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Space

News from Mars 258

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it-just-keeps-coming dept.
An anonymous reader writes "While the Beagle 2 may have been gobbled up by Mars--Eater of Spacecraft, the main part of the ESA's recent Mars mission is doing well. The Mars Express Orbiter has sent back some amazing pictures of The Grand Canyon of Mars (Valles Marineris). Yes, this is the same gigantic geological feature that was missed by Mariner 4, 6, and 7 but finally found by Mariner 9. In other news, the Spirit rover is getting ready to grind the rock Adirondack (picture)."
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News from Mars More

News from Mars

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  • Image mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:16AM (#8032576) Homepage Journal
    The ESA site appears to be getting quite slow. A mirror of the large image of Valles Marineris is here [utah.edu].

  • Every space mission gets a conspiracy theory. What's this one going to be?

  • I'm getting ready to grind the rock too (Score:5, Funny)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:17AM (#8032585) Journal
    I just don't take pictures or issue press releases. Probably best that way.

  • Speed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fred87 ( 720738 )
    How much time does it take it to grind a rock compared to the amount of time it takes to move one meter?

    • Re:Speed (Score:4, Informative)

      by dekashizl ( 663505 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:56PM (#8033713) Journal
      From Athena Science RAT Technical Briefing [cornell.edu]:
      The RAT is a diamond-tipped grinding tool capable of removing a cylindrical area 4.5 cm in diameter and at least 0.5 cm deep from the outer surface of a rock.
      This operation takes about 2 hours for a dense basalt.

      From NASA/JPL info on Rover and wheels [nasa.gov]:
      The rover has a top speed on flat hard ground of 5 centimeters (2 inches) per second. However, in order to ensure a safe drive, the rover is equipped with hazard avoidance software that causes the rover to stop and reassess its location every few seconds. So, over time, the vehicle achieves an
      average speed of 1 centimeter per second.

      So moving one meter takes very roughly ~100 seconds (about a minute and a half). Grinding takes roughly two hours. But grinding is just grinding, and you still would want to do some science after that. Also consider that moving will generally be interrupted by other delays such as taking photos. Check the link in the sig below for all kinds of info and links on this type of stuff.

      --
      For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
      (AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History [axonchisel.net].

  • OMG... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:18AM (#8032601)
    OMG... that rock is like, a pyramid! I wonder what secrets it holds?!
    • Probably all there is to learn is that Adirondack is a pyramid shaped piece of basalt. Which is what you can tell from the picture.
  • Perhaps I should be looking at mars? Everyone else is. :)
  • The pictures would be more detailed if they would let Mars Express fly a little lower. And they would have a decent chance to find Beagle 2, too.

    • Re:ESA is not very clever. (Score:5, Informative)

      by morcheeba ( 260908 ) * on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:31AM (#8032767) Journal
      If you fly lower, you'll make more orbits per day, making the images zip past the camera [esa.int] even faster. With a pushbroom-type sensor [nasa.gov] such as this appears to be, this can actually lead to worse resolution in the direction of travel. But, being closer would make the perpindicular direction a little better -- it's all about compromises.
    • I thought the beagle had been sighted [buffalo.edu]?

    • Hey, actually they don't have to fly lower. They are alrady looking for signs of the airbags since the resolution of the cam is very high and they should be able to detect it. But, they don't know where exactly the beagle landed and therefore this could take some time. Still, there is a chance that beagle2 can be found on January 24th. The device (if still in one piece ;-) switches into emergency mode from this date on and Mars Express could have a chance of picking up a signal. Well, I don't think it will,

  • Press release is kind of funny... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:21AM (#8032635) Homepage
    ...featuring famous landmarks on the surface of Mars 'as seen through European eyes'...

    I thank those noble European eyes that were sacrificed in order to make this European mission Euro-possible.

    It's ironic. By so blatantly highlighting the Euro-ticity of this mission, they sound very American.

