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NASA Mars Rovers Hit 5-Year Anniversary
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's Mars rovers have been on the red planet for five years now. The rovers were originally planned to stay operational on the planet for only 90 days, but it has turned into a much longer mission than anticipated. NASA has put together a video to celebrate the anniversary. The rovers have made important discoveries about wet and violent environments on ancient Mars. They also have returned a quarter-million images, driven more than 21 kilometers (13 miles), climbed a mountain, descended into craters, struggled with sand traps and aging hardware, survived dust storms, and relayed more than 36 gigabytes of data via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. To date, the rovers remain operational for new campaigns the team has planned for them."
It's still so unbelievable to me that we actually have a satellite and stationary vehicles on another planet and are using them to do stuff there. If you really think about this for a moment in terms of what has to be accomplished for this to work it's just mind-blowing.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
This is a perfect example of the best that America has to offer.
The people who built these rovers were not all "American."
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
How much more data does the lander need to send before the total mission cost is cheaper on a per MB basis than sending txt messages to your BFF?
It already is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Greatly agreed. Our unmanned program has been such an astounding success.
What I don't get is the benefit of adding a human to these missions. They are ill suited to the environment and require all sorts of extra equipment to keep alive during the voyage and on the planet. Worse, they have to be shipped back to earth intact. Their value is so high that heavy expensive multiply redundant systems have to be built to ensure their safety.
I do get the benefit of having a device that can make decisions without up to two hours lag time, but the investment might be better spent on a bit of navigation software rather than transporting wetware.
-Jon
As an American I am proud of what we've done but I'm also proud of the work the non-Americans have done to help us achieve what we wanted.
And in fact I think it goes to show we'd achieve a load more if we could unite and combine our strengths, like Voltron, rather than fight each other. Unfortunately that goes against our instinct and a global economy scares to religious freaks who believe that will bring on the end of the world.
How many rovers could you have send to Mars for the price of a human mission? Around a thousand or so I think, puts things into perspective.