Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mars Rover Opportunity Set To Roll Into Its Ultimate Crater

Posted by Soulskill on from the opportunity-knocks-on-endeavour's-door dept.

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."

10 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Late-breaking news from the Council! by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    K'breel, speaker for the Council, emphasized that preparations for the final battle were complete.

    "Citizens, the last of the two mechanical invaders that first touched down on our red soil, has reached its ultimate destination. Intelligence reports from the blue world confirm that the alien fiend will likely peer over the rim of its ultimate destination this week, the huge End-Devaur 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 .

  2. Don't be sad, be glad! by graveyhead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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;
  3. Re:Why the ultimate crater? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    The crater is steep. It will be extremely difficult to get Opportunity out of the crater after it goes in. And there's a massive amount of interesting stuff in the crater to look at. Opportunity also has some functional difficulties (although it has so far been much more functioning than its sister Rover spirit). It is likely that the rover will break before we run out of interesting stuff to look at in the crater.

  4. NASA hates successful designs by tp1024 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:NASA hates successful designs by RollingThunder · · Score: 2

      Mars is huge, compared to what the rovers are covering.

      They could put a hundred identical rovers up there, and they'd all be finding different things, and the project would get some cost savings on the design side.

      Of course, the main cost isn't in the design side, but in the heavy lift and ongoing operations.

    2. Re:NASA hates successful designs by tp1024 · · Score: 2

      Quite the contrary. Getting stuff to Mars is cheap - about 10% of the project cost in those NASA projects. Ongoing operations are on a similar order of magnitude. Design is the most important part of the cost, hardware cost is quite neglible.

      This is quite unlike the japanese JAXA - where launch costs can make up 50% of the mission. But the Japanese, too, only send single missions and pay for it by having unreliable hardware (although part of this may be, because their missions tends to be technologically more ambitious than NASA - despite the low budgets).

    3. Re:NASA hates successful designs by DerekLyons · · Score: 2

      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.

      The most reasonable reaction is to do it again, only if you want to do the same thing again. Otherwise, not so much.
       

      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.

      And what's the point of doing what you've done ten or twenty times more, when it won't accomplish what you want to do? If I want to climb Everest, I don't climb the hill at the end of my street ten or twenty times and then claim I've accomplished the equivalent. (If I did, everyone would, quite rightly, laugh at me.) Yet, that's what you propose to do by repeating the MER rovers.
       
      Not to mention that nobody was sure the airbags would work beforehand either - the MER landers were much heavier than the Pathfinder lander, right at the bleeding edge of what the airbags were/are capable of in fact.
       

      What happened to the good old scientific practice of repeating your measurements and assuring your hypothesis?

      What happened to the good old scientific practice of building on your results?
       
      The landing system of the MER rovers is extremely limited, and can only reach a very small portion of the Martian surface with a very small payload. The science suite is equally extremely limited in that it's designed to answer only a small number of questions. You could launch a whole fleet of them and get an avalanche of data, but after spending those billions you'd still come face to face with the same problem - they can neither accomplish the science nor reach the landing sites Curiosity can. (In fact, the most interesting scientific sites are in the high latitudes and at higher altitudes - neither of which the MER landing system can reach.)

  5. Last words by MagicM · · Score: 2

    Opportunity's last transmission:

    Wheeeeeeeee!!!

  6. Science: doing the same thing over and over again by tp1024 · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. best joke on /. by roman_mir · · Score: 2

    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.