    • Re:Press release is kind of funny... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:38AM (#8032850)
      Thank you for pointing that out. I was waiting for someone to do it - and you did in a much better way than I could of. Seems like the ESA has a serious case of American Penis Envy. Scratch that. The whole damn EU seems to have it. Why does every clipping have to mention how they are doing it "better" than Americans are..... Yeah ok. I wonder if I can find a part of Mars no one has mapped, look at it with my Telescope, then make some grandiose statement about how the ESA's piece of shit probe missed this or that particular feature.......
      • Hey, it's Europe's turn to try out cultural imperialism (again), don't knock it. In no time we'll have you Americans eating French fries and pizzas, using European languages (e.g. English, words from French like derriere, cafe), trying to learn the Metric system, setting your time system based on a location in England, madly trying to trace your roots back to Ireland, coming over here to see our old castles and achievements predating the founding of the US, yearning for Mercedes Benz and BMWs...

        Remember, E

    • euro != uk (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rhubarb Crumble ( 581156 ) <r_crumble@hotmail.com> on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:43AM (#8032905) Homepage
      I thank those noble European eyes that were sacrificed in order to make this European mission Euro-possible.

      It's ironic. By so blatantly highlighting the Euro-ticity of this mission, they sound very American.

      I think you're missing the point. I think it's a dig at the UK, who hogged all the publicity with the (UK-built) Beagle lander, which then turned out to be a turkey. This is them pointing out that the rest of the mission, designed on the "continent", works just fine.

      Remember that, especially in the UK, the "opposite" of european isn't american, it's british. "Fog in channel, continent cut off" and all that.

    • The european picture looks like it's artwork. It does not seem real.

    • Re:Press release is kind of funny... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:33PM (#8033471) Journal

      Mars, as seen through various eyes:

      European: Look! We've boldly gone where the Americans have gone before!

      Chinese: Look! Maybe we can mine it an populate it just to piss of the americans!

      American: Look! It doesn't have a McDonalds! NUKE IT!

      Trekkie: Look! We're going to build a planet based space dock there!

      Conspiracy theorist: Look! That's where the aliens are! They're just using their invisibility rays!

      Slashbot: FIRST LOOK!

  • The large picture of Valles Marineris appears to be composited. It looks like the background (with the small black border) is the real picture, and then they've extrapolated something closer to a surface view where you can see elevation, slapped it in front, over the border, and projected a shadow back over the join where they laid the forground over the background.

    What gives? That's remarkably annoying -- why not just show us the picture as taken instead of this cutesy mockup?

  • Spirit not that impressive...? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by troon ( 724114 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:23AM (#8032664)

    Check out Lunokhod [nasa.gov], two Russian moon rovers from the early 1970s that drove around for months.

    Not to bring down the Spirit guys or their great work, but their talk of pioneering 30cm moves sound a bit dull compared with Lunokhod, or the Pathfinder. Also look at the Russian Venera [nasa.gov] probes that managed to return images from the surface of Venus, at temperatures hot enough to melt lead and pressures of 90 bar.

    • Whoa! We had images of the surface of Venus???

      Where was the news media?
    • You're forgetting that the Mars Rover is autonomous. NASA gives it high-level instructions (move over there), and Rover figures out the best way to get there on its own. Lunokhod is remote-controlled.

    • Re:Spirit not that impressive...? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:36AM (#8032819) Journal
      Check out Lunokhod, two Russian moon rovers from the early 1970s that drove around for months. Not to bring down the Spirit guys or their great work, but their talk of pioneering 30cm moves sound a bit dull compared with Lunokhod.....

      Lunokhod had the advantage of a 2-second message turnaround time instead of the approx. 20 minutes one gets from Mars. Thus, Lunokhod did not have to carry a brain of any kind. Spirit can travel quite a distance on its own, making navigation decisions if one lets it. However, they are being cautious at this point in the mission. They are likely to get braver toward the end of the mission when there is less to lose.

