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Space Science

Two New Mars Rovers Will Be Launched In June 32

Posted by timothy from the a-roving dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story which talks about the next two rovers to explore Mars which will be launched in June of this year. NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. From the article: 'The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart, will have more power and greater mobility than the Pathfinder's Sojourner rover. Both should be able to trek up to 44 yards across the surface every Martian day (24 Earth hours and 37 Earth minutes).'"
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Two New Mars Rovers Will Be Launched In June More

Two New Mars Rovers Will Be Launched In June

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  • Is it me, or are these things getting really big? If I recall correctly, the first mars rover was no bigger than a PC tower. Guess they need the space for a lot more instrumentation and tools?
  • "NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. "

    Either way, they should still call it Jupiter 2.

  • wheee (Score:3, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @01:24PM (#5937946) Homepage Journal
    The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart

    They are so having a race!
    • ...at the blazing speed of 44 yards every Martian day (24 hours 37 minutes). Why, that's over 5 feet an hour!

  • Oh No! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @01:26PM (#5937958)
    This will become a high profile project. So it won't be at all the skunkworks project that the earlier rover was.

    It'll be full of egos, and every department of NASA will want to be involved.

    We'll be lucky if it even lands on Mars.
    • This mission will be only as successful as the Zhti Ti Kofft allow it to be. They won't tolerate us discovering anything substantive, like any more hard information about them. Read about what they did to Mars Climate Orbiter, [uncoveror.com] and Mars Polar Lander. [uncoveror.com] We already learned all they want to show us when we found their death ray [uncoveror.com] on the dark side of the moon.
  • I wanna sign up for the next packet tour. When's Dick Rutan getting his Marz-EZ lander done?

  • Argh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bob Vila's Hammer ( 614758 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @03:20PM (#5939045) Homepage Journal
    After reading the article, I again became frustrated after finding that the length of these rover's operational lives seems to be limited only by the amount of dust collecting on its solar cells. These new rovers were supposedly built upon designs and characteristics of the old Sojourner model operated in 1997. Why wouldn't they improve upon this restricted system and incorporate something to prevent the dust from covering its energy supply?
    • Same here. Couldn't they devise a simple mechanism similar to a windshield wiper to keep the dust off? Or perhap something akin to the plastic sheet roll that they use in racecams to keep the rubber/tar/smoke/dust from blocking the view? Maybe a low volume air compressor that would occasionally blast a little jet of martian air over the panel surfaces?

      That ain't 'rocket science'.

      -robSlimo

    • Re:Argh (Score:1)

      by rk ( 6314 )

      That's certainly a constraint, but there's also a mission ops constraint in that there has to be a highly coordinated mission planning team on duty 24 by 7 for each rover. That's much more expensive than doing mission ops for something like Mars Odyssey's THEMIS that two people, working (more or less) normal working days can handle.

  • Earth hours? (Score:3, Informative)

    by bravehamster ( 44836 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @03:36PM (#5939216) Homepage Journal
    An hour is an hour, regardless of where you are in the universe (relativistic effects aside). Days and years vary with the planet you're on. So if you want to compare the Martian day to the Earth day, you could say that a Martian day equals 1.0256945 Earth days. Just please don't ever use the words Earth hour or Earth minute ever again. Unless, that is, the reigning body of mars decided to create a new system of measuring time based upon the martian day as a base unit. If that ever happens, I would hope they have the sense to not use the same units (hours, days, etc.) Perhaps Marklars? Have you got the time? Sure, it's Marklar Marklar's past Marklar.

    • There's actually nothing wrong with saying "Earth hours". The fundamental unit of time is a "Day"; the time it takes between two successive transits of the Sun. (Actually, if you want to get technical [navy.mil], a Day is really defined as the average time between successive solar transits for a particular year: 1820). A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day, a minute is *defined* to be 60 seconds, and an Hour is *defined* to be 60 minutes. The point is, they are all tied to the length of an Earth

      • Re:Earth hours? (Score:3, Informative)

        by bravehamster ( 44836 )
        A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day

        Actually that's not quite correct anymore. Look at the link you provided, or anyplace else where the SI units are spelled out. The second is the SI's basic unit of time, and is defined thusly [nist.gov]:

        The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

        That's the *current* definition of a second, not the historical definition that

        • Ahem, like I said, the definition of a Day I was using was the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820.

