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One Year on Mars
RetroGeek writes "It has been almost a full year for the Mars rovers. NASA has created a flashback of rover images and information. You can use either HTML or Flash (it is the best use of the technology I have seen). There is even a movie taken from the hazard avoidance camera showing the full year of travel."
stay tuned as the rovers welcome a brand new year on Mars.
What does an earth year have to do with a martian year? Nothing thats what!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
A martian 'year' is much longer...
One of the things that impressed me most about this mission is when they had to take into account the changing seasons on Mars, and their effect on the rovers.
:)
We are not only on other planets, but planning for spring!
Happy new year! (And let's hope the evaporating methane does not mess up the sensors come summer
maybe they could use the same sets for the manned mission.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I liked the flash presentation. Informative and interactive without being a full blown technology show-off.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Those of us in the U.S. may be interested in the Welcome to Mars tht will be broadcast next Tuesday, January 4th, on Nova.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You have _got_ to be kidding me.
It's only saving grace is that it's not flash by default. The intro looks like one of those late 80's slideshow, and the navigation of the main page is infuriatingly confusing and useless.
I'm about to fire it off to one of my friends who teaches web design as an example of what _not_ to do in a web page.
I actaully _like_ pretty flash, but when it just slows things down and makes navigation harder, well then it's stupid.
I guess it's better than the html, which seems broken with my firefox setup.
Seems to put to bed the question of liquid water on Mars.
And how do we know that isn't the rover's transmission fluid that leaked out??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Now lets try for a Mars Year,
h tml
y .epl?pid=55
322 days to go.
Interesting information on Mars Time:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.
What is time really?
It helps us sync here on Earth, but it certainly
gets crazy once we move into the great beyond.
Wonder what those Mars team members are doing for New Year?
They had to follow a different time.
Cicadian Time would certainly be muddled.
http://www.nsbri.org/Research/Projects/viewsummar
I think NASA rovers was one of the rare things in 2004 which united whole world. They were there for purerly scientific reasons, they did what they had been sent to do, even more - they continue to rock on and provide more and more details, overloading NASA scientists with work for years.
I see it as victory of science over money, politics, everything which seperate us. Because I think nothing beat those news that we discovered that Mars once definetly has water. So... there should be living organisms on other planets. There could be something like us, humans.
I think nothing beats that feeling when science and common sence works for whole humanity.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The movie section says "grab some popcorn and select one of the movies to the left to start the show". I'd rather say "select one of the movies to the left, then drive to the mall to buy some popcorn, and when you're back, it will start".
Dear Sirs. We managed to slashdot NASA. Congratulations.
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I misread. I thought you were referring to the Flash version. The HTML version is broken for me, too.
Let me first say: Mars is not Earth... what may be true on Earth may not be true on Mars. It has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth and 1/10th the atmosphere. As such unless multiple qualified people agree that a certain piece of data indeed means something, that piece of data is simply being misinterpreted by a bunch of morons. Please look at t all the crap about a "fake moon landing" for an example.
Images of Mars have been interpreted to have everything from water filled canals to giant faces, however both were simply due to light.
For some reason I thought the rovers were MUCH smaller than they really are. Heck, this thing is bigger than the lunar "automobile" (the copy of it I've seen in Boeing museum).
I seem to recall, from reading Lucky Starr in the 1970s, that the Martian year is 687 Earth days.
With the rovers there for so long, it sure would be interesting to get them back here. Nice chance to study the long-term effects of the Martian environment.
One 1/100th the atmosphere by surface pressure at the very best. 1/200th is more normal
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Are you alowing for the time-lag to Mars and back?
Want me to dig up the "Beagle 2 lost" and "NASA Rovers working" stories? All that rambling about NASA superiority over ESA, "US - Europe 2:0" and such? Maybe if they were a common effort, they would unite the world, but it seems with Beagle 2 demise they only made the conflict deeper.
No, of course they are great devices, great succes, and scientifically priceless and all that. It's just that they didn't help a thing on the social level.
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Since Mars is the subject, your middle name wouldn't be Valentine, would it? :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
you obviously didn't get enough popcorn.
9.1 Billion web hits!
And how do we know that isn't the rover's transmission fluid that leaked out??
Because Ford motor company didn't make it.
----
Squirrel
Spirit landed in early January and Opportunity in late January. If something goes wrong between now and then, the "Year on Mars" campaign will have egg all over it.
Table-ized A.I.
It's a Rover, not a Volkswagen or Ford ;-)
where's all that Karma?
