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Mars Rover Reaches Victoria Crater
gevmage writes, "CNN reports that the 'Opportunity' rover on Mars has reached the Victoria crater. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars three years ago with planned mission lifetime of 90 days. The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly. However, Opportunity is still going strong and has been trucking towards the massive crater Victoria for almost the past year. Scientists have been hoping that Opportunity would get there so they can have a look at geologically older areas — and it's finally made it!" See the NASA press release for links to photos of the Victoria crater.
Space really is the final frontier. News stories like this never cease to brighten up my day, and give me hope for the future. Not to sound too corny, but do others find this is true?
Spirit and Opportunity are some seriously tough robots. My hat is off to the engineering teams that built them. How much longer will they go?
Are those English Wheels or Metric Wheels?
Once the rover reaches the Victoria Crater, that will an end to Victoria's Secret!
The shuttle program may have been a mess but the rovers are one of the greatest accomplishments in space exploration to date and they just keep going. I'm guessing at least one of the rovers will still be going two years from now. There may have been failures along the way but in Mars research NASA has done a stunning job. Most other countries haven't had much luck getting probes to orbit Mars but NASA has had many successes. I'd love to see the shuttle program scrapped but I'm still a massive NASA fan. I would love to see probe go to some of the more interesting sites on Mars though. The poles and such. They would need a self contained power source though. Nowhere near enough light for solar.
"We don't have major discoveries every week. But we do expect some major new discoveries when we get inside Victoria,"
Seeing projects like this really gives me hope about the space program. I mean, look at the ROI on this project: for a project that was only supposed to last 90 days, we've gotten over 1000 days of use out of it. Kinda makes up for the other "crater" project... =)
Honestly not trying to troll, but no, sorry, this does not restore my faith in humanity at all. Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
And while our exploration of space at this point does have practical applications for current-day life, a lot of it is also just a "cool, let's see what we can learn" sort of thing. Which, again, is of use both today as well as in the future. But with the way things are going here on Earth right now (The environment, anyone? Wars? Etc.), who knows if we'll ever really be able to put a lot of our knowledge from space exploration to full use and truly reach the final frontier.
Add an 's to get "Mars Rover Reaches Victoria's Crater" and you get the title of a well worn "video" I used to own.
Just out of curiosity--by what standards exactly, is China "making the US look pretty bad" in space tech?
They've managed--using Russian derivative technology--to put one man into space. Nothing shoddy, true, however the US and Russia each, with completely new technologies, doing something never done before, put people into space over 45 years ago. We put men on the moon about 35 years ago.
I'm all in favor of furthering space exploration, and China is a very welcome addition to the frame (I hope their involvement makes us go to the moon again frankly). Saying that they make NASA look bad though is ludicrous and ill-informed.
Based on NASA's 2007 budget request, we could fund it for more than 100 years on what we've spent on the war in Iraq so far. We could fund it for 260 years with the money we've spent on the Defense Department in 2006. We could fund it for almost 300 years with the money Bush gave back in tax cuts for the richest 1%. The amount of money the Medicare Drug Plan is projected to cost over the next 10 years could fund NASA for 560 years.
NASA is not the first place you should be looking for answers to the government's budget problems.
FTA: The rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars three years ago with planned mission lifetime of 90 days.
;-)
Are you sure these rovers were made in America??
Shouldn't that be a Terran Year.
There's a lot of good info and advice in the Bible...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
Besides, imaging the AAA cost even WITH the "good" membership.
Please keep your particular brand of emo out of the voting booths, thanks.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Yeah. Things like radar, sonar, high performance jet engines, compact wireless telegraphy, nuclear power and computers would all have been invented so much quicker if there hadn't been wars to get in the way.
I think the standard name of the unit is "one of your Earth years".
Have you noticed that the countries with the largest militaries are the one's with the most capable space programs? Have you noticed that the countries with socialized medicine and minimal military are not in space, or they largely piggy back on the former? I think things are a bit more complex than you suggest. Now I'm all for greatly increasing NASA's funding, but getting rid of the Pentagon will do more harm to NASA than good. The place to cut the budget is all the damn pork projects that do nothing other than get incumbants re-elected. Some of these are in the Pentagon, but many are outside of it. Pork is one of the few things conservatives and liberals agree on.
"The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win."
Robert A. Heinlein
Will Vista be released before even one of the rovers dies?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Various mechanisms involving dust, wind, steep slopes, etc. have been proposed, see this article.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
And in the case of Germany, the rewards are great for the losers. I'm no historian, but everything presented so far leads me to believe that Germany was much better off after WWII than it was before. I suspect Japan is too, but it may be that I am looking though too thick a cloud of cultural bias.
I would agree that in the long run, they have been better off, and that has happened often in history.
Have you noticed that since the Geneva Convention was signed, and the UN formed, no country has been better off afterwards? Or that no one has been treated better, except by the "Evil Empire" et al.? And that there are just as many wars, and they are just as deadly, but they don't end fast due to limitations in the Convention? AND if we were under the Geneva Convention during WW2, we would not have been able to bomb civilians, factories or nuke anyone? Notice a trend?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I think you missed my point, or misread my post. I was rebuffing the parent's belief that wars (or at least military spending) got in the way of science.