          Where do you think they got the 9,192,631,770 periods from when defining the atomic second? That's right: it's the number of Cesium 133 periods that makes a second equal to the 1/84600th part of one Day (as defined in terms of the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820).

          This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long.

          Actually
          • Ah, a thinly veiled insult. How nice. Can't we just exchange pedantries without stooping to such sophmoronics?

            Indeed we can. All I was attempting to point out was that your use of the definition from Merriam-Websters dictionary should not *convince me* of anything. I retract the thinly veiled insult, but my point remains: Dictionary definitions are annoying as hell, and usually useless, in the context of a scientific or historical discussion.

            Nothing you have said refutes my original point. While the

  • This time around... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kescom ( 45565 ) <`moc.orejnat' `ta' `neb'> on Monday May 12, 2003 @03:44PM (#5939317) Homepage
    ...the images you see should be true-color, too.

    A large majority of publicy-available Mars images--particularly maps taken from orbit by Mars Odyssey [asu.edu] and most of the Sojourner images--are not really color-calibrated at all. Mars is actually a lot redder than you think, and you really can't see clouds at all.

    Here at Cornell [cornell.edu], we're working on properly calibrating the images for the new missions. With some luck, everything that's publicly released next year will be sRGB! (Check out progress [cornell.edu].)
    • Color manipulation has often been employed to enhance otherwise subtle variations, like the afore-mentioned clouds. I suppose you'll color-calibrate infrared images so that they are invisible to the naked eye? Anyway, Mars is not redder than I think. I've seen it with my own eye, I know what color it is, and I'd prefer to see enhanced images of it.

    • The majority of the data taken by Odyssey would not be terribly useful in true color, since most of the THEMIS data is IR, and therefore is invisible to the human eye. :-)

      Yes, I know there's a visible component, too. I look forward to seeing the true color images, especially at up to 17 meters resolution. Whee!

      • In addition, even visible instruments tend to be at wavelengths that are imperfectly aligned to human eyesight. The apparently true colour images produced by the Viking Orbiters in the 1970s were derived from only two wavebands (approximately blue and orange), therefore requiring some interpolation and guesswork to come up with RGB. Still, they appear to have done a pretty good job, despite initial problems (they assumed that the sky should be blue, and calibrated the colours accordingly). Anyone working wi
        • THEMIS does have five (realistically four) visible bands, which let us cover the entire visible colorspace (replying to lk). And while true-color isn't directly useful for geology, astronomers do want to see what the surface looks like anyway.

          On the THEMIS imager--yes, the bands are definitely close. However, output images were never plotted in a standard colorspace. There are also latent sun-illumination effects that need to be removed.
  • I don't understand why so many people are constantly bashing Goldin's faster, better, cheaper (FBC) approch. And it's not only our own /. crowd I'm thinking about, but even journalist like the person that wrote the abcnews article.

    I mean, the first part of the article somewhat describes that FBC sucks, then it explains that this new mission is going to use trusted technology like, [guess what ?], bouncing airbag landing, aeroshell insertion (probably aeorbreaking too). Guess when all this "trusted" technol
    • yea, DS-1 and NEAR, that was fun! It was a real adventure to follow all the technical solutions and extensions to the misions, the daring experiments (the unplanned landing on an asteroid!) Think FBC just made it psychologically possible to be that daring with the hardware, like, its cheap stuff, cobbled together, what would happen if we tried to mcguyver this broken startracker, if its not gonna work, well, pity, but, the bird was beyond its primary mission anyway. With expensive hardware, there wwill be

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