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Opportunity Breaks NASA's 40-Year Roving Record
astroengine writes "After nine years of hard Mars roving, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity has broken a 40-year-old extraterrestrial distance record. On Thursday, the tenacious six-wheeled robot drove 80 meters (263 feet), nudging the total distance traveled since landing on the red planet in 2004 to 35.760 kilometers (22.220 miles). NASA's previous distance record was held by Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt when, in December 1972, they drove their Lunar Roving Vehicle 35.744 kilometers (22.210 miles) over the lunar surface. Although it's broken the NASA distance record, it hasn't surpassed the international record, yet. The Soviet Lunokhod 2 remote-controlled moon rover roved 37 kilometers (23 miles) across the lunar surface and, so far, remains the undisputed champion of distance driving on an extraterrestrial surface."
And likely will be for a long time to come. And so it should be, at least while we are doing for the science.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
No I think you're confusing the decimal for a comma.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
35760m in 3309 days is about 45 cm/h
( and imperial types can translate from SI themselves)
That's European syntax. Ten thousand point five would be 10.000,5
Is there like, a trophy or something that goes to the winner? Maybe they should get a contract to manufacture electric powered vehicles to reward their expertise.
Where does 7 to 1 come from? 7 to 1 of what?
I think NASA's done pretty well for itself...
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We're still kicking ass in terms of total distance traveled in space, thanks to V'Ger... err, Voyager. But we still have a long way to go to catch up with total extraterrestrial crash landings and highest BAC in space.
Seriously, try walking 1 meter in 1 minute and 40 seconds and you'll get an idea just how slow the rovers travel. Now walk 22 miles at that speed. That said, the accomplishment is still incredible. Show me any moving device that had received no maintenance in 9 years and still works.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
That's European syntax. Ten thousand point five would be 10.000,5
point == . != ,
In France they more commonly have a space instead of a point: 10 000,5
Actually he's not.
1.000 km is 1 000 km or 1 000 000 meters.
1,000 km is 1 km or 1 000 meters.
1,5 km is 1500m or 1.500.000 cm.
Considering this website IS based in the US, then US convention rules.
When you pronounce "1,5km", do you say "one point five" or "one comma five"?
Thats actually what the word definition means, but then again most people don't understand causality:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma#In_numbers
seem already to work quite well... on Mars
I see how there could be confusion with the trailing 0 in the thousandths place. I have to presume they really did measure that distance down to the millimeter. Since NASA released the figures, make sure to localize the radix point and thousands separator to "US" when reading. Here's a lengthy but incomplete list of localized separators.
I am not a crackpot.
Soviet Union
1st Satleite to orbit Earth
1st Animal in space
1st Man in space
1st Woman in space
1st multiple personnel in space
1st Object into inter planetary space
1st lunar probe
1st Venusian probe
1st Martian probe
1st Space walk
1st space station
NASA
1st Cokacola in space
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Should have read "down to the meter".
I am not a crackpot.
, spread over 3 separate EVAs in 3 days. All of the unmanned US and Russian rovers took a lot longer to set their distance records.
If the Apollo program was allowed to continue past 17, there were plans for even longer distance surface excursions. There were even preliminary studies done for a small flying vehicle to allow the astronauts to cover even longer distances from their landing site.
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they hatin'
When you pronounce "1,5km", do you say "one point five" or "one comma five"?
Actually I say: "One and a half kilometers" ;)
Well, as you wrote 1comma5 it is pretty clear, don't you think? Ask again for 1,500 km whether he will say onethousandfivehundred or onecommafive. Overall it is pretty clear that the OP used . as a thousand separator and not for decimals - the european way.
Oups got it wrong . for decimals and , for thousands - the american way.
jobs in Pasadena, CA as opposed to jobs in Houston, TX.
The rover would fit right in with the drivers on my daily commute in Cleveland...man I miss NY
Kind of funny but wrong or misleading both by commision and omission. Commission: 1st Venusian probe and 1st Martian probe -- the USSR had the first landers on each (which operated for a few seconds or minutes) but the USA had the first flybys of each (Mariner II for Venus and Mariner IV for Mars; Mariner II was the first successful mission of any kind to another planet besides the earth-moon system) and "space probes" by definition include flybys.
Omission: The list of "firsts" which USA-NASA accomplished is long, but the highlights are:
Manned moon landing (had to put that one in first)
First and so far only probes to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. First and only orbiters of Jupiter and Saturn.
First and only spacecraft on escape trajectories from the solar system.
First probe to Pluto (on its way now).
First and only probes to Mercury (Mariner 10 flyby and Mercury Messenger in orbit now).
Only landers on Mars which worked for more than a 15 seconds.
The list above is far from exhaustive. Both the USSR and USA had notable space accomplishements and neither would have moved as fast without the competition of the other, but this pervasive meme that the USSR did everything first is just false.
Considering this website IS based in the US, then US convention rules.
After a moment of confusion, simply ask yourself whether the rover has completely circumnavigated Mars. If your answer is no, then it must be the US convention. If your answer is "I don't know," then hit Ctrl-W and go read Perez Hilton or something.
I know sorry USA also had 1st semi re-usable space craft, 1st docking in space and 1st Geo synchronos. However if you look at it pre 1966 it's pretty one sided with I think the only NASA 1st being having two manned space craft within 200 yards of each other whilst in orbit. It all changed when Sergi Pavlovich Korolyev died he had essentially blagged the Soviet space program from the start (They only let him launch Uri Gagarin because he told them they needed someone to man the radio).
