Opportunity Rover Sets Off-World Driving Record 46
schwit1 writes: "With a drive of 157 feet on Sunday, the Mars rover Opportunity broke the Soviet record, set by Lunokhod 2 in 1973, for the longest distance traveled by a vehicle on another planet. "If the rover can continue to operate the distance of a marathon — 26.2 miles (about 42.2 kilometers) — it will approach the next major investigation site mission scientists have dubbed "Marathon Valley." Observations from spacecraft orbiting Mars suggest several clay minerals are exposed close together at this valley site, surrounded by steep slopes where the relationships among different layers may be evident. The Russian Lunokhod 2 rover, a successor to the first Lunokhod mission in 1970, landed on Earth's moon on Jan. 15, 1973, where it drove about 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) in less than five months, according to calculations recently made using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) cameras that reveal Lunokhod 2's tracks."
Re:Apollo 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
You are kidding, right?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa... [nasa.gov]
And of course the "moon landing hoax" nitwits have already convinced themselves that NASA, every involved contractor, all the astronauts, and our bitter rivals the USSR are part of the conspiracy. It would be a small matter to assume that the LRO pictures are also faked. That the fundamental nature of stupidity.