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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. '"
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.
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.
One way to get new toys is to break the old ones. If you had driven those greenscreen monitiors down a crater, they would have been replaced with some new shiny CGA monitors. I don't htink NASA is setting out to break "the little rover that could" but they are getting more and more adventerous with it, doing things that may have previously been ruled out for safety concerns. "The last thing it ever does" is better than saying "Hey everybody, Watch this!"
We are all just people.
'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.
But where does this confidence come from that they know that all of these formations are caused by water?
We use our experience on Earth to form a hypothesis about similar features on another planet.
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.
We form a hypothesis but we can't support or deny it until we observe evidence. If the evidence supports then it looks like we knew it all along. If the evidence denies then it raises more questions.
As far as I can tell, nobody's ever even observed an impact occur on any planet.
We have observed minor impacts on the Moon and a major one on Jupiter.
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.
Consensus is built with mathematical models. Probes and telescopes are used to validate our hyptheses. Again, if observational evidence does support a hypothesis then more questions are raised and new ones are formed. As for not correlating with physical impacts (I'm not entirely sure what you are referencing here) there are craters formed by volcanoes and probably some caused by exploding meteors (meteorites).
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.
We have hypotheses. Yes we want water to be found on Mars and it shouldn't be unexpected. There is an incredible amount of water in the universe and it would be foolish to only expect to find it on Earth or the moons of Jupiter.
Mars was a molten ball of magma that eventually began to cool. Why would anyone not expect that sometime between being a molten ball of magma and its current state as a presumably cold, dead world that there wasn't flowing water on it?
so if aliens landed on earth and drove 11km you'd think they had seen everything earth has to offer?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
No, but there isn't much else in the immediate vicinity. With the speeds the rover is moving, it will take literally years to get anywhere interesting.
OK smart guy, let's work this out from an engineering point of view - after all, the engineers have to build the things.
You: I want to build a Mars probe, looking for things we don't understand and don't expect.
Engineer: What kind of sensor platform do you want? Visible light? UV? IR? Radio? Gravitational waves? Do you want to pick stuff up and look at it or just wander around? Take some measurements perhaps? Of what, pray tell?
You: I dunno, there's just.... just stuff out there that we don't understand.... I want to learn about it. But no preconceived notions - well, wait, maybe something about electric fields, but no other preconceived notions.
Engineer: Maybe come back when you're sober, eh? (Goes back to reading Digg).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
~wolf
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
It's all about weight. The mars rovers had a very limited amount of space to work with, in terms of fitting them into the rockets. The solar panels were light enough and small enough and provided enough power that by using them, they were able to fit more science equipment on them. Also, launching radioactive material into space, despite being perfectly safe, still gets some furrowed brows from congress. Using solar panels pushes the paperwork through faster, which for this mission was of critical importance, since it was designed on a very tight timeline. But still, the major point was weight and space. The solar panels were the most efficient. Cassini used RTGs because the sunlight was too dim, so solar power wasn't a viable option, weight and considerations aside.