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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?
Are those English Wheels or Metric Wheels?
According to the many articles I've read about Spirit and Opportunity, they'll continue to run as long as the dust that's collecting on the solar panels doesn't get too thick, resulting in blockage of the essential part of it's charging system.
I wonder, if in the future, NASA will develop a type of self cleaning aparatus to aide in "dusting" them.
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,"
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.
There's a lot of good info and advice in the Bible...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
He said that basically having yet another moving part just wouldn't end up being worth the expense of engineering it and adding the weight to the rover and the launch vehicle.
The next rover that will be launched in a few years will have a plutonium oxide power source, so that the power won't be a factor.
Actually, dust on the panels isn't the only issue. Eventually the mechanical parts wear out, get dirt in them, so they don't work. Spirit is running on 5 of 6 wheels now. The PI said that if it loses another one, then it probably won't ever be able to move again. That is, the solar panels are fine, the computers and instruments are fine, but if one more motor goes out, then it's limited to what it can do in a stationary position.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
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.
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
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!
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.
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.