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Space Science

Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater 156

Posted by simoniker from the enduring-opportunities dept.
Mean_Nishka writes "After weeks of driving, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has arrived at 'Endurance Crater.' It's a scientific treasure trove with an extensive outcrop of layered bedrock, and scientists will have to decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever - there's more information via a Monterey Herald/AP article."
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Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater More

Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater

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  • Stuck Forever? (Score:5, Funny)

    by alpinist ( 96637 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:43AM (#9048708)
    I doubt it would get stuck there forever. I'm sure the Chinese will be more than happy to pull it out and bring it back to Earth so it can be kept at the Beijing Smithsonian.
    • Nah, we'd have to conquer the martians first. The martians are behind all these dangerous outcroppings. Just look at the pic! The geological thingy they want to look at is right smack dab center! They're rearranging the land around the rovers as the rovers find it to see how well we can build bots.

    • Re:Stuck Forever? (Score:3, Informative)

      by mwood ( 25379 )
      Is it just me? I can think of far worse things to happen to a sophisticated geological probe than to be stuck forever in the middle of a "scientific treasure trove". The actual problem may be that Opportunity wears out before they are done looking over all the goodies.

      "That is like speaking of food so appetizing that no Frenchman would eat it." -- Mark Twain

  • And? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Black_Logic ( 79637 ) * <wintermute@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:43AM (#9048711) Homepage Journal
    NASA sent the twin rovers to Mars to prospect for geologic evidence of past water on the now dry and dusty planet. Sooo... Did they find any?! Did the article writer not know, or was it not considered interesting enough to print. :)

    On a side note, I don't understand the design of these rovers. Seems like they're dangerously flippable. If that happens, they're pretty much junk, right? Do they have any way of correcting themselves if one tread climbs up onto a rock and it tips over? Why not have 5 or 6 treads around the center and have the middle gyroscopiclly right itself?

    • Re:And? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Mycroft_VIII ( 572950 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:51AM (#9048745) Journal
      NASA sent the twin rovers to Mars to prospect for geologic evidence of past water on the now dry and dusty planet. Sooo... Did they find any?! Did the article writer not know, or was it not considered interesting enough to print. :)


      Here's what I found earlier in the article:

      Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance.


      Hope this helps.

      Mycroft

      • Re:And? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Black_Logic ( 79637 ) * <wintermute@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:08AM (#9048816) Homepage Journal
        My understanding was that this article was about the specific crater, Endurance. From the line you pointed out to me, "Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance." it's seems as though knowing whether other rocks, such as the ones in the endurance crater were formed similarly. So, my question was, do they not know yet? They've got images, are they only preliminary images? Do they take time to analyze?

        • Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Mycroft_VIII ( 572950 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:15AM (#9048837) Journal
          Ahhh, sorry I misunderstood your question. Odds are they don't know yet. It will take time to gather evidence. And considering thier discussing whether or not to enter the crater at all, I would assume they don't have any significant evidence yet.

          Mycroft

        • Re:And? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )
          "Opportunity revealed the Eagle crater outcrop formed in water; they now want to know if that was the case for the deeper - and thus older - rocks in Endurance." it's seems as though knowing whether other rocks, such as the ones in the endurance crater were formed similarly. So, my question was, do they not know yet? They've got images, are they only preliminary images?

          The conclusions from the first crater (Eagle) were mostly based on close-up images (AKA "microscope"), and "hands-on" spectrometer analy

    • Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:11AM (#9048823)
      On a side note, I don't understand the design of these rovers. Seems like they're dangerously flippable. If that happens, they're pretty much junk, right? Do they have any way of correcting themselves if one tread climbs up onto a rock and it tips over?

      I think you've been watching too many episodes of robot wars where a robot gets flipped over and becomes helpless! :)

      The rovers don't have a self-righting mechanism, but they might be able to do something with the instrument arm. NASA has done extensive testing of the rovers to determine the performance envelope.

      The rovers don't move very fast, and with the cameras they can accurately map the terrain in 3D to avoid trouble spots.

      Why not have 5 or 6 treads around the center and have the middle gyroscopiclly right itself?

      They are limited by size & weight, and they want to carry lots of scientific instruments - that's the tradeoff they had to make. Given that the rovers have greatly exceeded their expected lifespan, I think the designers did a great good job.
      • I'm sorry to be off-topic, but that was a really interesting response. You need to get a login so I can befriend you and see your replys easier. :)

      • Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)

        by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @05:30PM (#9056767)
        The rovers don't have a self-righting mechanism, but they might be able to do something with the instrument arm. NASA has done extensive testing of the rovers to determine the performance envelope.

