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Mars Rover Ready for Risky Descent into Crater
Riding with Robots writes "After months of scoping out the terrain, the robotic geologist Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars. Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think the potential for discovery is worth it. 'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days. The scientific allure is the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments. As the rover travels farther down the slope, it will be able to examine increasingly older rocks in the exposed walls of the crater. '"
I think it will survive it. Obviously that sucker was built Tonka tough lol. It's funny though cuz every time it's about to do just about anything, the scientists say "well this might be the last thing it ever does" just because it's way past the 90 days. It's kinda like how people every year say "yep, those AS400's are on their way out any day now" and then there I was, still sitting in front of an ugly green screen for one of my classes (I changed degree fields after that) I think the rover will be there long enough to bump into an astronaut's foot lol. Unless of course it gets attacked my martian crater monkeys. Those things are vicious.
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The MERS mission has been an incrediable sucessess that one doesn't hear much about, unless you read slashdot. A 90 day mission that has lasted 3 years and shows no signs of stopping as funding has been approved to at least september and so long as they are showing results, I doubt that is going to change. Most of the costs is in launching and building the damn things. From that stand point, looks like they've gotten their money worth out of them.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movie s/opportunity/VictoriaDigitalStory.mov
JPL produced Video of Project Manager John Callas discussing the entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_crater if there is water ice underneath MArs' surface or even temporarily exposed ice, this is the spot. what ever created the crater whether a deorbited moon, asteroid or comet likely left water behind after the impact. so even if the rover doesnt come out again it will be well wortth the sacrifice.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I've had fun jumping old cars over hills at 70MPH trying to get the axels to bust off after the car's served it's purpose, but I've got nothing on this, I'm jealous.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Looks like Boeing engineers (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/ 27/1723251/ sidenote, can someone point out the syntax to do this properly?) could learn a lot from NASA.
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I wonder how many probes like this we could've launched with the gigantic money wasted^H^H^H^H^H^H, er, I mean spent on the space shuttles and all the launch support. With some mass production techniques, maybe 1,000? More?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"the chance to examine and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments."
Oh jeez... investigating and exploring the depths of ancient, wet environments?... This sounds like some kind of MILF joke gone wrong... *cringes*
If it's taken us this long to reach a hopefully significant leap in the exploration of Mars, how long do you guys think it would take for a man to be able to set foot on Mars to actually get some first person perspective on the planet itself?
I ask, because I've seen a lot of planning going on in terms of living on Mars, but I can't help wonder, "Why all this planning and scheming, when we haven't even had concrete, indisputable evidence that Mars can sustain life, much less had someone actually get there?"
'The rover has operated more than 12 times longer than its originally intended 90 days.'
;)
So, it's a pre-DRM rover, then? It certainly wasn't built by HP's printer division.
You know, sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in the details of these rover missions, but I am always pretty humbled when I think of this remote controlled do-dad, once pieced together by earth-bound scientists, sitting on some planet 50 (or so) million miles away and still responding to our every command. Just to think that thing is out there, on mars, right now.
:)
Reading story after story about the various space exploration projects and we can get a little desensitized to the pure 'awesomeness' of the kinds of things our space exploration agencies are doing. So a moment to just consider this achievement is warrented I think.
How great would it be to have a go at driving that thing?
How many of these probes could we have launched if we spent money making a cheap launch system instead of ICBMs?
Or.. how many Mars rovers could we make if we spent the national health care budget on making them?
As cool as the Mars rovers are, they had enough trouble getting money for a 90 day project, let alone a freakin' armada. To the people who control the bucks, this is just boring geek stuff. At least the shuttle gives them some national heroes to say they support.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Old martian crater,
Love her or hate her,
Waited for someone to come.
Before it's all over,
Rover comes over,
And crawls right into her bum.
