reliable, cheaper, etc.
AccountKiller
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?
It's quite far away. Keeping in mind that the entire distance the rover has traveled is about 2km, if the beagle probe was only 10km away (really, really, really close in planetary terms), it would still most likely be "out of reach". And even if we could get to it, what would we do? Poke at it with the rock abrasion tool?
You have to remember the goal of this mission isn't to move the furthest distance from the landing zone as possible. It's to explore the surface of Mars, something you find every few centimeters :).
Much of this "exploration" involves stopping every few metres to sit around for a day or so and test rock and soil samples.
And even when it is on the roll, each rover doesn't move terribly fast, and often needs to navigate around terrain. Nevermind the fact that if you did want to move a long distance, you'd only be able to move a few metres, take a snapshot of your surrroundings, send them back to Earth, and await the next set of movement instructions. Both sending the snapshot and retreiving the next set of instructions takes several hours due to the distances involved, resulting in quite a bit of time spent not going anywhere.
Yaz.
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.
I read your link but what you people fail to understand is this little thing real scientists call time. The technology to put a robot on Mars is here now with us. The technology to put a man on Mars is not here with is. That takes time. The time we spend wasting on deciding who builds the plastic food trays and where to locate the launch site is also time we can have robots actually there and exploring. Not to sound like a troll but people like you blow my mind. It's like you don't understand the difference between real life and what you see on Star Trek/Wars/Gate/whatever.