Mars Rover Rolls And Turns

hcg50a writes "MSNBC reports that overnight, 'the golfcart-sized rover cut the final cord tying it to the landing platform that it came in on 10 days ago, then backed up about 10 inches (25 centimeters) and turned 45 degrees. These were the first maneuvers planned in preparation for having Spirit roll 10 feet (3 meters) down a ramp onto the Martian surface on Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.' The NASA Mars rover website has complete animations from numerous cameras of the 45-degree turn. Driver training was never this cool!"

Re:Latest Mars images available thru apt-get

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha slashdot mods are quite stupid.

Re:linux at nasa

[dmiller]

You mean "looks like they are using X" - it could easuly be BSD, Solaris or any other Unix-like OS.

Re:Am I the only one?

[dekashizl]

These rover updates are BY FAR more newsworthy than the latest Scott Peterson updates that seem to come in every couple of days on nearly all major news outlets.

Updates on the progress of the rover are NEW, and they are NEWS. I completely understand if you don't find it interesting, but in that case why do you click on the headlines, read the stories, and post about them? Just ignore them.

--
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH) [axonchisel.net].

kilometers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why NASA writes "kilometers" instead of "km" is beyond me. After all these years they still speak metric like a second language. Hint: "kilo" replaces 3 zeros with 4 characters, it doesn't make things shorter.

Re:Shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the Martian atmosphere has 10^-7 oxygen molecules per square meter, I'd say the chances of anything burning there are pretty low.

Myself, I read it as the rover rolled onto its back. Like an SUV or something.

Mars rover, mars rover.. send water right over.

Re:The perils of creationism

[Anonymous Coward]

"This shows no faith..."

Faith, huh?

Re:The perils of creationism

[Anonymous Coward]

"the things that make America great"?

You haven't been paying attention lately, have you?

Re:Looks like Windows to me

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

Yeah, and then we'd have people whiging about how it's too difficult for Windows users to convert to, how it violates "industry standards" for GUIs, how the fact that it can predict what you're doing and do half your work for you is just annoying....

No matter what linux GUI designers try, they'll be criticised.

Re:Wow! Metrics!

[Chess_the_cat]

The problem is, you can't do full immersion, because people will always speak in the language that they know.

I'm Canadian and have never known anything but metric. We were taught it in grade school. But I still tell people my height in feet and inches and my weight in pounds. I order meat from the supermarket in pounds too and the clerks don't ask me to repeat my order in kilograms. We still measure first downs in yards and photo sizes in inches. In fact, I just returned to school to study graphic arts and the first math course we took focussed on learning...Imperial! Why? Because paper sizes are expressed in inches and you buy ink in pounds in the United States and since the US is the number one economy in the world we had to learn it. My point is that Imperial sneaks in even in a country that has full immersion.