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Animated View from the Mars Rover
An anonymous reader writes "The Mars Spirit rover is within sight of the summit of Husband Hill, and it's looking out onto a vast plain where it caught sight of dust devils that are presented in a new animation of stills. Meanwhile, on NASA's site is a cool new panorama of 'Rub al Khali' taken by Opportunity." The science of the dust devils was covered previously on Slashdot.
Some additional (and larger) animations of Martian dust devils are available here:
Animations for August 19
Animations for July 8
This animation is my favorite, with maybe a half-dozen dust devils charging past the camera, some of them quite close.
I'll have to take the opportunity (pathetic pun intended) to plug Steve Squyres new book Roving Mars. Steve gives a good history of the rovers development and he doesn't hold back, he even touches upon things such as a yelling match between him and the Engineering lead at JPL which would normally not be in such a book. He goes over all the drama involved in designing and testing the airbags, parachutes, and other landing equipment. He also spends a fair amount of time on how MER was nearly killed several times by close calls at NASA design reviews.
Once on Mars you'll find out how a function left over from the frustration of early software development together with a programmer's backdoor helped save Spirit. There is a great deal about learning to operate the rovers on Mars and how tough it was to make the call to run for the hills with Spirit at the risk of dying enroute with virtually no science return. The book is also filled with many little known tidbits including how debris from the WTC was used on the rovers, and things NASA might not want you to know about such as the supreme importance of beer as a motivational tool in ensuring the success of the project.
Amazon.Com
In other words, don't expect to see color pix from the rovers of moving objects. Specially if it's the natives.