      Lunokhod was just a RC car more or less. But still a bold craft for its time. I read that it took 5 guys to drive it.
    • "it weighed just under 2,000 pounds and was designed to operate for 90 days while guided in real-time by a five person team at the Deep Space Center near Moscow"

      That's a whole lot different than the semi-autonomous driving of the MER's [nasa.gov]. You may think it's dull, others see the value in going easy, step by step, evaluating each step before a bigger step is taken. Well, maybe it is dull, but IMHO it's the right thing to do with a $800 million asset...

    • Yeah, and we had people driving around the Moon before that even.

      Mars is not the Moon... it's a lot further away, it's a harsher environment in many ways, and there's a lot less known about it. Really it's the "further away" bit that makes it difficult -- you have to spend an immense amount of energy to go really fast in order to get there. And then you have to get rid of all of it once you're there unless you want to just plow a new crater. The Russians sent, what, 9 probes to Mars in the 70s as well -- o

      • Re:Spirit not that impressive...? (Score:5, Informative)

        by mikerich ( 120257 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:54PM (#8033692)
        The Russians sent, what, 9 probes to Mars in the 70s as well -- only one survived. And only for a few seconds at that.

        I make it seven.

        1. Kosmos 419 (May 1971). Mars orbiter intended to beat Mariner 8 to the planet. It reached Earth orbit but the booster failed to restart, it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere a few days later. The only positive point is that it did get further than Mariner 8 which ended up in the Atlantic.
        2. Mars 2 (May 1971) . Mars orbiter and lander. Reached Mars and deployed lander which entered the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle and crashed. The orbiter successfully returned data for three months.
        3. Mars 3 (May 1971). The twin of Mars 2. The probe succesfully deployed the lander which touched down on Mars - the first craft to do so. Data was returned from the surface for 20 seconds - the reason for the failure is unknown - either the probe was toppled by a raging storm or there was a failure with the uplink to the orbiter. (The same storm delayed the return of images from the US's Mariner 9 orbiter). The Mars 3 orbiter failed to enter the correct Martian orbit and was put into a highly elliptical orbit. It returned data for almost three months.
        4. Mars 4 (July 1973). A Mars orbiter intended to serve as part of a fleet of four ships. It was damaged by radiation on the voyage to Mars and failed to fire its retro engine. The orbiter passed by Mars, taking some pictures of an astonishingly high quality (better than those obtained by the US to the time) and performed some work on the Martian atmosphere.
        5. Mars 5 (July 1973). The twin of Mars 4, but this one entered an orbit around the planet. It returned surface images before after less than a month. Again the images were superb.
        6. Mars 6 (August 1973). A heavy lander intended to use Mars 4 and 5 as relays to Earth. It entered the Martian atmosphere and relayed data to Earth during the descent. It is believed the retro rockets failed to fire and it smashed into the surface at high speed. Nevertheless, the Soviets were the first to make measurements of the Martian atmosphere, sadly much of the data was badly mangled during transmission.
        7. Mars 7 (August 1973) The twin of Mars 6, but this one didn't even land on Mars. For some reason the lander was ejected from the bus stage far too early and it missed the planet. Both stages went into solar orbit, neither returned any data.

        So a pretty depressing story for the Soviets (especially compared to their successes on Venus), it has been suggested that a good number of the failures were caused by solar radiation eating away the microchips in the probes causing them to die or malfunction. Certainly when you think of the longer flight times to Mars than to Venus it appears to suggest that it was something going on in-flight that caused the failures.

        Having said that, they did achieve some successes and I can only imagine the elation of Mars 3's controllers when they started getting that first grainy image of the Martian surface - only for it to suddenly stop.

        Best wishes,
        Mike.

