1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars

Suggested by elspode. This is the widest IotD ever
posted at 1900 pixels wide, and will cause the terrible
horizontal scrolling that we all hate so much, but for once
it's really warranted.

Because this is fucking MARS you're looking at! Come on
people!

It's a 360 degree pan from NASA's Spirit, a "rover" about
the size of a golf cart.

Apparently the landing spot was just about as ideal as they
could hope for. There's room for the rover to move around;
it's not on too sharp an angle; there aren't boulders
for it to get hung up on.

Today they reported that the rover was able to figure out
where the sun is, which meant it could figure out its
Martian heading, which meant it could figure out how to
point its "high gain" antenna back at Earth. It had to get
it pointed within a couple of degrees. And it did. It
used the same navigation techniques as ancient
mariners used. It simply used them on another
planet.

And thus they are now able to get 11850 bps downloads
from Mars to Earth. That's two 56K modems' worth of
bandwidth to send back all the Martian science-porn the
rover can find.

Today they will send back the first color photos... and we'll
see if they make tomorrow's IotD.

"It simply used them on another
planet."

Long low whistle...

This is so cool when it works.

What has become of the second one, Opportunity? Is it still in transit?

Juju, yes Opportunity is still in transit. Scheduled to land on Jan 24th. If all goes well, it will be (more or less) on the opposite side of the planet from Spirit.

Here's a big to all the people bitching about how NASA is a waste of money. I saw these pictures the day they were first released. Very very cool. I love space pics. (Even if the moon landing was fake... (that was required you know))

Quzah.

I believe it is radio signals. On their website, they say that they transmit in the "X band".

Quote:

Originally posted by quzah Here's a big to all the people bitching about how NASA is a waste of money.

This project is private the other direction G - large parts of it are built by private firms with contracts. I don't know how much.

Re: 1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars

Re: 1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars

Excellent choice UT. History in the making and as Walter Cronkite used to say "And you,....were there.".

**looks at her watch and waits for tw to rant**

Not unless there's a political angle. On the other hand, if he happens to have a space magazine on hand to scan in..

Are we sure it didn't land somewhere in Nevada by accident?

Short memories?

Not to detract from the coolness of this picture (which I agree is impressive), but has everyone totally forgotten about 1997's <A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9707/06/mars.wrap/">pathfinder</A> (which sent its own <A HREF="http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9707/06/mars.wrap/panorama.lg.jpg">panoramas</A> back as well)?

It's just that everyone seems to be going on about how novel this all is -- as if it's the first time -- and nary a word about the sojourner/pathfinder expedition... I tend to wonder...

It's like sex in that the 2nd time is just as cool and in many ways better.

I bet the Brits aren't all that happy at the moment.

I hope they name the rocks something more creative than last time. I really got sick of hearing about Barnacle Bill and friends.

Maybe they should name the rocks after recent celebrity fuck-ups.

Hey, look at Spirit nudging up against Britney Spears.

Or... look at Spirit being fed by Jeff Corwin who is carrying a baby.
He really shouldn't take a child to such a dangerous planet...

Re: Short memories?

I wonder if the Spirit or Opportunity can try and see if the European Beagle made it or not?

...and for anyone interested in trying their hand at the NASA simulator, it has been made public at various university mirrors such as the one below:

ftp://ftp.net.usf.edu/pub/maestro

I haven't tried it, yet (can't FTP from work), but a friend explained that it it rather irritatingly slow, being a 40Mb java application. Yuck!

My inlaws live in Arizona in general area of the greater Mohave Desert basin. When I saw the first pictures from Mars I told my wife that her dad had sent us some pics of their backyard for New Years!

She was not amused.

Re: Re: Short memories?

With the apparent Mars mission curse that has plagued us earthlings for the last several missions, I wonder if NASA has considered the possiblity that the second lander would fall on and obliterate their first lander. Calculating the odds of that would be a good task to keep an intern busy for a week or so.

That would be a press conference to behold.

It *would* be quite the colossal fuckup, since the second lander is supposed to land clean on the other side of the planet. Of course, that distance is a relatively small fraction of the total distance the lander has travelled, so it would still be a very near miss by outer space standards...

NASA has a pretty neat picture up of the rover Opportunity driving around the rim of a deep crater. The 1MB high resolution version clearly shows the tire tracks going off into the distance around the crater.

The rover has already exceeded all expectations for longevity. Scientists are thinking now that it might last for years.