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Spirit Rover Begins Making Night Sky Observations

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the rover-that-keeps-on-giving dept.

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.'"

8 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:why aren't any of the rover pics ever worth a d by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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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  2. Observe what? by ATestR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Observe what? by Stenchwarrior · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

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  3. Amazing Engineering by deemen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Phobos & Deimos by sznupi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ;>

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    One that hath name thou can not otter
    1. Re:Phobos & Deimos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Phobos & Deimos by brock+bitumen · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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....

  5. Re:Nautical tradition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.