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'Opportunity' Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary Roving Mars
An anonymous reader writes "Ten years ago today, six and half months after launch, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's six-wheeled, solar-powered Opportunity rover landed on the surface of Mars, tumbling into a previously unknown feature now referred to as the 'Eagle Crater'. Opportunity and its twin Rover Spirit, which had arrived three weeks earlier, proceeded to crawl over and through plains, craters, and sand dunes, collecting and analyzing soil and rock samples, and taking panoramic photos of their surroundings, blowing orders of magnitude past the original projected 90 day mission timeframe. Spirit's mission drew to a close after it became irretrievably bogged down in soft soil in 2009; scientists lost contact with the rover in early 2010. Meanwhile, Opportunity is still going strong, with scientists announcing new evidence this past week of an ancient mild watery environment conducive to microbial life. Several web sites have mined the NASA archives to assemble tributes commemorating 10 years of work from Opportunity: Time, space.com, Information Week/Techweb. There's also a bricks-and-mortar tribute; the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC has just opened an exhibit featuring photos sent by the two rovers."
I know that's right. I bought some of that cheap shit too. Now I spend more money and buy stuff that will hold up.
10 years of service when built to last 90 days.
Thank the Martian winds. The wind blows the dust off of the rovers solar collectors, that wasn't expected.
Does anybody know when it will get to the Face on Mars? This is something truly worth investigating from the ground. They could provide real evidence to show one way or another that it is or is not it is intelligently-made.
"The Face" is a trick of light/shadow, no mystery to it anymore.
NASA has been the preeminent space exploration agency in the whole world for a long time now. Russia and others have sent great probes to Mars, Venus and nearby planets, but NASA has been the only space agency to send probes out of the solar system, to explore Jupiter, Saturn, fly by the Neptune and Uranus, and now sending a mission to Pluto. They've done incredible things with a limited budget. They made the first space telescope, the first Mars rovers, and so much more.
But given the massive investments China is making in space, and the political turmoils and budget problems going on in the US, I think in 20, 30, years China will have the preeminent space agency instead. Not that that's bad really but they're very strongly motivated, while in the US budgets get yanked around, people don't go into advanced engineering and science much any more, Congress is purely dysfunctional and incompetent, etc.
We'll see but I think China will become "where it's at" for space exploration in the future. They have longer term vision, stronger "national will", and an increasingly highly educated population.
The engineers thought the solar arrays would only generate power for 90 days, as evidence from earlier Mars explorations made them aware of a persistent dust problem they assumed would collect on the arrays' surface. The legendary winds on the planet proved the anti-Murphy, clearing dust accumulation regularly.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
is out of order, i heard today.
Why don't people just say "tenth anniversary" anymore?
Probably because people forgot - or never learned - that the word "anniversary" contains the root "annus", meaning year. Thus, the word has become so degraded that people celebrate things like their "two month anniversary since when we first started dating". Therefore it has become necessary these days to specify how long is each "anniversary".
It drives me nuts too, but you know that if you confront people about it they will just say, "language evolves."
It drives me nuts too, but you know that if you confront people about it they will just say, "language evolves."
And much like evolution there's no direction towards a "higher" lifeform, there's just selection pressure. For example, they say the inuits have so many words for snow. Well, perhaps other people who rarely see snow don't need half a dictionary of snow forms. Maybe they want to use adjectives like dry snow, wet snow, light snow, heavy snow, powdery snow since the words dry, wet, light, heavy, powdery can be reused in other contexts. Short words (piracy) tends to win over long words (copyright infringement) but there's a limited number of short non-toungetwister words so they're reused. a bear and to bear are totally different words but you figure it out from context. Compactness, precision, complexity on both the part of both the reader and the writer are opposing forces. Particularly the competence level to education time is critical, Latin might have been very precise between two people who've spent years at university but tourist English is easier when you just want to know the way to the nearest toilet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's called an amazing job. Show me any other nation on this planet that could do that. 10 YEARS working in an incredibly hostile environment w/o an chance of a repair. No one would claim that up front because no one would possibly believe it.
"...blowing orders of magnitude past the original projected 90 day mission timeframe."
Minimum of 2 orders of magnitude. 90 * 100 = 9000, or around 24 to 25 years.
It's because a 10th anniversary occurs after the passage of 11 years.
Maybe in Bizarro World...
The first happened at the end of year one.
Yes, after one year had passed. See how all the numbers are the same?
1st anniversary, end of year one, one year has passed.
10th anniversary, end of year ten, ten years have passed.
This is the start of the 10th year for Opportunity
The start of the first year of Opporunity's Mars journey occurred in January 2004. We're now in January 2014. This is the start of its 1st+10=11th year.
its 9th anniversary and 10th year anniversary.
I think the fourth character of your username needs to be moved back a couple of places.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"well there's your problem right there, see? it says 'made in China' "
It is unfortunate in some ways that you're modded down. This is the evidence for why there is no face on Mars: The other side of the coin is that seeing faces where there aren't any is an artefact of how your brain is wired up. Random natural formations (on any scale) stand a better chance than most people think of appearing as a face. This also extends to other objects, however, such as Jesus, and genitals. This one is really cool too.
soylentnews.org
Earth or Mars years?