Mars Rovers

[Turtle]

___These little buggers amaze me! They have run so long, we now take them for granted. NASA main page for the Rovers:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/

Two precent Rover photos I found interesting:
Feldspar crystasl? I so forget the geological chemistry I knew so poorly; this looks familiar though.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...0P2977M2M1.JPG
Unusual holes in rock.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...0P2977M2M1.JPG

[Eliot Hariton]

They really are quite amazing. It's one thing to design equipment to specification, but when you exceed the expected life by such great amounts, that really shows the genius of those that worked on it. I would really like to see them do an after study on them, to figure out why they lasted so long.
In space, it's all about durability and survivability in reference to cost. I think it's something like 10k/1kg or something along those lines. It's forecasted that prices will fall gradually though, given another 10-20 years but it will never be run-of-the-mill. Which is sad because I was really looking forward to going up myself

[Hawkens]

I just love this one....

Opportunity Leaving Martian Sand Trap - June 07, 2005
This video shows the Mars rover Opportunity maneuvering out of a martian sand dune between May 11 and June 3. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked for nearly five weeks to get Opportunity free. The long-distance roadside assistance was a painstaking operation to free the six wheels of the rover which were stuck up to their rims in the soft sand of the small sand dune. The rover exited the sand dune in the same direction it drove into it on April 26th.

Five Weeks!!!

[Turtle]

___They keep going, & going, & going...
___Update from BBC on rover progress:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4172674.stm

___From that article, an interesting geologic find at the latest rock Spirit has data mined; "...It has just finished a thorough investigation of a rock called Assemblee, which has an unusual composition and the highest levels of the metal chromium ever discovered in a rock on Mars. "
___Back in a flash with some image links.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...0P0795L0M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...EP2977M2M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...20050819a.html
___The last link is a nice set of movies of a dust devil on Mars; the first 2 a nav cam still & a microscpic still. It looks like the images from the rock mentioned in the BBC article haven't arrived yet.

[UncleAl]

What have the mars rovers accomplished? Mars is boring. It started out as a shallow planetary sea of acidic magnesium sulfate, then dried and oxidized over a few billion years. That's all very nice as far as it goes. Now what?

Unknown discoveries await! Riiight. Mars, like downtown Detroit or Watts in Los Angeles, is exactly what you see. Get over it and move on.

[Buffy]

Well Al, I'll agree with you partly: there's even been a conscious attempt to avoid the interesting landing sites because the fragile little landers wouldn't survive or might get stuck in a boulder field. Well, tiny steps... In prep for the activity in the thread on Biosphere 3, maybe it would be interesting to send an automated M1 Abrams there. The space science folks are always complaining about "how much" gets spent on manned space flight, how about a solid gold elephant of their own? Why not?

At any rate I'd rather spend it on any of these projects than padding oil executives 19th hole martini funds. They just gotta start thinking bigger... I'd like to skip Mars and start working on those Jovian and Saturnian moons.... If you wanna mess with Mars though, how's about starting to drive lots of comets into its surface? It would give us practice in diverting them and saving ourselves from a dino-like exeunt, and in a few thousand years, there'd be more water and atmosphere there for us to start colonizing it...

Cheers,
Buffy

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by Buffy

If you wanna mess with Mars though, how's about starting to drive lots of comets into its surface? It would give us practice in diverting them and saving ourselves from a dino-like exeunt, and in a few thousand years, there'd be more water and atmosphere there for us to start colonizing it...

Sure...use Mars as target practice while we keep funking up the Earth.

It would mess it up, all right. But you wouldn't get a breathable atmosphere in less than a few million years I think.

But frankly the rovers are an astonishing success. They didn't cost that much money, really, and they are performing much better than expected.

Among the discoveries made with the rovers are for example traces left by liquid water in rocks, and also that there has been geological activity on Mars more recently than previously expected.

It's amazing, really - there are three mars probes in orbit (Mars Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyor and the European Mars Express), and two rovers on the ground, and Mars Reconnaissance orbiter will arrive next year - there is a lot of activity going on and the rovers really need to be seens as parts of a bigger picture. They are our eyes on the surface, and can see and touch things which is impossible to do from orbit.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Tormod

Sure...use Mars as target practice while we keep funking up the Earth.

Boy, not enough smilies in my post...

Originally Posted by Tormod

Among the discoveries made with the rovers are for example traces left by liquid water in rocks, and also that there has been geological activity on Mars more recently than previously expected.

Heck even if its boring, this is great practice for those more interesting places that will be harder to get at like those outer planet moons and my fave Venus (there's one for a tank-like probe that can survive the pressure, heat and acid content of its atmosphere...). As I say, much better than the martini fund or Hummer subsidies...

Cheers,
Buffy

[alxian]

i'd like to see nasa deploy a swarm of flyers and later some earthworm like probes, tunneling robots able to sample the soil up to a few dozen meters and return information about the deeper soil, if it would be at all useful to migrant humans in the coming decades.

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Boy, not enough smilies in my post...

Or in mine, maybe?