Slashdot Mirror
End of the Road For NASA's Mars Rover?
An anonymous reader writes "NASA celebrated Mars rover Spirit's bountiful, six-year stint on the red planet on Sunday – way longer than its forecast three-month mission. But it all may soon come to an end, stuck as it is in Martian sand."
I wish the poster had done a better job summarizing the situation. Spirit is stuck in the sand and can't rock itself free; because it's not moving, sand and dust is collecting on the solar panels; winter is coming on Mars, making the solar energy that much weaker anyway.
But even as cute little rover sits there spinning, its wheels are doing Science, they dug down to a layer with sulfur. Sulfur indicates hydrothermal vents, and hydro is the greek word for water. Woot!
A miracle could happen; a sandstorm could clean off the solar panels, allowing enough energy for a mighty push that could free the machine.
"the lost century: the millennial archive hole"
abstract: paper archives from the 1900s are still useable today, the only barrier being language conventions of that time period. additionally, digital records from the 2100s are usable today, due to mandated standardization of file formats and the prevalence of cheap, eternal nanoholographic storage. however, the 2000s consisted mainly of magnetic and optical storage on flimsy media. additionally, file formats were often proprietary, quirky, and ever changing due to the rapidly evolving nature of digital technology from that early era. if the actual media itself wasn't degraded, the file format itself was usually forgotten in a generation or two. finally, many early groundbreaking sites of the primitive internet are lost to posterity simply because they were designed to be ephemeral and ever changing, and no one thought to take archival snapshots of their content. it didn't seem important at the time. and so, the early decades of the digital age, when many fundamental crucial decisions were made that have defined our culture today, are forever lost to us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it