        I know the rover drivers etc, and am familiar with the hardware. The idea that the IDD could right the rover would get many a chuckle here at JPL, as the IDD is not load bearing, and has very slow motors.

        The torques induced when spectrally imaging the magnets alone is enough to slow down the arm movements.

        If the rover is flipped over, we lose all power but batteries, and probably break mechanical components in the process. Communications may become difficult or impossible. If/when that happens, it's over.

        Would make one hell of a final pancam though, the ground a centimeter away from the PMA.

        Cheers,
        Justin Wick

        Disclaimer: I do software engineering on the mission, I do not directly drive the rovers.

    • Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WegianWarrior ( 649800 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:17AM (#9048843) Journal

      On a side note, I don't understand the design of these rovers. Seems like they're dangerously flippable. If that happens, they're pretty much junk, right? Do they have any way of correcting themselves if one tread climbs up onto a rock and it tips over? Why not have 5 or 6 treads around the center and have the middle gyroscopiclly right itself?

      Interesting point, and one which sendt me looking all over the web for pictures of planetary rovers. Seems like pretty much every rover we (ie, humans) have sendt out there is built on the same principles - wheels, no autoerect feature, seemingly hight center of gravity. So, I'm forced to conclude, they picked this particular design because it works.
      It is, when talking about spacecraft, worth remembering that they are designed down - down to a volume to fit the launcer, down to a weight to be able to get where it's going, and down to a budget to get it of the ground in the first place.
      Perhaps a tracked, selfrighting rover with wrap around tracks (like the early british tanks of WWI) would be a better design to use on Mars... but since it isn't used I'll hazard a guess that it's either not as suited as it may appear, or it may be too bulky, too heavy and too expencive.

    • Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gogo Dodo ( 129808 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:10AM (#9049011)
      The rovers are designed to withstand tilt of 45 degrees without tipping over. At the speed that the rovers travel, I'm pretty sure that it's software is designed to stop movement if it senses that it's tilt is getting too great, it will stop what it's doing.

      Of course, this doesn't work if something unexpected happens like lots of soil slippage or a rock giving way (that would have to be one large rock). The rovers are programmed to go around rocks, not over them, so the chances of it tipping over are pretty low. Soil slippage like the type Opportunity saw at Eagle crater [nasa.gov] isn't going to cause the rover to tip. It was have to be a full-on landslide.

    • Re:And? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by cedmond ( 515813 )
      One of the posts here already pointed out that the rovers are programmed to stop if they think they will flip. I think I remember this actually happening with the Sojourner rover and the drivers had to back it away before programming the new instructions.

      I would imagine one of the reasons the rovers sit so high is ground clearance. It would be pretty inefficient to drive around every rock that was an inch high instead of going right over it.

      Also, the wheels all sort of move up and down independently keepi

    • Re:And? (Score:2)

      by 3dr ( 169908 )
      Did they find any?! Did the article writer not know, or was it not considered interesting enough to print. :)

      Where have you been? Other outcroppings had geologic features that showed that yes, water had been on the planet for some time.

      On a side note, I don't understand the design of these rovers. .... Why not have 5 or 6 treads around the center and have the middle gyroscopiclly right itself?

      The CG in relation to the support polygon defined by the wheels, doesn't appear to be too different than say

  • Stuck there forever? (Score:5, Funny)

    by WarlockD ( 623872 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:45AM (#9048715)
    I mean really, wasn't that the point of going to mars in the first place?

    I mean sure, its a long way to just put a multi-million dollar jeep, but damnit we came this far we might as well do a running jump into that thing!

    • Re:Stuck there forever? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anubi ( 640541 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:03AM (#9048795) Journal
      Somehow, if we get all the way over there and fail to avail ourselves of the opportunity to see this, it kinda seems like traveling all the way to California to see Disneyland, then stopping at the ticket gate.

      The rovers have a limited lifetime.

      I leave it to the scientists to see this from their chair. They drove more than they expected, past the "warranty" of the rover, to get there. From now on, all is gravy. From their vantage points, they can figure out if there is anything even remotely around which would make it not worth the risk. You gotta die sometime. Might as well be doing something useful.

      These ships were not made to stay in the harbor.