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I'd like to preface this by saying that I think that the guys at NASA are very intelligent and certainly well-meaning. However, their missions are becoming increasingly scripted. They increasingly presuppose their findings before even embarking upon the mission, as if the future holds absolutely no unexpected findings. I realize that nobody likes to feel like they are surrounded by things they don't understand. We all want to feel like we are masters of our own universe, and you have to have a purpose before people will consider putting money to it. But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water? Every week that goes by, our probes and telescopes bring more unexpected observations. Our theories of the universe are constantly changing. Objects that we thought were completely different increasingly appear to have similar characteristics. Many enigmas remain regarding fundamental questions about things like comets, the Sun and even the fundamental building blocks of the universe. As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet. At some point in time, their speculation hardened into consensus without ever thinking to validate it. Many of the craters we observe in the universe have highly unusual features that don't appear to strictly correlate with physical impacts.
My point is that the overall predictive track record and the large number of unsubstantiated consensuses within astrophysics today do not support the notion that we should be able to accurately predict our findings on Mars at this point in time. Our findings there have raised more questions than answers. We need to swallow our pride and get on with trying to be objective about these missions, or we risk creating an expectation within the public that science is a pre-scripted story. We need to allow for the possibility to be surprised, even on the big picture questions, or we run a risk of squandering the little time we have left on that planet with those rovers.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Having already got more that their money's worth, why the concern with its survivability? Surely the purpose of sending this explorer is to gather info. It has already gathered 10x the info that was planned for. Being conservative and tooling around on the flats is not as likely to give as much information as exploring the crater.... even if this is a one-way trip.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And I'm still not sure Vista is really 'out there' yet.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
With my rover!
Physical impacts have been seen on the planets. For example in 1994 there was a
comet that hit Jupiter. A little closer to home, the moon is regularly hit by objects. So yes there is a reasonable basis for thinking that planets get hit by hard objects.
I submit that the mars meteorite would probably be a better line of argument to use for your hypothesis.
After months of scoping out the terrain my hardy rover is ready to drive down the Victoria crater and investigate the compositions and textures of exposed materials in the crater's depths for clues about ancient, wet environments
My rover will most probably not operate more than 12 times longer than its originally intended though...
These have been amazing pieces of hardware. There has been a lot of buzz around opportunity, but last I heard both were still functional. What is the other one doing? That way if opportunity gets lost or malfunctions in the crater at least one will be left to roam the surface.
The talus slopes that it has to traverse to get back out are covered with the little hematite 'blueberries.' Its wheels will just slip and slide. It's like driving on ball bearings. You can check in but you can't check out.
You can see daily images and weekly updates about both rovers on the excellent official site. If you'll forgive the plug, you can also keep up with all the planetary probes on my (non-commerical) site: ridingwithrobots.org.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
We need rovers working off of RTGs! No more of this pansy solar panels that dictate that Spirit had to spend months in one spot facing toward the Sun just so it could generate enough power and internal heat just to stay alive! Even then they can only spend part of the time working and data broadcasts are limited when the power is low.
The RTG powered Cassini probe is doing a bang up job orbiting Saturn, and future Martian robots should, too. Enough mamby-pamby exploration with under powered exploration units. With nuclear power sources in these rovers, we could have gotten ten times the science in during the same amount of time.
The Mars Science Laboratory is slated for launch in 2009.
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
They were demonstrating the new one at the JPL open house last month. In addition, it will be much bigger (SUV-sized vs. ATV-sized).
will it check out that featureless black spot we found recently? I sure as heck would like to know what's in there.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Really Old Vehicle Extremely Resilient.
What do you think the odds will be?
Oh well, I guess this does for Victoria's Secret...
And come back safely - NASA needs you.
You may be right that unmanned exploration makes more sense -- but I don't find the human-life risk factor compelling.
Come on, who can name a single astronaut since they ended Apollo?
Easy: Mark Shuttleworth!
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They had two working one in 1970s. One went 11 km and the other 37 km. Opportunity just passed the first one. Lunar driving was remote control because the time-dleay feedback was about two seconds. Mars is 40 to 90 minutes.
hmm... my money is on the rover will fail due to not enough solar radiation. The batteries will die.
> Opportunity is ready to drive down into Victoria Crater on the Meridiani Plains of Mars.
> Mission managers acknowledge the hardy rover may never come back out, but say they think
> the potential for discovery is worth it .
