Slashdot Mirror
Mars Rovers Celebrate Their 1000th Sol On Mars
Cherita Chen writes, "Yesterday NASA, Cornell University, and the USGS celebrated the Mars Exploration Rovers' 1000th Sol on the Red Planet. The first rover to land, Spirit, reached the 1000 Sol mark a few weeks ago while the planet was in Solar conjunction. 'Opportunity,' Spirit's twin, and the second lander to make the bounce to Mars, celebrated the milestone yesterday while sitting atop Victoria Crater on the other side of Mars. Both Rovers are still operational (though Spirit is limping) and are sending back valuable data. Not bad for what was slated to be a '90 Sol' mission."
Not bad for a mission that cost less than $500 million. Fast, cheap, and still lasts a long time. Too bad they don't have nuclear power plants, as they'd be getting more work done faster.
Biggest success since the Moon landing. It proves NASA can still excell they just need to dump some baggage like the shuttle and get back to what they do best, space exploration. I'd love to see them release a disk of all the Mars images. I'd pay good money for a full set of images especially if they included a set of the aerial shots. It could help open up the research to people that don't have direct access. A lot of things have been found just from Google earth. I'd really love to see a similar thing done with all the mars images. I know it's been started but there's a massive number of images availible. Better to have a few million eyes searching them than a few hundred.
How about talking in the context of Earth Days, Martian Days, Venusian Days, etc? I think its pretty understandable, moreso if the wikipedia pages ever turn up ;-)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its