      • I leave it to the scientists to see this from their chair. They drove more than they expected, past the "warranty" of the rover, to get there. From now on, all is gravy. From their vantage points, they can figure out if there is anything even remotely around which would make it not worth the risk. You gotta die sometime. Might as well be doing something useful.

        Don't worry, the scientists are well aware of the cost/benefit tradeoffs associated with this... They are all very excited about going into the c
    • If Opportunity exhausts the scientific possibilities at Endurance Crater, the next target, according to NASA press releases [nasa.gov] is some "etched terrain" several kilometers to the south. Presumably they would be weighing the possibility of getting to that versus the benefits of spending the rest of the mission at or inside Endurance.

  • They've been there since Friday (Score:5, Interesting)

    by micha2305 ( 769447 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:47AM (#9048728)
    Well, they've been sitting there since Friday and will spent the next two sols (Martian days) looking at the crater. Here's an amazing hi-res TIF [nasa.gov]. If you ask me, it looks to steep to go down. But on the other hand, this is the most exciting target in the Meridiani plains...

  • Spirit and the Columbia Hills (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dolphin558 ( 533226 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:49AM (#9048738)
    I am really looking forward to when Spirit reaches the Columbia Hills. If Spirit successfully reaches the top of the hill the view will be breathtaking. Not only could we see the landing site but also see the actual rim of Gusev Crater more clearly. It will be an amazing sight!

    • Re:Spirit and the Columbia Hills (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:42AM (#9048922)
      What I want is to hear Mars. Does anybody know why one of the least resource consuming sensors - a microphone - has never been sent to the surface?

      Ok, so maybe all you'd hear is incessant whistling of wind. Maybe Mars makes wierd noises, like the barking sands in the desert.

      But for a $0.25 mic, we'll never know.

    • Re:Spirit and the Columbia Hills (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ScottMaxwell ( 108831 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:54AM (#9049141) Homepage
      I am really looking forward to when Spirit reaches the Columbia Hills. If Spirit successfully reaches the top of the hill the view will be breathtaking. Not only could we see the landing site but also see the actual rim of Gusev Crater more clearly. It will be an amazing sight!

      I'd like to see that, too. But unfortunately, the current thinking is that we won't be climbing the hills when we get there.

      In fact, I just had that conversation with Larry Soderbloom, one of the top scientists on the mission. My side was, basically: "But, Larry, the view would be so cool." :-) He readily agreed, but unfortunately, there's just nothing scientifically compelling up there. (As best we can tell from orbital imagery, that is.)

      However, MOC [msss.com] images (MOC is the camera system on the MGS spacecraft) show that there's a lot of cool stuff in the hills' vicinity, making them a worthwhile destination anyway. There are rock outcroppings on the hills themselves, which we'll be able to see fairly well even without climbing to them, and several geological features of great interest in the 500m or so around the hills. (Now that we've upgraded the rovers' flight software, we're regularly covering 70m+ per sol -- indeed, we just set a new Spirit single-sol record of 92m -- so 500m is roughly a week of driving.) As a result, that area is likely to give us our best chance of telling the "water story" we came to Gusev to find.

      Incidentally, we're shooting for reaching the hills in about 40 more days (we're targeting sol 160; we just planned sol 119). Stay tuned.

      FWIW, as spectacular as the view would be in other respects, I don't think the Gusev Crater rim would look any better from the top of the hills. It's faint because of the high tau (atmospheric opacity) caused by the global dust storm that preceded our landing, and which is still settling. Maybe the view would be better from a little higher, but I doubt it. The good news is that the rim is showing up better and better as the atmosphere clears, so we'll get better views of it over time even without climbing the hills. (If you've never noticed the rim in the images, you can see it in this image [nasa.gov] if you look carefully -- look to the right of the hills, at the right-hand edge of the image. It's faint, but that's the rim of Gusev Crater.)

      • > My side was, basically: "But, Larry, the view would be so cool." :-) He readily agreed, but unfortunately, there's just nothing scientifically compelling up there. (As best we can tell from orbital imagery, that is.)

        I was always curious about the heatshield or backshell sites. I doubt the backshell would be useful (due to chemical contamination of the surroundings due to residues from the backshell's engines), but the heatshield - an object with a known mass, known altitude at time of separation,

  • My opinion (Score:5, Funny)

    by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul @ p r e s c o d . net> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:51AM (#9048752)
    Sayeth the poster: "Scientists will have to decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever."

