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Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations
Nancy Atkinson writes "Even though the Spirit rover is stuck in loose soil on Mars, she has an overabundance of electrical power due to a wind event that cleaned off her solar panels. While MER scientists and engineers are having the rover take pictures of her surroundings in an effort to figure a way to get her dislodged, there also is enough power (since the rover isn't moving anywhere) to do something extra: keep the rover 'awake' at night and run her heaters so she can take images of the night sky on Mars. 'Certainly, a month or more ago, no one was considering astronomy with the rovers,' said Mark Lemmon, planetary scientist at Texas A&M University and member of the rover team. 'We thought that was done. With the dust cleanings, though, everyone thinks it is better to use the new found energy on night time science than to just burn it with heaters.'"
Then, when they DO image something interesting, like this Martin crinoid, they won't talk about it!
If there really was to be a cover-up, wouldn't it be easier to just not release the smoking gun pictures rather than release and deny?
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Trolling is a art,
That this rover landed in 2004 with a planned mission of 90 Martian days and we're now in 2009 still amazes me. To keep these rovers functioning for that long is an engineering triumph. Even with equipment failures, dust storms, broken wheels etc. the engineers at NASA manage to make the best of these rovers and learn more about Mars. If we're lucky, the rovers will still be working when we land there, one day. It's nice to see such human ingenuity.
described Spirit's astronomy as "stone-knives and bear-skins backyard astronomyâ"but from Mars!"
They may not get much useful information but you have to admit, doing Astronomy from a coffee-table sized robot while it sits stuck in sand on another planet 36 Million miles away IS pretty cool.
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