That had less to do with the war itself, and a great deal to do with the Marshall plan (in Europe) for rebuilding the countries' economies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_plan The Japanese reconstruction, while different to Europe, also involved US economic management under the SCAP system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan's_post-war_econ omy
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly.
Actually, spirit has stopped because it does not have enough power to move very far during Martian winter, and they would rather camp it on a small slope facing the sun than risk getting stuck without sunlight and freezing its parts to death. Spirit camped last Martian winter also for several weeks for a similar reason.
When Winter is finished (soon), it will rove again. However, it will not be near as nimble as it was with all 6 wheels.
Opportunity is at a slightly better lattitude for sunlight, and has been on flat areas this winter, so it does not need such winter camping.
Table-ized A.I.
On the other hand, you look at this accomplishment, and then you wonder why the world's most popular operating system is successfully attacked by 13 year olds.
What was once true, is no longer so
The USA is 5-for-6 in successfully landing it's landers (only failure was the Mars Polar Lander). Viking 1, 2, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity all were successes (and wonderful successes at that).
USSR had zero landers successfully make it.
The ESA is 0-for-1 in landers.
Minimal "professional" army, socialized medicine, and still goign strong on rocket science.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
For people that like the rovers and hadn't stumbled upon it before:
http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/
"the Midnight Mars Browser software, which allows home users to download images and view slideshows and "virtual reality" panoramas from the Mars Exploration Rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity"."
it is really awesome, try it out, you get the latest pics from Mars virtually real time (before they're up @ jpl's site.)
Pannable and zoomable panorama's, false colour and true colour movies etc etc.
Arianne 5 is one of the best launch vehicles in the known universe. For a change France is concentrating on practicalies - comms systems, observation and weather satellites, interplanetary studies etc. ESA have had some fantastic programmes recently. Whinching over-evolved chimps into space on the back of ICBM as some kind of vanity exercise (a la China etc) is not where it is at.
My blood just boils when people make these ascertions without giving them a second thought. They have bought in the popular wisdom spread mostly in countries in which, oh surprise, the economy is highly dependent in selling death machines.
If you think that science in Iraq, Sudan, Palestine or Afghanistan is going to be advanced at all thanks to the ongoing wars there, I venture with confidence that you are an idiot.
The countries in which some scientific advancement is gained during conflicts do so because they already have a research infrastructure in place. THis research infrastructure would produce useful science no matter what, the tax in human misery is an unnecessary price to pay and it is frankly disgraceful that there are pople thinking in those terms.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To say that the rewards are great for the losers shows such an abismal ignorence that I don't know where to start.
But lets start somewhere.
Germany was the second country with more people killed after the USSR, this without accounting for the people killed in the demented genocide that took place there. Entire towns like Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig were literally removed from the face of earth, and ever since then Germans, most of who by now had nothing to do with the war, have to deal with a national anguish that is difficult to appreciate unless you have been there (which let me venture, you haven't).
As for Japan they had to endure two atomic bombs. I don't in which demented univers that may be compensated by economic prsperity a few years down the road. Not in mine surely.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The countries with space programs are the ones big enough and rich enough to afford it, and the desire to impress one's neighbours. First it was the USA and the Soviets. Then it was the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese (no, the Europeans and Japanese don't have their own crewed launch vehicles, but the Europeans are planning to build one). The Indians are in the advanced stages of a moon probe. Key common factors: big economies. Key differences: almost everything else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The US ingored blantantly most of the Geneva convention during the Vietnam War.
Vietnam, in spite of this, is better off now.
This is due to adopting market reforms and has nothing to do with the existence of the UN or the Geneva convention.
How in your mind economic development after a war is linked to reasonbale safeguards against butal behaviour is beyond my comprehension.
We have seen plenty of conflicts (Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Yugoslavia) in which the Geneva conventions and the UN were just meaningles words and the countries that suffered these conflicts don't seem much better off for it , as a matter of fact, not respecting such conventions becomes a deterrent for progress and investment, as the US sponsored situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine sadly shows.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your instinct is incorrect. The "single larger rover" is going to last FAR longer than the MERs, unless something breaks. But it won't be due to the power source; it's RTG powered. It will also be able to drive faster and farther than the MERs. And do a lot more science.
The MER-sized rover is obviously a good design, but they have many drawbacks. For one thing, they really were TOO heavy -- the airbag landing system nearly failed, and the small chute really is vulnerable to high horizontal winds. Moreover, the MER landing system only allows landing such rovers near the equator and near sea level... you can't use them at the poles, or to land on top of, say, Mt. Olympus, because there's not enough atmosphere between space and the ground.
So yes, there is a lot of science that can be done by sending more MER rovers. But they aren't the answer to every Mars mission's needs. We can really only afford to send a couple of probes every two years, and over the next few years we're going to be sending probes to do other things and investigate other places where a MER probe wouldn't work. Will we see more MER-class probes 6-12 years from now? Probably.
Bruce