    I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.

    • I am personally in favour of them sending it inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever. Getting it stuck forever seems like it would be a bad idea...but maybe that's just short-term thinking on my part.

      The 90 day mission is over... consider it the cost of doing business with Mars.

      No seriously, if we consider the rover to be above the mission it was sent to do, then it will fail at the mission it was sent to do. If the crater looks awesome, then by all means send her in!

  • Nice MER Animation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by boomgopher ( 627124 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:53AM (#9048758) Journal
    Not sure if this has been posted before, but I stumbled on this today, it's quite amazing:

    Mars Exploration Rover [maasdigital.com]
    (requires Quicktime, me thinks)

  • Don't jump to conclusions... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Wiser87 ( 742455 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @01:54AM (#9048763) Homepage
    It could very easily get stuck there. When the rover was leaving the crater that it landed in, they had a little bit of trouble because of soil slippage, and the crater wasn't all that steep.

    • Re:Don't jump to conclusions... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by beckerie ( 775211 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:13AM (#9048829)
      It could very easily get stuck there. When the rover was leaving the crater that it landed in, they had a little bit of trouble because of soil slippage, and the crater wasn't all that steep.
      Considering the terrain of the red planet, NASA surely would have incorporated this into the design of the rovers. They are programmed to avoid exceeding tilts of more than 30 degrees although they can tilt up to 40 degrees without tipping over.

      What would be interesting is knowing how far the rovers can go. Being robots, not humans there would be a fair few limitations in their exploration.

      • Re:Don't jump to conclusions... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Mycroft_VIII ( 572950 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:29AM (#9048886) Journal
        The've actually done quite a bit of testing on rover slippage on inclines with and engineering prototype here and have a chart showing up/down angles vs. slippage. elswise when they tell it to go forward 15 meters, it may stop at 12 or go past to 17 if the weels slip (the rovers rely on sensing wheel rotation to calculate distance traveled) they've been refining this test data (which they found alot closer to reality than they had hoped) with actuall measurements since then.
        Thier data indicates that at about 25 degrees an uphill climb becomes impossible because of the slippage. so all they need to do is find a usuable slope under 25 degrees in angle.

        Mycroft

        • Re:Don't jump to conclusions... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by psoriac ( 81188 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:41AM (#9049108)
          I worked in my university's robotics research department during my undergrad studies. My job as a cs student was to write the motion control algorithms for a group of math grad students. The project was to develop an AI that could navigate a building and perform tasks autonomously given a floorplan, its starting location, a destination, and an action to perform.

          The robot platform that they were using had a styrofoam head mounted on top of a cylinder with a pair of treads. The head had two cameras mounted where the eyes would be and two microphones mounted where the ears would be. The idea was that the robot would be able to understand simple voice commands, be able to detect transient obstacles (mostly people) using the cameras, and be able to track its location using the cameras (landmarks) and treads (distance rolled).

          By the end of the semester, we actually had it working halfway decently. One issue we encountered with tracking distance using how much the treads had turned was that the treads tended to slip when turning and also on dusty/dirty patches of the floor, so that over time the internal position diverged from the actual position (which is where the cameras came in).

          Now seeing as how this was almost 10 years ago and it was just a bunch of undergrad and grad students, I'm sure that the specialists at NASA have been able to accomplish something truly amazing with their rover. My hats off to them.

        • Re:Don't jump to conclusions... (Score:4, Informative)

          by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @05:20AM (#9049382) Journal
          The rovers have a suspension system which reduces side-to-side tilt. So if a rover is sideways on a slope, wheels on one side can be higher than those on the other side, while the body is more level than the angle of the slope.

          The rovers can reduce the angle of a slope by going diagonally up a slope. In a conical crater, a rover could traverse the sides in a spiral pattern to reach the top. Assuming it doesn't slip down as much as it is trying to move up.

          The safest route is straight up and straight down. A roll over is more likely when going sideways on a slope.

    • Its possible, but there seems to be quite a bit of bedrock to get a stable foothold for the rover. I heard from one scientist on the radio that the particular area the rover arrived at has an easy slope, around 18 degrees as opposed to the sharp rise on the opposite side. Its possible the rover can get back out of Endurance.

  • No Parking Sign (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:04AM (#9048797)
    Just put up a no parking sign, a parking enforcement officer will be right along to help in five minutes or less. I wonder what the parking fine on another planet would be though.

