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.'"

Comments

Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d

[grub]

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?

.

Re:Girl rover

[corsec67]

It is something that you could ride; wouldn't it be better to ride a female? /Going for a strictly funny mod with this comment. //Real reason is probably the same way that ships are referred to using feminine pronouns.

Observe what?

[ATestR]

At first glance, one might think that observation of the Martian night sky would return insignificant scientific data. After all, how powerful of a telescope does Spirit mount? Certainly not even in Hubble's league. But they aren't looking to collect data about distant galaxies & stars.

The real value is information about the Martian atmosphere. By observing the "twinkle" of distant stars, the observations should return some useful information regarding night time atmospheric conditions. Maybe not as much as a dedicated purpose designed atmospheric station, but certainly more than we have now.

Re:Observe what?

[Stenchwarrior]

From TFA:

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.

Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d

[grub]

Sure, it does to me too, but that doesn't make it one. Take the famous Mars face photos. It looks like a face, under the right conditions of lighting and shading, but is otherwise an unremarkable piece of Martian real estate.

Amazing Engineering

[deemen]

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.

Re:Amazing Engineering

[Chris Burke]

I'm wagering that designing a rover that you are certain is capable of running around Mars for 90 days would necessarily entail a degree of engineering that makes it at least theoretically capable of running around Mars for years. Everything that broke and they worked their way out of in the last few years could have happened on day 10. Thus redundancy, back-doors, and clever, robust engineering were the words, even for a short mission.

The 90 day expected life was due to the expectation that the solar panels would get covered in dust, and that the Martian wind would be too slight to blow them off (and various panel cleaning devices were considered and rejected for reasoning as solid as the rest of the rover design). When that assumption was proven false, and the panels were kept clean enough to continue powering the rover, well, then the rover's "expected" life span goes way, way up.

It's not like they said "Oh the mission will only be 90 days, we can design this axle so that it would snap on day 91" or "Hey, the controller code will fail with an out of memory exception on day 100, but we won't fix it or put in a back door to get new code in the rover because who cares if it dies on day 100?"

So, yeah, yay for human ingenuity for sure, but that ingenuity was in there from the start and comparing the result to the 90 day expected life is a little misleading.

Amazing what those little rovers can do

[bignetbuy]

Such an amazing project, those little rovers are. With an planned life span of 90 days, they have now been running since...oh...2003? Wonderful work, NASA. Please keep the pictures and the science flowing. Can you imagine how long that data takes to get from Earth to Mars?

Or what about the communication path from the rovers to NASA? They use the Mars Odyssey or Mars Global Surveyor. Check this out. The rovers have a 250kbps link to those satellites. Unreal. Even with the satellite use, the data still takes TEN minutes to get to Earth.

This stuff is awesome. Just awesome.

Phobos & Deimos

[sznupi]

Please, please, please...make a photo of those two moons on night/twilight sky, with barely visible ground/horizon

Ultimate romantic picture for all geeks throughout the world ;>

Re:Phobos & Deimos

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's going to look like you think it's going to look.

Here a series of pictures taken by Spirit in 2005.

Re:Phobos & Deimos

[brock bitumen]

that *would* be cool. don't think the Martian sky has a sight like that tho

Put this in perspective, our moon, which is a fairly large night-sky (or daytime) feature, is about 1800km mean radius, (which is about a quarter the size of Earth, mind you, and we posses the largest natural satellite, relative to the planet, in the solar system), and, by the way it's about 385,000 km from earth on average, which is not very close, but it still appears quite large.

However, Phobos, and Deimos, the two small moons possessed by Mars, are a paltry 11km and 6km in mean radius, respectively. The smaller moon, Deimos, is also farther away, and would appear no more than a small dot in the sky (day or night as it would happen to be). Phobos, by virtue of it's very close orbital distance, would have a shot at actually being recognized by a lay-Martian to be something special in the sky, but it would still appear quite small when compared to the grandeur of Luna.

The photos from these pages depicting a solar transit ("eclipse") from the the surface of Mars, help provide a good metric for comprehending these relative sizes. Notice that neither moon is large enough to actually create an eclipse. Of course, on the surface of Mars, the Sun is slightly smaller than on the surface of Earth, but not by very much. Phobos' transit, Deimos' transit

Finally, both of these on first glance appear to be nothing more than lumps of rock drifting through space, hardly anything to cherish on a romantic skyline like we do the way our perfectly curved Luna hangs. But maybe I'm just being ethnocentric....

Re:Nautical tradition

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just nautical tradition. In English, anything of "common" gender (i.e. persons unknown or groups of mixed gender) get masculine pronouns, while anything ordinarily neuter but "personified" gets feminine pronouns. There were some archaic examples of personification from neuter to the masculine gender, of which see Fowler's for details, but these mainly follow Latin gender categories; modern usage of the gender of personification favors the feminine, as far as I know, exclusively.

Re:Girl rover

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Try: "The heteronormative, phallocentric discourse of the hegemonic western technocratic class."

For extra credit, be sure to emphasize that said class's "dehumanizing ideology of technologically mediated science-as-dominance oppresses the many equally valid Traditional Ways of Knowing embraced by native martian culture".

You posted from "Angstrom Medal" Winner...

[WED Fan]

Good, F%&king god, man. Did you seriously post a link from Richard C. "Art Bell's Best Buddy" Hoagland, "winner" (read: purchaser) of the Angstrom Medal, science "advisor" to Walter Cronkite during the Apollo missions, Mister "Face On Mars", glass tunnels on Mars? Did you seriously post that tripe on this site?

Do you believe:

• Aliens have Elvis?
• Alien craft are in storage in "Area "Boogidy Boogidy" 51"?
• Aliens built the pyramids?
• Atlantis is near Bermuda/Bahamas/Catalina?
• The world will end on December 21, 2012?

You do know that this is /. and not the "News of the World" site, right?

Would be better to look for meteors

[petes_PoV]

The pix of stars aren't very good.

As the article says, they trail after a few seconds, since they can't track. So they can't take deeper images of fainter objects. Without the ability to track, they might as well point the camera straight up (or whereever) and check for meteors. Apart from getting information about how many strike the martian atmosphere, they could correlate counts with meteor showers on earth, to see how the same showers impact (or not) two planets at the same time - a unique opportunity.

Also, a lot of metoers on earth at least, are fairly bright. So they might get quite a good hit-rate with their cam. Although I don't know what effect the thinner atmosphere would have. It would be interesting to see if the thinner atmosphere made meteors burn brighter (as they'd be slowed down by "air", less) or less bright, due to the lack of gases.

Re:Sell the images to raise funding money.

[bignetbuy]

*raises hand*
Between the Martian pics, Hubble, and APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day), we have enough pictures to last a lifetime...or at least until Microsoft starts charges us to change wallpaper. Hohoho.

Re:Girl rover

[RenderSeven]

If it was a guy, clearly it wouldnt have gotten stuck. Would've had bigger mud tires and a hemi ...

Re:how is it possible

[Hognoxious]

I doubt he read what you wrote. I didn't.

Re:Wind Event?

[dotancohen]

Storm implies rain, as other commenters have mentioned. However, this is more than just wind, it is is a phenomenon typical of Mars but rare on Earth: very small tornadoes. The Mars folks call these "dustdevils" as the appear and move similar to Taz. So "wind" is inappropriate, "storm" implies water, and "dustdevil" sounds weird to the layman. "Wind event" suffers none of the drawbacks, and the less-inquiring layman will not ask any more questions.