Still, they're larger than Lunokhod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_1), which roamed the Moon in 1973 (!).
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
First prize: a year on Mars.
Second Prize: two years on Mars.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
Even the Beagle 2 team themselves was very happy at the rovers success - everyone knows that Mars is a tough business and scientists are happy when anything works there.
A few silly comments from trolls on Slashdot should not be mistaken as world opinion. I agree, the landings were a real unifying event as people the world over got a glimpse of what can be accomplished with some proper global teamwork.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looks like dust thats collected between the cracks to me. I don't now where you got shiny and clear from, but it certainly isn't.
Nice. Perhaps the thetans have been cleaning off the solar panels on the rovers. I love cults. They use the most imagination when it comes to our origination. Wasn't L. Ron Hubbard a con artist before he became the leader of the Church of Scientology?
Which raises some interesting CGI... possibilities.
Because of the fisheye distortion on their cameras, the high-speed movies of their travels make them seem a bit like The Little Prince, walking about his tiny planet. I thought Mars was bigger than that.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Wasn't L. Ron Hubbard a con artist before he became the leader of the Church of Scientology?
No, just a third-rate SF writer. He did decide to start his own religion when writing wasn't making him rich and famous enough, though, which is quite an ambitious con. One he pulled off quite well.
'Your brain is God.' -- Dr. Timothy Leary
Helium-3 is of little use until we figure out how to build a reactor that can make use of it. Also, Hubble pretty much proves that the best place for an observatory is in orbit.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
322 days? Should't you be measuring in sols?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Helium-3 is considered the prime resource for the Moon, not Mars. Martian soil is unlikely to have much Helium due to the fact that it has a (compared to the Moon) thick atmosphere of other gasses. On the moon, much of the solar wind is able to directly impact the soil, which allows the Helium-3 to embed into the rocks on the lunar surface.
Similar conditions also exist on Phobos and Deimos, but in that case any Helium-3 extracted there will probabaly be used by Mars, and not the Earth, if any Martian colonies ever get established.
As far as a good location for a telescope, the Sea of Moscow (on the far side of the moon) or perhaps even closer to the lunar equator would be a fantastic location for a radio telescope.... you would be able to block out almost all human radio traffic, and all that is left would be from space missions in interplantary space. I hope that I can see it built in my lifetime.
Regardless of whether it is the Moon, or Mars, the basic fact of the matter is that there is no such reactor. Although the reaction is theoretically possible, science has yet to reach the break even point in the lab, let alone produce a working prototype.
I agree that the far side of the moon would be a fairly quiet place for a telescope. Of course, you need to deal with compensating for lunar motion, and you also need to have some way of transferring the signal from the far side, to Earth. It would be far cheaper to stick the thing in orbit.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Radio telescopes are not nearly so sensitive to motion problems, and there is eletronic steering that you can do to the detectors so that you can insure that the target astronomical object can be detected easily. The big advantage of the Moon here is that it is a physical barrier that stops RF interference, and the fact that it is turned away from the Earth 100% of the time. Not even Io or Ceres can offer that sort of guarentee.
As far as creating a reactor that uses Helium-3, it is a little more than a mere theoretical concept. There have been working research reactors using fusion that have been able to even produce more energy than was used to create the fusion environment. (Yes, they have passed the break even point). The problem is more trying to make a practical device that doesn't need another power generation facility just to get it to work. And hopefully be able to make it provide power for beyond the needs of the generation facility. This is all forms of fusion reactors, wheither it is a Tokamak, Fusor, or Cold-Fusion cell. The advantage of Helium-3 is such that it makes the practical fusion reactor much closer to reality. Current Helium-3 acquisition is from nuclear energy research and is quite expensive to manufacture.
"Yep, it's broken on firefox with me too, running default setup on WinXP."
So right click, and do "View This Page in IE".
"Given the fact that they can't make a simple webpage work with more than one browser makes me wonder how the hell did they manage to put two rovers on an another planet for a year..."
Maybe they actually spend their budget on things which matter (rovers, etc) more than they do on things which don't matter (compatability with Firefox).
People here tout standards and Open Source like they are holy grails. In the real world, market share matters more. Until Firefox is bug-compatible with IE, I expect that a good number of sites will remain broken. It takes a lot of time (time = salary = money) to test web sites with multiple browsers and work around the differences in implementation. I'd rather that NASA spend their money on space travel than on HTML Bug Compatability with browsers that less than 10% of their users use.
