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Mars Rovers Return to Exploration
inkslinger77 writes "The two Mars rovers that have been carefully conserving critical power supplies since June, when the summer dust-storm season began on the red planet, are now springing back to work as the storms subside.
Typically, the solar panels on each rover produce about 700 watt-hours of electricity per day — enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours, according to NASA. But this year's dust storms reduced that to as little as 128 watt hours per day. When daily power generation is down to less than 400 watt-hours, the rovers suspend their driving on the planet and stop using their robotic arms, cameras and other instruments.
But they are back in action now!"
Sadly, with their relatively low speed, they will probably never find Sarah Connor in time for Fox's upcoming "The Sarah Connor Chronicles."
Hope they're not Li-ion.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I don't think you need NASA to say that - I think I can confirm that 700 watt-hours will power a 100-watt bulb (or device) for 7 hours. furthermore, improving on NASA, I can also say that it will power 7 100-watt bulbs for 1 hour, or 1 700-watt bulb for an hour.
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Why are you describing to slashdotters, 700 watt-hours will light up a 100watt bulb for 7 hours? Is it that easily imaginable? Should use very precise engineering descriptions like, four football fields long or as big as a refrigerator or something. The most descriptive way to describe 700 watt-hours would be something like the energy spent by a senator tapping the restroom stall floor with foot over his entire three term career or the energy used by a /. mod marking 8324 posts as trolls, flamebaits and underrated.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sigh. It's practically obligatory when you're talking about science (at least in the States, how about other countries?) to dumb it down. At least they didn't say how many ping-pong balls the rovers could carry if they were hollow.
And at least we aren't to the point of saying how many angels can dance on a rover's solar panel, or somesuch. Yet.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
When we put our minds to it , it gets built in china.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
"If your car was as well-designed and resilient as these rovers it would run on empty for 100 miles, drive up mountains, and review your tax returns."
I'm David Hasselhoff, bitch! My car does all of that - and more!
They are doing pretty well though
> Past storms on Mars affected the rovers, but those were only short-term events, Matijevic said. This year's storms were especially strong.
Must be the global warming.
Slashdot is able to reproduce an article twice per week, that's close to a dupe in about 3 days, according to Nasa. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/0 3/0154202