    • Re:No Parking Sign (Score:4, Funny)

      by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:16AM (#9049031)
      Just put up a no parking sign, a parking enforcement officer will be right along to help in five minutes or less. I wonder what the parking fine on another planet would be though

      Ah, but chances are they'd just clamp one of the Rover's wheels and then we'd have to call this guy [anglegrinderman.org] to bail them out.

  • Forever, or until the solar panels die... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by beeplet ( 735701 ) <beeplet@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:04AM (#9048799) Journal
    I wonder what the expected lifetime of the Opportunity rover is now? If they are not expecting it to hold up much longer anyway, I don't see any reason not to send it down into the crater to investigate for as long as it can. Are there other interesting sites within its expected range?
    • I believe the expected lifetime of the rovers expired some time ago, and NASA is lucky they are still operational. Then again, NASA seems to have a pretty good track record in this area- Voyager 2 and the Hubble Telescope are both far beyond their projected life spans and are still returning information.

    • Re:Forever, or until the solar panels die... (Score:5, Informative)

      by cyclone96 ( 129449 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:39AM (#9048912)
      As JPL stated here [planetary.org] they think they may get about 250 sols out of these rovers, which is the approved duration of the extended mission (of course, I'm sure they'll keep extending it until they die, but there is a ten day communications blockage from the sun at about that time).
      • (of course, I'm sure they'll keep extending it until they die.

        You sound like you're talking about valve...

      • Re:Forever, or until the solar panels die... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @05:23AM (#9049389) Journal
        You could always just (as I presume they will) slowly restrict operations as effeciencies wear down. (Nah, stay here today, charge batteries for a trip tomorrow)

        Surely at *some* point the dust deposition on your panels would balance out to the amount of dust being blown off them - whether it's at some useful percentage remains to be seen I guess.

        When it gets real tough they could always turn it into a permanent station - just park up in an interesting (preferably high-ish) spot, change your firmware to boot up once a day and send an "I'm Still Here! Temp -30degC Pressure 6mbar location..... as before" message.... once a week or at local noon try and squeeze enough juice into (and out of) your fruited batteries to take a photo.

        • Re:Forever, or until the solar panels die... (Score:5, Informative)

          by hanssprudel ( 323035 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @06:03AM (#9049495)

          You could always just (as I presume they will) slowly restrict operations as effeciencies wear down. (Nah, stay here today, charge batteries for a trip tomorrow)

          The problem is that at some point the panels are not generating enough energy to keep the rovers hot over night, so the internal temperature of the components cannot be maintained at their operational level, and then NASA expects that they will start having component failures.
          • The problem is that at some point the panels are not generating enough energy to keep the rovers hot over night, so the internal temperature of the components cannot be maintained at their operational level, and then NASA expects that they will start having component failures.

            Indeed. The swing in tempuratures is estimated to be the biggest risk. Electronic components constantly expanding and contracting due to day-to-night-cycle tempurature changes eventually works things loose and cracks stuff.

            The sec
        • Why not just put windshield wiper thingies on the solar panels and brush off the dust?
          • NASA already considered doing that.

            Wipers would have been too expensive, too bulky, too prone to failer, etc., etc. So they opted to have more instrumentation instead.

            Next gen rovers sound more interesting since they will be all nuke from what I heard.
  • The question which has to be asked is that the lifetime of the rover is finite and what else is there to look at which the rover is capable of getting to in that time. Sure they could go look at other rocks or they could risk winning 'big biccies' by going 'over-the-top'...........remember 'who dares wins' and other crap cliched sayings etc,etc

  • Lomg time. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OgGreeb ( 35588 ) <og@digimark.net> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:06AM (#9048807) Homepage

    "...decide whether or not to send Opportunity inside for a closer inspection without getting it stuck forever"

    Whether it is sent into the crater or remains outside and nearby, what is the likelihood that the rovers will *ever* be recovered? Won't they then be "stuck forever" anyway? Also, they just sent the rover to this place over many days. If this wasn't the best place to get stuck, why did they bother?

    • Re:Lomg time. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gogo Dodo ( 129808 )
      Whether it is sent into the crater or remains outside and nearby, what is the likelihood that the rovers will *ever* be recovered? Won't they then be "stuck forever" anyway?

      One would hope that eventually somebody will recover Pathfinder/Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity. Heck, maybe one day somebody will find the remnants of Beagle 2 and figure out just what happened.

