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Mars Rover Opportunity Set To Roll Into Its Ultimate Crater
coondoggie writes "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will likely peer over the rim of its ultimate destination this week, the huge Endeavour crater. According to a NASA post late last week, Opportunity was only about 120 meters from 'Spirit Point,' the first landfall on the rim of Endeavour crater."
K'Breel confirmed that the source of this intelligence leak was a communications node of the blue world's so-called "Planetary Society" has been neutralized. Its data flows as sluggishly as the brine that oozes forth from beneath the summer soil. Soon, the invading force whose activities it purports to document, shall be neutralized along with it! ONWARD TO VICTORY!
When a junior reporter speculated that the reason for the temporary downtime of the communications node might be related to a surge of network traffic from blue-worlders whose only interest was peaceful exploration, K'Breel had the junior reporter's gelsacs effectively slashed .
Well, our spirit is gone but at least we've got some opportunity left! :-)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
We just finished building the Endeavor crater movie set in Area 51 for all you gullible suckers to ooh and aaah at. NASA, you haven't fooled ME!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Keep it going as long as possible. If it can still go explore something else, that must be done. After paying for the development, launch and all, it would be a pity to abandon the mission before Opportunity actually becomes kaput.
Snakes get over rocks with no ground clearance.
If they did, of course, you'd be complaining how the dummys made it too top-heavy, that's why it fell over.
Because you're a seasoned expert, who's landed probably dozens of ROV's on other planets.
They should have licensed the rover to Burger King; we could be instead be seeing a Whopper-tunity rising over the crater (likely pulling The King on a snowboard or some such thing) and claiming Mars for the right to Have It Your Way.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A few gaseous, gigantic planets may render your conclusion invalid.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Right. Because planets that aren't rocky have lots of vegetation. Because plants eat rocks.
But enough about CowboyNeal....
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
According to the wiki page Opportunity has been on this road trip since aug 2008... Thats a good 3 years now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endeavour_(crater)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Otherwise, they'd keep building them.
Those rovers are easily the most successful probes on a planetary surface ever. And this has been clear for years now. When you do something that turns out to be wildly successful, the most reasonable reaction that people have is to do it again. But not NASA. NASA could have build, launched and operated at least ten or twenty duplicates of Spirit and Opportunity for the price of its current "Curiosity" rover (some $2,300,000,000) that may or may not work.
What happened to the good old scientific practice of repeating your measurements and assuring your hypothesis? NASA could have spread new landing sites all over Mars and could even have gone so far as trading the risk of losing a few rovers to unfavorable terrain for the chance to do exploration of scientifically more interesting landing sites, that are more than flat deserts with the occasional crater.
Quantity is a quality all of its own that you must not underestimate.
Opportunity will get JPL on its toes until then.
Opportunity's last transmission:
Wheeeeeeeee!!!
Your romantic Hollywood picture of science notwithstanding, science is for the most part about doing the same things over and over again under only slightly differing circumstances. It may not be spectacular. - But imaging what we would know if all of earths geology came from two surveys conducted somewhere in the North German plains and the US middle west prairie. Right: nothing much.
Oh totally! That is an excellent comparison, since basically everything we know about Martian geology comes from the Opportunity and the Spirit! They have been the backbone that has given mankind untold amounts of information about the planet! They were in no way kept operating mostly because they gave NASA good publicity! NASA never planned to take them offline but reneged because of a furor given by non-scientists! I'm not being sarcastic, I just can't help ending my sentences with exclamation points!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The US government is going to roll something into a crater? Is this Slashdot or the finance pages?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I still remember the best joke seen on /. back when there was a software problem reported on Spirit during the flight to Mars, there was some issue related to flash memory, so that's what comes to mind every time: The Spirit is willing but the flash is weak :)
You can't handle the truth.
You don't get it.
But it does beg the question - once you've got a working design and engineering, operations, management, etc teams with lots of experience, does the total cost per mission drop when you start doing it in bulk?
Ie, once you've got a better idea of the mission lifespan, and yes assuming that the "getting it to mars" costs aren't coming down soon(ish), why not run 10 of them in parallel, on an "average" 5 year lifespan for each?
I'm sure there's something obvious missing from this, so someone please fill me in. Facts/figures please.
I think you are minimizing the impact of even one failed mission. In a government funding environment where even the military budget and Social Security are no longer sacrosanct, you can't afford any negative publicity when you are going hat in hand to your funders. The thinking public understands the risk, but thinking people don't control the purse strings -- politicians do.
It could be like a big online game, with a leaderboard, credits for school, etc. Self-supporting, it would not only explore a lot of the lunar surface, but give preparation for repeating the whole thing with Mars a few years later.