1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars
 

http://cellar.org/2004/spiritpan.jpg

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?

The second one is due to arrive in 'late January'... (Or so I've read in one of the news articles about this one...)

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 :finger: :flipbird: 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.

So how long do these signals actually take to get to Earth? Radio signals?

Also it seems the rovers got there in about seven months or so, but I thought they always projected a manned trip to be a 3 year ride?

I tried explaining all this to my wife but just ended up sounding like a big fat idiot.

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

I could have done it better, faster, and cheaper. That doesn't make it any less cool. :)

In what role? Administrator? Engineer? Research?

The reason I've read is that with human cargo, they can't exert the tremendous acceleration and de-celeration G forces that they can put a mechanical probe through, thus a manned mission would have to go slower, plus not take quite as efficient of a route...

Us human's are just too fragile for that.....

holder of the checkbook

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.

About 10 minutes, I'm told.

Re: 1/5/2004: Welcome to Mars
 

Hmmm... 11,850 bps = 11 kbps. More like an old-school 9600 baud jobbie. Now that was porn surfing! "Wait... wait... I think that's a nipple.... Damn it! Hang up the phone, Kevin!"