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Mars Rovers Celebrate Their 1000th Sol On Mars

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-little-buddies-go dept.

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."

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Come On. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Admit it, you're getting misty.

  2. Congrads NASA! by edwardpickman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Congrads NASA! by jkerman · · Score: 5, Informative

      the nasa HiRSE team is releasing full resolution images from the new orbiter as they are processed. its fantastic! their site seems to be down at the moment but it has the pictures, and a sofar interesting blog from some of the image processing team http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/

  3. Sol2k "bug" by QuantumFTL · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've mentioned this on /. before. I used to work on MER (one of the devs of Science Activity Planner/Maestro, as featured on /.), and while lasting longer than 90 sols was not considered completely ridiculous, lasting over 1000 sols (with both rovers!!!) definitely was. Our directory structure contained a 3-digit sol number, and a lot of calculations were carried out using only the first 999 sols, including some code I wrote (knowing this to be the case).

    Luckily the Operational Softare System team had plenty of time to work this issue, and it even fascilitated the introduction of newer, more capable software into the mission, as if we were already changing everything, why not ad some great stuff. I wish everyone on MER great success with the next 1000 sols!