Slashdot Mirror
The View from the Top of Husband Hill
chriscrick writes "After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. According to lead scientist Steve Squyres, 'What field geologists typically do - and Spirit is a robotic field geologist - is you climb to the top of the nearest hill and take a look around so you get the lay of the land and figure out where you want to go.'"
That's amazing. That same photograph just took my breath away.
It's wishful thinking, perhaps. but looking at the photograph and I imagine a place that once housed life. It might be the birthplace of life in our system and the seed planet for life on earth.
A dead planet once alive. Conservation of information.... the entire evolutionary record of that planet is in those rocks, that dirt. It's suffocatingly exciting.
And at once harrowing. It has no magnetic field to speak of. It must have had some form of one due to the clear volcanic/geological activity. What happened to it? When will the same thing happen here? If there was life there, did they just run out of time?
There are finite strictures on the amount of time ones birth planet remains hospitable to you. And if you don't figure out how to get off, how to survive in space and thrive, maybe you're doomed to die with your planet.
Some theories abound about why we haven't seen sign of intelligent life. my favorite espouses the notion that civilizations get wiped out by their own technology. What if the stricture is planetary? What if we don't see any intelligent signs because no species could survive the life cycle of their own planets?
It puts any interest in a next-gen ipod or the new google beta in perspective.
It's a great photograph. It fills me with that little kid feeling.... the one whe you look up a the sky and it feels like there's something there looking down at you, waiting for you to discover it.
un burrito me trampeó.
Be aware that some mars photos of those devils might be one and the same. It might be just one that keeps popping up in frame as it's moving quicker than the camera taking the set of photos. For example, it looks like the shadow of the big devil on the left hand side is repeated a little bit in the next image - I guess you could get an idea of how fast they are moving from that.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
we should mass produce the rovers using the same specs and retrofit with geographically specific tools. We can send up more at a time and have standing teams exploring in real time, as we're doing now, amassing data.
un burrito me trampeó.