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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."
Solid Rubber Wheels. They sell them for Bicycles too.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I understand it fine. Which is why I don't understand why the thing isn't made so bulletproof that you could test the wheels with the entire crew jumping up and down on top of the rover. It's not so much a matter of not testing it as of having to treat it like it's going to break because you're testing it. One of the Mars landers crapped out this year because too much frost (albeit a layer of dry ice a couple of feet thick) snapped its solar panels. Prissy design is passe. Let's send up some gear that can do donuts. We'll find a use for the extra capability when we get there. We always do. Otherwise, we're going to spend $300 million and get only $301 million worth of work out of it, if we predicted every unpredictable input.