      The idea isn't unprecedented. Apollo 12 landed at the Surveyor III landing site. They didn't pick it up, but I supposed they could hav

      • Re:Lomg time. (Score:3, Informative)

        by brassman ( 112558 )
        Apollo 12 landed at the Surveyor III landing site. They didn't pick it up, but I supposed they could have brought back parts of it.

        Yes, in fact they did -- some bits of metal and fabric, to study the effects of radiation and micrometeor pitting over time.

      • Re:Lomg time. (Score:3, Funny)

        by mwood ( 25379 )
        One day someone will recover all that stuff and sell it on Ebay, more likely. :-/

  • Endurance crator? Who comes up with these names... (Score:5, Funny)

    by chiyosdad ( 759746 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @02:13AM (#9048830)
    Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains; Strength: 20 / Agility: 8 / Endurance: 10 / Intelligence: 2) finds a crater in the ground.
    The crater has no distinguishing features!

    You...
    [x] descend and explore the surroundings
    [_] circumvent the crater and continue your previous explorations

    You are basked in a strange and comforting light!
    + Strength 1
    + Endurance 30!
    + Agility 2
    + Intelligence 1
    You found a new item! Unremarkable Rock of Endurance (+14)
    [x] keep
    [_] drop

    You leave the crater and continue your explorations.
    You drive over a rock askew and fall onto your back, unable to right yourself!

    > Cast Roll Over (level 2)

    You must roll 14 or better to cast this spell.
    > 1d36

    Opportunity (level 3 Rover of the Martian Plains) has rolled a 08

    You continue to lie immobile on your back in the cold Martian evening. Slowly, your batteries lose power and a darkness begins to come over you. As you desperately struggly against the dying of the light, your thoughts go back to your maladjusted childhood...
  • High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having a problem.
    Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

  • From The Sound of Music (Mars Edition) (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hawthorne01 ( 575586 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:22AM (#9049054)
    ./~ High on a hill, stood a lonely Rover, yodel-lay-he yodel-lay-he yodel-lay-he-hoo ./~ /me ducks ands runs. :-)

  • Now THIS is an interesting picture: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NeuroManson ( 214835 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @03:30AM (#9049075) Homepage
    http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/n/095 /1N136619354EFF2000P1985R0M1.JPG

    Take a gander at the center of the crater. How many folks familiar with wind eroded ice recognise that kind of formation?
    • Wow! That IS an interesting picture.

      Just wish I could be there to take it!

    • Grr, use html for links! :)

      click for pic [nasa.gov]

    • I really don't understand how people can have become so blaze so quickly about such wonders, both of nature and technology.

      Sure there will be more to come, but that image alone is the best "WOW" I've had in a while, at least in the intellectually satisfying but not invented here category.

      Thanks for posting it, and to the poster of the clickable link for lazy people like me.


    • What caught my eye was the 'tendrils' on the right that appear to be flowing down the crater. Could it be an underground water source spilling water into the crater whenever the temperature and pressure are high enough? I think so.

    • Re:Now THIS is an interesting picture: (Score:4, Informative)

      by hopemafia ( 155867 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @10:42AM (#9051246)
      As a geologist the formations in the center of the crater look like small star dunes to me. They form when winds come from multiple directions, such as the swirling winds you would get in a crater.
    • That's exactly what I thought, too. It looks to me like a glacier face in the fall, when the wind and sun have eroded it heavily all summer, and the wind has frosted it with dust along all the peaks.

      And those tendrils, as someone else pointed out, look to be seepage flowing out onto the surface and freezing. Eventually it would work its way downhill (gravity and all) as the water continued to push out, the stuff coming later protected, even for the barest few moments, by the ice that was just formed. I

    • Take a gander at the center of the crater. How many folks familiar with wind eroded ice recognise that kind of formation?

      It is not really that different from other wind-blown dust patterns found elsewhere on the mission. Light-colored soil/dust tends to stick to parts that "stick up". For example, the edge of Eagle Crater had light dust at the crests. If you remove the light-colored tips, then they would look like regular dust dunes.

      But, until you go, you don't know.

      By the way, they could not recreate
    • I mean man... look at those waves!!!

  • How Endurance Crater Got Its Name (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ScottMaxwell ( 108831 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @04:29AM (#9049243) Homepage
    I don't know if this is common knowledge, but I thought y'all might be interested to know how Endurance Crater got its name. I don't think I'll be telling tales out of school if I relate this story. This is an excerpt from a mission diary I've been writing as a way of keeping my wife in the loop, which was especially important when we were all on Mars time and I wasn't seeing her for weeks on end. From way back on sol 3 [insert wavy lines here] ....

