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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 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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With my rover!
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?
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.
Mars Rover Beginning to Hate Mars.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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!
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:
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!