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Mars Rover Ready for Risky Descent into Crater

Posted by Zonk on from the go-opportunity-do-your-best dept.

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. '"

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. How long would it take? by Ub3rT3Rr0R1St · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?"

    1. Re:How long would it take? by pln2bz · · Score: 1, Interesting

      One of the inevitable problems that will eventually come up regarding life on Mars is the electrical activity there. NASA has been down-playing it because their purpose appears to be to demonstrate that there was once water covering the planet, but many of the images of Martian geology do not support that theory as much as they support the notion that electricity is terraforming the planet. People on Slashdot have made a hobby of ridiculing the Electric Universe theorists, but it is not even debated that dust devils on Mars can have lightning bolts at their cores. Pictures don't lie ...

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0509 16dustdevil.htm

      Martian dust storms appear to be armies of these dust devils. You can make out unmistakeable filamentation in these dust storms. Why is it there?

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/0705 09dustdevils.htm

      Would you call these craters or rilles? Is there a difference?

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0504 11marspits.htm

      The infamous Martian blueberries can be created in the lab with a cheap (electrical) plasma gun apparatus ...

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040827 mars.htm

      Same goes for the Martian spiders. You can generate Martian spiders by covering an old VGA CRT monitor with fiberglass dust, charging it up, and then discharging to the same location repeatedly with your finger. Anybody can do it. We all have the materials in our own houses. So much for one of the greatest enigmas in the universe! ...

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/0607 24spiders.htm

      These rilles on Mars defy many of the characteristics of fluid flow that we've used to understand fluid processes here on Earth ...

      http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/0705 14russellcrater.htm

      There are lots of things happening on Mars that do not fit into NASA's attempt to prove that water flows or flowed over all of Mars, and we'd be very wise to take a closer look if we plan on sending people up there. I've only included a very small handful here. Rather than ridiculing the EU Theorists, people should put serious effort into debunking them if they feel that they are wrong because what they are saying is very important. If you send somebody up there into an environment that has not been properly characterized -- if the environment is far more electrical than we are imagining it to be -- we could subject them to massive equipment failures and they could die. Within that context, it is not at all a waste of time to investigate the alarming things that the EU Theorists are pointing out.

      --
      "A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
  2. Re:A moment of reflection... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm totally with you. Although, I think the Voyager missions are even more humbling.

    Voyager 2 weekly reports (from 1995 to 2007, not sure where the 1977 to 1995 ones are) available:
    http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports /

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  3. Re:It will make it! by TrevorB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm actually surprised they're that concerned about getting out again. Literally, there's nowhere else to go. We already have 2 years of survey data from the non-cratered surface.

    This mission will end in Victoria crater, regardless of how long the rover lasts. The only reason to leave is to test the engineering capabilities of an aging rover to climb back out again.

  4. Re:For all of NASA's problems by cyriustek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It sounds to me as if the engineers at NASA took Scotty's advice to heart when he was shocked that Geordi told the truth about how long it would take to make a repair. (TNG: Relics)

    Under Promise and Underperform.

    The flip side of this is that we have to wonder if there is a downside to the NASA engineers under promising? Is it possible that if they gave a more realistic estimate, better plans for research could have been developed?

    Regardless, I say good job NASA!

  5. Re:A moment of reflection... by timmarhy · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Wrong, and i'll use a simple example to show it. If the engineers issue a command to the robot to move, it takes 4 minutes for that command to reach the machine (given that radio waves travel at the speed of light give or take a little), the machine still moves 4 minutes later, not at the exact moment we issue the command even though according to your logic the machine being 4 minutes in the future would mean it would move at the exact moment the engineers issued the command.

    our ability to OBSERVE the machine is delayed by 4 minutes, this however does mean it's 4 minutes ahead in time.

    what you are reffering to is the very cool effect of large distances on light in space which means when you look up in the sky your exactly gazing into a patch work of events which happened millions of years go.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  6. Re:These missions seem pre-scripted by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    and load up sensors to test every single one of them,

    The landed weight is 348 kg. It's mission is not to "explore strange new worlds and go boldly where no man has gone before..." it is:

    The scientific goals of the rover missions are to gather data to help determine if life ever arose on Mars, characterize the climate of Mars, characterize the geology of Mars, and prepare for human exploration of Mars. To achieve these goals, seven science objectives are called for: 1) search for and characterize a variety of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity, 2) determine the distribution and composition of minerals, rocks, and soils surrounding the landing sites, 3) determine what geologic processes have shaped the local terrain and influenced the chemistry 4) perform "ground truth" of surface observations made by Mars orbiter instruments, 5) search for iron-bearing minerals, identify and quantify relative amounts of specific mineral types tha contain water or were formed in water, 6) characterize the mineralogy and textures of rocks and soils and determine the processes that created them, and 7) search for geological clues to the environmental conditions that existed when liquid water was present and assess whether those environments were conducive to life.

    Very limited, very specific. Hopefully one of the first Mars landers, not the last. It took some five years (IIRC) to go from that paragraph to the actual spacecraft. During that time there were innumerable meetings / arguments / pointed emails about what scientific packages would fly on the landers. Some of those decisions were likely pretty prosaic - It might simply have been that they actually had some or all of the technology in a package that could be built and tested in the time frame and budget allotted.

    You somehow manage to find some deep, dark defects in the soul of NASA in a pretty mundane engineering exercise.

    You should get out more often.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  7. Re:It will make it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why didn't they made it sail-powered? It would had been great engineering challenge (Martian winds are so much faster then Terrestrial ones, sail control has not been robotized yet, AFAIK, especially sail control in extraterrestrial environment), but unlimited operational radius would have given us so much more exploration data.

    We need more parallelism: automatic drone factory ("hive", or "anthill") on Mars.