New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time

wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."

Comments

Overweaning care

[blair1q]

You know, being in a similar biz, I understand some of the economics of the process, but really, if we're building something to go a hundred million kilometers and land on another planet, you'd think we'd make it robust enough out of the box that it doesn't take 14 engineers and an act of congress to see it roll a few feet the first time. Let's send a robotic humm-vee. Yeah it weighs more. Big deal. Put it on a bigger rocket. That'd be cheaper than treating it like it's made of isinglas from day 0 to EOL.

Hope they fix..

[denis-The-menace]

Hope they fix the dust collecting on the solar panels issue.
Something as simple as compressed air blowing on the panels would do the trick.
Since there is a thin atmosphere on Mars, they could just have a little compressor pump the Martian air instead of an air or CO2 canister.