Ok. Who the hell hired Peter Griffen to work in the control room?!?!?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
All it took to keep it running was wind blowing the panels clean? Who builds an 800 million dollar robot that doesn't have a brush to wipe the solar panels down?
I've heard they investigated that possibility but concluded it was not worth the cost. For one, there was no way to test them on real dust to make sure they don't make the problem worse. Second, Many other parts were also limited to 90 days, and in fact somes wheels, joints, and grinding teeth *are* worn out. They just happened to be able to work around these so far (or live without some, such as Spirit's grinders). There are a lot of work-arounds in place already. A lot of the credit goes to the workaround experts.
Table-ized A.I.
People on Slashdot like to allege that EU Theory is absurd. So, let's get down to business!
...
When the rover descends down into Victoria crater, NASA will be surprised to find that what they thought were sand dunes down there are in fact glassified sand. That peculiar formation down there is a fulgarite. It's not sand. It's more like solid rock. I'm guessing that the rover will be able to figure this out. Shouldn't be too hard. Wallace Thornhill discusses the formation of these Victoria Crater fulgarites in depth on his holoscience page.
NASA will discover this and then, for a brief few moments, wonder why this particular pattern became glassified (as opposed to just a flat melted bottom). Then, not understanding what they're seeing, they will move on to other things -- because, after all, if it doesn't have to do with evidence for water or life, why would they be interested?
It would be nice to think that getting this prediction right might mean something to some people out there, but there will be other opportunities
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I *love* the fact that astrophysical predictions are classified on Slashdot as "Troll". That's pretty interesting. It's a sign of the times that predictions no longer mean anything to mainstream astrophysical enthusiasts.
...
Anyways, I have some more details about what will be found at the bottom of Victoria crater. It's technically called a fulgamite (not a fulgarite). Fulgamites are superficially glassified, whereas fulgarites are underground tubes of glassification.
The formations in Victoria crater (and in thousands of other craters and canyons) a glassified mounds of debris. In CJ Ransom's experiments where a plasma gun is shot at various types of soil, the charged probe gathers material from the area surrounding the dark mode release of electrical energy and shoots it into the air. The shallow crater that forms gradually grows larger as more and more material is sucked in to the center of the plasma vortex.
If the energy is high enough, the material will be swept into the center of the vortex and then re-deposited below the discharge zone, where the heat would tend to glassify the surface, leaving it partially solidified. That's why the formations on Mars don't move around in the "wind" -- they're covered with a crust of tiny ceramic beads that have been fused together.
These sand dunes will look very similar to those observed at Endurance Crater
Endurance Crater "Dune" Field
One interesting aspect to these "sand dunes" inside the craters on Mars is that they all -- without fail -- exhibit identical morphology, from the polygonal formations to the trailing tendrils that look like they rise right out of the ground, rather than resting on top of it. Not one NASA commentator has remarked on that fact, despite being presented with, literally, thousands of examples from orbit and from Spirit and Opportunity.
There is a similar structure in the Argyre Planitia crater -- a giant, glassified, polygonal mound with ribbon-like structures, frozen in place:
Argyre Planitia
Argyre Planitia is 900 kilometers in diameter.
Once NASA discovers that these formations are hard rather than soft, they will likely call them "pachydermal weathering". But, in the process of coming to this conclusion, they will completely ignore the fact we can also generate these structures in the laboratory using a plasma gun. My guess is that they will also likely gloss over the morphology of the glassified "dunes", which Wallace Thornhill discusses on his www.holoscience.com site towards the bottom of this page.
As I've stated before, if NASA wants to prove to itself that water activity is responsible for these structures, it might have some success. However, there is no doubt that they are demonstrating a preference for one interpretation over electrical interpretations as the electrical interpretation would undermine their contention that impact craters are the results of explosions resulting from physical collisions. To accept that electrical plasmas are involved would force them to accept that bodies in space can acquire and trade charge -- a fact which they should have learned from the Deep Impact mission, which Wallace Thornhill also accurately predicted in great detail.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.