Compliance with the standards is not the reason that these sites are broken with Firefox. The reason these sites are broken is that they were not developed and tested with Firefox. How bug-compatible is Forefox with respect to Netscape? I would assume that since Netscape "open sourced" the product, it's pretty close, if not identical.
This message was posted using Firefox. I'm not going to claim that one browser is better than the other, but I will play with Firefox, and I happily click the "View This Page in IE" button when Firefox doesn't work. I'm also noticing that sometimes I click the "View This Page in Firefox" when IE doesn't work...
Wasn't L. Ron Hubbard a con artist before he became the leader of the Church of Scientology?
What do you mean, "before"?
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
The big advantage of the Moon here is that it is a physical barrier that stops RF interference, and the fact that it is turned away from the Earth 100% of the time. Not even Io or Ceres can offer that sort of guarentee.
:), and so on.
But the Earth-Moon L2 point (above the lunar farside) *does* offer that. Whyever would you want to stick any very sensitive, automated science instrument down a gravity well where it requires tons (literally) of structural support that wouldn't be needed in space? Not to mention having to deal with vibration & dust kicked up by those lunar He3-mining operations, interference from the miners' WiFi gear (noone would want to live farside without broadband
The only reason to *not* put a telescope in space is pre-existing logistical support (for repairs etc.) at the bottom of a given gravity well - but in case of the Moon you're putting that cart before the horse.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
L2 Lagrange points are not stable (you cannot orbit it without continual orbit correction). And you still have a communications problem, what with the moon being in the way.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
There are a couple points beyond the instability of the L2 point as covered by uberdave (L4 & L5 are much more stable and you need to read more about orbital mechanics to explain).
It also isn't 100% useful either for blocking out RF radiation from the Earth because most L2 orbits will be more a "halo" that "orbits" the L2 point rather than being at exactly L2. Again this is the same for all Lagrangian locations. True, such an orbit can be reduced, but there is also the apparent size of the moon relative to the L2 Point, and compared to the earth. The point here being that something on the surface of the Moon is inherantly easier to maintain, especially given the size requirements necessary for a radio telescope. Optical telescopes would not have this problem so much, and indeed an optical telescope at L5 would be a much better option anyway.
Dust and vibration kicked up by lunar mining operations would be no different than vibrations you experience in say Los Angeles from mining operations in Utah. Unless you are talking nuclear explosions that exceed the largest built nuclear warhead in human history, or a large metor impact, it is unlikely you would even be able to measure such activity at an astronomical observatory even with a sismonitor. The dust would fall to the ground due to gravity, and the only real effect that would have "global" impact on the moon is the increse in lunar atmosphere. Even that would still be negligable except for optical telescopes, which as I said would have better places to be at anyway. By way of measurement and note, human activity in the 20th Century doubled the lunar atmosphere, primaily from the Apollo landings. Even that is negligable when compared to the surface area of the moon as a whole.
As far as pre-existing logistical support, I would say that having an established lunar colony would be of tremendous benefit to such a project. Indeed, lunar smelting operations could provide the raw materials for such a project, and then the only logistical issues would be to be able to move the materials on site over ground terrain.
Look, all I'm suggesting is a practical reason to have a scientific base on the moon, that would yield a huge benefit to a major branch of science. I'm not suggesting that it would be the only possible solution either, and even with all of the supposed benefits such a base would offer, it would be obsolete in a few centuries as people move out in the solar system... so such an operation would have to be moved to yet deeper in the solar system.
there is also the apparent size of the moon relative to the L2 Point, and compared to the earth
What about it? I calculate that the apparent size of the Moon from L2 is almost twice that of the Earth. In other words, L2 lies well within the moon's radio shadow, except for emissions from GEO. GEO communications satellites have highly directional antennae pointing down at earth though, so this should not be much of a problem.
a "halo" that "orbits" the L2 point rather than being at exactly L2
I think you're confusing that with L4/L5, which are statically unstable but have dynamically stable halo orbits around it. There are no stable orbits known around L1/L2/L3. Yes, this means a telescope would have to actively maintain its position at L2, but since this does not require much energy, a solar sail should suffice to do the job.
an established lunar colony would be of tremendous benefit to such a project. Indeed, lunar smelting operations could provide the raw materials for such a project, and then the only logistical issues would be to be able to move the materials on site over ground terrain.
Oh, I agree. What I'm saying is that from our present status (zero resources on the Moon) it makes no sense to establish a lunar base *in order to* build a telescope (of whatever kind) there - it's much simpler to just put it into space. Of course there may be *other* good reasons to build a lunar base - and once you have that, it may make sense to site a telescope near that base.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard