Slashdot Mirror
Top Ten Discoveries of the Mars Rovers
eldavojohn writes "Space.com brings us the top ten discoveries of the Martian rovers that landed there in 2004. They were expected to last three months but, as Slashdot has covered time and time again, they have lasted over three years. From minor discoveries about the formation of Mars to images of atmospheric phenomena, to final and definitive proof of a Mars with water, these two robots have definitely reserved themselves a place in the history books. Pending a dust storm, they may not even be done with their mission yet."
10. Martian's don't bleed 9..... Oh crap I gotta get fp
That the best publicity comes from making moderately low predictions of success, then when you exceed them you look heroic.
hmm, there were more than 10 discoveries?
If credit is to be tossed around, anthropomorphizing devices such as these tends to ignore the 'real' people that harnessed imagination and creativity so that 'they' could scuttle around another world.
...don't answer that, thanks.
Why the childish urge to conjure up cute little clanking robots instead of simply patting a fellow human being on the back?
In recent years
....) 500 million
NIH: $28 billion
NSF $5.5 billion
NASA $16 billion
NSF Math and Physical sciences : 135 million in 2002
NSF CISE (Computer
Nasa's Spirit probe $820million
Viking missions cost $935 million in 1974[1] or $3.5 billion in 1997 dollars
Good Photoshop and Wavefront hackers can work miracles with the raw material from the Mojave desert and Roswell NM coming from our photogs.
Obits for Nerds. Robots that mattered.
Seriously, no band survives the greatest hits album.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
Dejah Thoris
OK, first of all, almost all of the taxes you've paid for the last 10 years have already been spent several times over so we can Spread Democracy and Freedom.
Secondly, NASA engineers managed to create machines that were able to accurately and consistently navigate the surface of Mars safely and efficiently almost entirely on their own.
If anything, I wish NASA got more taxpayer money.
AC
no Mars Face?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
A mile long translucent worm or tunnel, Cydonia was built by ancient Martians and alien artifacts buried in the Martian soil.
No thanks to Richard Hoagland.
10 - Opportunity provides tantalizing glimpse of Victoria crater.
9 - Evidence of volcanic origin for Gusev crater.
8 - First meteorite identified on another planet.
7 - Discover of sulfur suggests Mars stink.
6 - Helps scientists determine that Mars had three distinct geological eras.
5 - Martian dust devils captured on film.
4 - First shot of Earth from distant planet.
3 - Photographs Earth-like clouds on Mars.
2 - Helps scientists create first atmospheric temperature profile of Mars.
1 - First definitive evidence that water flowed on mars, including blueberries, hematite, and silica.
Honestly, this has got to be one of the coolest things in a very long time for NASA. Not only has their multi-million project blown away the three-month lifespan, but the amount of data being recorded has got to be making those NASA scientists and the scientific community cream in their pants on a regular basis. We can learn with greater detail how planets and the galaxies are created, and begin to develop a very crude technical draft for mars colonization. The more data we take, the better the chances that, while probably not in our lifetime, soon enough the first stage of extraterrestrial colonization can be planned and executed. Great stuff!!!
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
Must add the "don't bring blue suits on Mars" discovery to the list.
"La presi e te la pagai (480.000 Lire)"
Decepticons!
No discovery of Decepticons?
OK Mars mavens, here's your chance. If you read the article it is obvious that #10 is recent.
What about the others? This would give an idea of the marginal benefit provided by the extended life of the mission.
Certain scientific speculation may have its merits, but I could do without this kind!
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Even if we decided to colonize space, we're all going to die anyway because of the thermal death of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death
So why bother?
I just wish we could find a planet where it is written "We apologize for the inconvenience"...
If you need a good way to stick a CD to your dashboard, sandwich it between Legos.
1 26468357EDN0000P1502L0M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/n/001/2N
Do a blow up on the circular object on the panel, left and down from center.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
10 - O crater .../ \... volcanic ...*... meteor ...//... dust devils
9 -
8 -
7 - ~~~ stink
6 - A..B..C three eras
5 -
4 - [ . ] Earth from mars
3 - o@o clouds
2 - ~!~ atmospheric profile
1 - H2O water history
I think the 2 neatests things from a spectator's viewpoint were the dust devil movies and the spherical blueberries. Burn's Cliff was also cool.
Table-ized A.I.
Perhaps someone can update these lyrics for me:
Rambling Rover
- trad,from Silly Wizard
- chorus: -
Oh there's sober men & plenty
And drunkards barely twenty
There are men of over ninety
That have never yet kissed a girl.
But give me a rambling rover
Fae Orkney down to Dover
We will roam the country over
And together we'll face the world.
I've roamed through all the nations
Ta'en delight in all creation
And I've tried a wee sensation
Where the company did prove kind.
When parting was no pleasure
I've drunk another measure
To the good friends that we treasure
For they always are in our mind.
There's many that feign enjoyment
From merciless employment
Their ambition was this deployment
From the minute they left the school
And they save and scrape and ponder,
While the rest go out and squander
See the world and rove and wander -
And they're happier as a rule.
If you're bent with arthritis
Your bowels have got colitis
You've galloping ballicitus
And you're thinking it's time you died.
If you've been a man of action
While you're lying there in traction
You may gain some satisfaction
Thinking "Jesus, at least I've tried."
Regardless of any of the claims you have made, my feeling is that your simplistic and poorly-structured rant implies that you are/were not a director of a condensed matter lab. You may know something about physics, but you are not a professional. I would suggest you either improve your online presence in effort to support your future claims. Frankly, scientists tend to be very detail oriented and would not progress very far via efforts such as yours above. For starters, I wonder if you can identify three grammatical errors in your four sentences above?
I simply doubt your claim based on your ability to express yourself (I strongly suspect that English is your first language).
I invite you to prove me wrong.
Cheers.
do as the Martians do?
...should be to hunt down and kill whoever laid out that page for space.com.
Putting the article text in a six line scroll box while 95% of the page is ads or blank should be an offense punishable by being skinned alive.
I was a little bit annoyed reading through that. You'd get this tiny little 300x200 image that you wanted to see larger and not a single link too you anywhere that you could view it... That was more than a little frustrating.
"They were expected to last three months but, as Slashdot has covered time and time again, they have lasted over three years"
:) I kid, I kid.
So, Slashdot discovered this. Remarkable! Congratulations to Slashdot for discovering it, not once, but time and time again. So next year, if the probes are still working, will someone else discover that Slashdot was wrong again and again? That wouldn't be too much of a surprise, I suppose.
So what? That's still less than the economic damaged caused by a few years of MS viruses, the damage runs at several billion per quarter. Then there would be the general maintenance costs for MS junk which is throwing even more good money after bad. I'd say compared to all that, the Mars rover is cheap. When you start taking into account the merits of what you get for the money, the difference is even greater.
It took a few decades for the scientific benefits of the Apollo missions to spread out to the general populace. It will be similar here, though probably faster due to the Internet and other communications technologies.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
my eyes, the googles do nothing.
what a horrible website. Yes, I know what colour Mars is, they didn't have squeeze everything into a small window and colour it red to make sure I got it.
And I can't be bothered clicking through a page at a time, for a tiny bit of text about each discovery.
potentially interesting article, completely ruined!
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Then: 66 PRO
Now:
1. Use track ball to designate flight control system UI
2. Pull down Control Mode menu
3. Select Manual Mode option
4. Wait for confirmation dialog
5. Click Yes (and uncheck Don't ask me this again)
6. Check distance to landing site
Its a joke, I know, but I have never met a pilot who likes the Airbus UI. It needs a Dumb mode. All the Apollo spacecraft were dumb.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"We have reason to believe that Al Qaeda operatives have established a secret base in the caves of Mars. ... "
We'd be landing troops next month.
Possibly as its last assignment, Opportunity provides tantalizing glimpse of Victoria crater:
... the marketing people are having the spin the hell outta' this one. They're doing a good job of it. In fact I've seen /. posters who want to GO to Mars !!!
Has holes in the ground.
Evidence of volcanic origin for Gusev crater:
Has a rock.
First meteorite identified on another planet:
Has a foreign rock.
Discover of sulfur suggests Mars stink:
Maybe Has some kind of smell.
Helps scientists determine that Mars had three distinct geological eras:
Has rocks.
Martian dust devils captured on film:
Has atmosphere.
First shot of Earth from distant planet:
Earth is still here.
Photographs Earth-like clouds on Mars:
It has atmosphere.
Helps scientists create first atmospheric temperature profile of Mars:
It has atmosphere.
First definitive evidence that water flowed on mars, including blueberries, hematite, and silica:
Didn't find any water yet.
Most days the scientist/engineers upload the daily commands in the Martian morning, then download telemetry and data in the evening. Inbetween the Rovers pretty much operate on their own. There have been occasional snafus like Opportunity getting stuck in a sand dune for six weeks. But its been reprogrammed to detect getting stuck and not digging itself in now.
Another top 10?
If only they had sent a hummer up there instead, especially one of those robotically controlled hummers from the DARPA automation contests. Then we wouldn't have to worry about dust storms... the dust would have had to worry about its butt getting kicked by the hummer. The hummer is man enough for anything Mars can throw at it.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
A lot of the cost of a super-successful mission like Magellan, Galileo and the Rovers is the continuing operating cost. At some point the return on cost shrinks so that NASA ends the mission. I suspect the 2007 and 2009 Mars launches could compete with operating resources.
Another example is Hubble, initally $1.5B. However three servicing missions doubled that, and two decades of operation doubled it again. Still getting great results but may be retired if the final servicing mission never occurs due to launch delays.
Watching a show last night on Saturn, I started asking myself why we don't fund more large missions. Cassini was 3.4 Billion Dollars. That's a lot of money. The Federal Budget for 2008 is requested to be $2.9 Trillion though.
Wouldn't building Cassini-like projects get cheaper per unit if multiple projects were designed off of a common reference and shared parts? Obviously launch fuel wouldn't really get cheaper, but the craft themselves might, even with some specialized instruments for each mission. It would be incredible to have ten or fifteen missions to all of the planets, several moons, and the asteroid belt, and would definitely advance science...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.