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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."

4 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.