    The most interesting part of the meeting was a fifteen- or twenty-minute discussion about naming geological features. One of the first proposals was related to naming the craters we saw in the descent images. The starting suggestion was to name them after coins, partly because people are familiar with coins and partly as a thank-you to the descent imager, which is named DIMES. More specifically, they'd be named for the people on the coins -- Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and so on. To avoid being too America-centric, we'd also use coins from other countries -- especially Germany, Denmark, Brazil, and France, our international partners on this mission.

    The same discussion included how to name the landmarks we can see from the landing site, such as the hills to the east and the peak to the south. The initial suggestion was to name the distant hills "Endurance Hills," for the name of Shackleton's ship (and to reflect what it will take us to get there, if we decide to drive to them), and then name other features after the members of Shackleton's crew. There's some concern about tying ourselves so closely to a mission that, as romantic as it was, was technically a failure ("did not fundamentally meet its Level-1 requirements," as Squyres jokingly put it).

    A more general version of that proposal emerged later: name the landmarks after explorers generally (or, in another variant, after their ships -- this would also allow us to tip our cap to Beagle 2). One advantage of this is that there have been many explorers from all lands, so we could easily give the names an international flavor. (And we could include Darwin in the honorees, which is a big plus as far as I'm concerned.) A problem with this is that the same explorer is usually perceived differently by different cultures -- Columbus might be the most obvious example (though nobody brought him up explicitly), but for nearly any famous explorer you can think of, there's someone who thinks of him less as an explorer and more as a marauder. The idea was gaining momentum despite this drawback, until our NASA HQ rep said something like "I can just see the name 'Pillager Hills,'" which provoked a lot of laughter and seemed to deflate the proposal.

    Other suggestions for geological features: deliberately generic names such as "East Hills" and "South Knob" (derided as "too boring"), names drawn from the coined words in Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," and names of general qualities such as "Forbearance" and "Courage." The last proposal fits reasonably nicely with the rover names ("Spirit" and "Opportunity") and lets us preserve "Endurance" as the name for the hills to the east. But I think it might have lost some of its support when someone jokingly suggested "Chastity" as one of the names ("Well, it is going to be a long mission," Squyres laughed).

    Yet another proposal that came up late: craters are ring-like, and The Lord of the Rings is popular right now, so why not use Tolkien-based names? A downside is that this might be too topical, but the idea has some support despite that.

    Right now, I don't think any proposal is winning. We have to settle on something before too much longer, because our jobs are easier when the features have names, but it's a hard problem: we don't want to be too exclusive (that is, too America-focused), too generic, too topical, or too serious. ("Too serious" is a problem because we don't want the International Astronomical Union to think we're trying to usurp their job of giving these o

  • News disappearance? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by arfuni ( 775132 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @04:56AM (#9049305) Homepage
    Is it just me or did the landers totally disappear from all major news sources? I haven't caught mention of them on CNN, BBC and the like in quite a while. Did the government stop spending the money on press releases when they failed to take heat off of the administration and/or capture public attention?

    • Re:News disappearance? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by johnjay ( 230559 )
      They didn't totally disappear (news search [google.com]), they just aren't front-page news. Since discovering good evidence for water, there's not that much of excitment to the general public that's going on with the rovers. Heck, I think the rovers are great, but I don't do much more than look at pictures on the NASA website every few days. I don't know enough about geology to make much of the spectroscopy. All the successful space launches that went on before the Columbia disaster were not news-worthy either. The ADD
      • Or to put it a little more succinctly, the continuing mission is a lot more interesting to you (and me) than to most of your neighbors.

        Once you get beyond "we sent robots to Mars and they worked!" you're kind of out of headline material for the average newspaper. Most editors will consider further results a yawn until we get the first pictures of something waving its claws at the rover.

    • Re:News disappearance? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pease1 ( 134187 ) <bbunge@ladyandtr ... m minus language> on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @07:03AM (#9049668)
      There was little question this would happen... if you watched the daily news briefings for the two weeks after the landings, each day there were fewer and fewer reporters in the room.

      The rovers quickly became "old" news for most editors. How many pictures of rocks and sand dunes can the average public handle? Niche writers - the hardcore science writers - could be handled one on one. No doubt travel budgets were a factor. Even /. stopped covering it.