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
We are on the same team.
The hell? what about...
NASA
1st man on the moon...
Soviet Union
1st Object into inter planetary space
If I remember rightly, the 1st Object into inter planetary space was Luna 1 which was ment to be the first first luna probe ... but missed went into solar obit and was hurredly dubbed a "new planet" and renamed Mechta ("Dream")
When you use metric units, you shoud use metric conventions... I also read "35760" kilometers instead of the correct "35,76", or "35 kilometers and 76 meters".
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I know sorry USA also had 1st semi re-usable space craft, 1st docking in space and 1st Geo synchronos. However if you look at it pre 1966 it's pretty one sided with I think the only NASA 1st being having two manned space craft within 200 yards of each other whilst in orbit.
I had noticed this.
It all changed when Sergi Pavlovich Korolyev died he had essentially blagged the Soviet space program from the start (They only let him launch Uri Gagarin because he told them they needed someone to man the radio).
Didn't know why it changed then, though -- thanks.
Absolutely
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Considering that the real accuracy is at the meter level (3 and a bit feet), NASA 'results' are a tie. No story.
Actually Cassini is half european. The platform is NASA, but the antenna for communication is Italian, and the instruments come from both side of the pond.
I don't think lunar travel can even begin to compare to travel on a planet like Mars. There is no atmosphere and very low gravity.
If you define a geological stop for at least a day to take pictures and maybe manipulate rocks/soils. The MERs have done over a thousand of these stops in their combined 6000 days of work. Lunakhod nor Apollo never came close to this number.
If US convention rules, then why give km's first and then miles in brackets, and not the other way around, hmmm? ;)
Maybe, maybe not. I know when I first saw 35.760 and 22.220, I saw the decimal, but the trailing zero made me think that, for some reason, they were using European notation. It wasn't until I got to the part about the previous record being set by the Apollo 17 astronauts that I realized tens of thousands of kilometers/miles was probably the incorrect way of reading it.
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When you speak English, you should use English conventions... Most of the English speaking world uses '.' as the decimal separator.
And the only reason for the entire Lunokhod project is that the Soviets failed to get a crew to the moon and blew up the second N1 rocket in 1969 after a loose bolt got sucked into a fuel pump.
The Soviets lost the space race and never did get a man on another planet. They sent that thing instead, attempting to save face.
Funny how the poster forgot things like "first space rendezvous" and "Winning the space race and PUTTING A MAN ON THE F*CKING MOON". He counts ten seconds of functioning lander as a victory, but the brass-ring of the space race does not even count in his mind.
The largest and most expensive Soviet space program was their attempt to copy NASA's space shuttle, which flew once and got crushed in 2002 when it's hanger collapsed.
I would doubt that very much - maybe if we only count the ones having English (any version - the differences between GB English and US English are large) as a first language. But as English now is the international lingua franca most speakers probably have another first language. That makes the high population countries carry a higher weight - countries such as India and (Peoples republic of) China. But only a small fraction of their population knows English so it's hard to calculate their impact.
But all that doesn't matter as the choice of decimal point or decimal comma isn't part of the language structure...
"In 2003, the 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures officially declared “that the symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line,” and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures uses the point in its English-language publications and the comma in its French publications."
reference: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/faq.html#decimal
If they offer me the flight, I'll run the full marathon to break the record
Because this is science, and science is almost always done in metric regardless of locale.
countries such as India and (Peoples republic of) China.
Except that both India and China use "." as a decimal point.
Citation: Decimal Mark Use
That may have been coincidental. The "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies" was put into force on October 10, 1967 and removed concerns on how the USSR would react to space launches from the US. Up to that point, it's been said that it was easier to allow the USSR to go first and set the precedent.
Not here in Germany.
We say Zehntausend Komma Fünf. Ten thousand comma five.
And what we mean, makes only sense to you, if we say Ten thousand *point* five.
Although where I come from, I learned to write things like 10'000,5.
What's your point?
No hard feelings, especially since I see you are well informed in space history and not just repeating the meme without knowledge. One thing is certain about the first decade of space exploration -- without the competition between the USSR and USA, neither of them would have done near as much and they both achieved great things.
Of course you say "comma" when you write a comma, unlike in the parent post.
That was 19 km/h on the first Apollo 17 EVA, down a fairly steep hill, though John Young was sceptical, probably because he was the record holder at the time.
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Actually the first object into interplanetary space was a manhole cover that predated the Space Race. The Pascal-B nuclear test in 1957 was supposed to test safety features which would stop an accidental premature detonation of a nuclear weapon. Instead the safety features failed miserably, the nuke went off with almost the full force, and the 900 kg steel cover welded on top of the test shaft was launched into space at several times escape velocity.
I know far too much trivia.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
The Russians were also the first to have an astronaut die in a fire in a high-oxygen environment.
Or the cover was vaporized. I think the jury's still out on that.
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."
Certainly Korolev would have been stuck designing missiles for much longer if he hadn't been able to point at the US space efforts to get funding.
The problem is also the ambiguous use of "22.210 miles". That automatically makes you think it is 22210 miles and not 22.21 miles. I was reading 35760 and 22210 also.