      Besides, the daily press briefings were likely a real time sink for the rover teams, getting ready, attending and following up on the questions.

      Besides, when the briefings stopped and the daily news articles stopped, the real science could start. The really great thing is while 15 years ago, we could have never followed what was happening day-to-day, these days, all you had to do was check the rover website.

      But, I bet we see a flurry of articles Thursday/Friday as they release the color images of Endurance. But just for the day. Perhaps some more when Opportunity dives into the crater.

    • Plenty of coverage still on the BBC [bbc.co.uk].
    • The Denver Science museum has a wonderful ten foot HDTV projector. When this is used with the special educator DVDs from JPL, which have superior images to those downloadable from the web, the results are wonderful. The large screen has an immersive effect and you FEEL like you are looking out of a window at Mars.

      However my main complaint is that some of the curators truncate the Rover images and show the launch videos and animations over and over. This is because some patrons complain about the "bor
    • Oh, come now. It's much more interesting for the news to show death, destruction and pain. Ongoing success is so boring, which is why news outlets look for, encourage and enjoy failure even in the midst of success.

  • Harakiri (Score:5, Insightful)

    by photonic ( 584757 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @05:24AM (#9049393)
    From the article:
    "The big question is, if we can get down, can we get back out?" Wallace said.
    If you look at the driving plan [nasa.gov] thus far and at the surroundings [nasa.gov], you see that endurance crater is pretty much the only big interesting feature in the area. Also, given the finite life of the rovers (extended design life is 180 days?) there must come an end some time. The rovers seem to operate perfectly right now, but i believe that the thermal cycling of the batteries is a definite show-stopper in a couple of months. Considering this, i think it is a fair gamble to drive into the crater with the risk of never coming out. If you do you might get some very interesting data on all the deep soil layers. By the time you would get out you are almost dead anyhow.

    • Re:Harakiri (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      If you look at the driving plan thus far and at the surroundings, you see that endurance crater is pretty much the only big interesting feature in the area.

      There are lots of whitish patches further to the south (outside of your images) that may be more rock flatbeds. But they may just be more of the same as seen already, from the same geological layer. Plus, they are a bit far. Thus, I tend to agree with you, Endurance looks like the best bet even with the risk because the impact that made the crater se

  • This looks familiar..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cixelsyd ( 239 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @06:07AM (#9049502)
    Am I the only one who thinks this "crater" looks like a giant antlion trap? Especially with the loose "sand" looking stuff in the bottom center... I could totally see a gigantic martian antlion reaching out of that thing and rending poor opportunity into bits. Let's hope they didn't neglect to include phasers when designing these rovers =)
    • Well, that would certainly prove that life exists on Mars. Even if all this little rover did was get ripped into shreds by martian monster, it would be making a great discovery. Any pictures it took during the process, however, would probably not get transmitted before it was destroyed, leaving us clueless why it suddenly stopped working.

      It's like a horror movie where you are yelling at the rover not go in there, but the dumb, clueless rover goes in there anyways, oblivious of impending doom. :)

  • why no audio recorder? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i think the next mission should include an audio recorder. i mean, what if we run into some martians and need to hear what they sound like? :)

    seriously, nasa can probably produce a 'relaxing moments: sounds of mars' cd to fund the next mission.

    ok, really seriously, i think it would be fun to 'hear' mars, assuming that the atmosphere is thick enough to have sounds. even if it's nothing but howling winds.
  • Wiggled! [brownpau.com] Thank you, thank you, JPL, for making mission photos so available [nasa.gov] to everyone. This is exciting stuff.

  • Next time (Score:3)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @11:04AM (#9051456) Homepage Journal
    include as one of the tools on the rover:

    an electrical motor with a steel wire attached to the axis and an anchor bolt to attach this to the ground. Any time the rover would have to descend into a crater like that it could attach the anchor to the ground and use the wire to get out of the crater later on.

    • Re:Next time (Score:4, Informative)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2004 @12:20PM (#9052304) Homepage Journal
      By the time they got done adding a complicated bolt anchoring system, a bunch of wire, cutters, dust sweepers, extra mechanical arms, gyroscopes, and all of the other stuff people had suggested, the rover would end up weighing 50 tons and would never get off Earth. The tradeoffs in this business are merciless and if a system isn't on the rovers, it's probably because it would have replaced something more valuable.

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