        • The sad thing about the early Russian (aka Soviet) efforts at landing on Mars is the probes probably weren't sterilized very well, if at all. Soviet-era space electronics were tube-based, not transistor based, and were prone to heat-induced failure. Even their unmanned vehicles were pressurized to air-cool the electronicsm, and some of their early failures are probably attributable to loss of pressure in the probe itself, leading to heat-induced failure. What's this got to do with Mars? The Soviets couldn
    • Not to bring down the Spirit guys or their great work, but their talk of pioneering 30cm moves sound a bit dull compared with Lunokhod

      Yup, they sure don't build them like they used to... Why in my day we did things in space... put men on the Moon... robots were big clunky and lasted for years... Hey where are you going ya young whipper-snapper...

      Sorry, couldn't resist.

      Cheers,
      I.V.

    • Re:Spirit not that impressive...? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) * on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:50AM (#8032982)
      Not to bring down the Spirit guys or their great work, but their talk of pioneering 30cm moves sound a bit dull compared with Lunokhod, or the Pathfinder.

      Oh come on, you can't compare a an ancient real-time controlled rover like Lunokhod to an autonomous, self-navigating rover like Spirit. Spirit could easily run around all over the place if a human were driving it, that's not the challenge. The challenge is the navigation and safety aspects, and without a human controlling it one has to be very conservative.

      Also remember that sunlight is much dimmer out on Mars than it is on the moon, adn the gravity is higher, thus speeds tend to be slower.

      And as for pathfinder, the rover had almost no science instrumentation, and it got stuck.

      I know comparing apples and oranges is a slashdot favorite, but please don't put down an engineering triumph because you don't understand the differences in mission parameters!

      Cheers,
      Justin Wick
      Science Activity Planner Developer
      Mars Exploration Rovers

      • Re:Spirit not that impressive...? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ScottMaxwell ( 108831 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:47PM (#8033617) Homepage
        Also remember that sunlight is much dimmer out on Mars than it is on the moon, adn the gravity is higher, thus speeds tend to be slower.

        And why is sunlight a limiting factor? Because, for political reasons, we couldn't put an RTG (radioactive power source) on the rovers. That leaves us with solar only, which is what leads to the limited speed and the limited vehicle lifetime. If we could fly an RTG on Spirit, we could make it last for years. Maybe we'll be able to do that with a future mission.

        As it is, I think we've done pretty well: we're going to drive a 384kg rover a kilometer (or more) and operate it for three months on just about the amount of energy it takes to power two light bulbs (~140W peak). And we're going to do it again with Opportunity, starting in just a few days.

  • Adirondack? (Score:3, Funny)

    by twoslice ( 457793 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:26AM (#8032708)
    grind the rock Adirondack

    Since when did NASA scientists stop calling rocks after cartoon characters. The last visit to Mars we had Scoobydoo, Popeye and Barnicle Bill. Those names were really scientific sounding too...

    • . . . of "Adirondack Al," the wise-cracking otter from the Allegheny Animation Studio's show _The Runciple Potts Hour_?

      You know, ran on the Muntz TV Network?

      Had the guy who played Commodore Langly on _Space: Mission Upwards_ as Runciple Potts, the friendly lumber deliveryman who introduced the cartoons?

      Jeeze, kids these days don't have appreciation of culture.

      Stefan
    • Would you prefer perhaps a system based on range & bearing from lander? Scientific? Yes. Accessable? No. When you are dealing with $800M of the taxpayer's money, you have to play the PR game if you want to keep doing science.

      • Scientists are people too. The names they give the rocks are just convenient labels that facilitate discussion. It's a lot easier to say "Adirondack" than to quote a range and bearing. I doubt the PR people have much to do with it.

  • From NASA with Love... (Score:4, Funny)

    by JoeLinux ( 20366 ) <joelinux@ g m a i l . c om> on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:28AM (#8032736)
    How sweet! [pacificnet.net]

    I was bored....

    JoeLinux
  • Looks something like a repeat. [slashdot.org]

  • Ready to grind the rock Adirondack (Score:3)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:36AM (#8032832)
    "[...] ready to grind the rock Adirondack"

    Is this a rock that they've given a name to? Or is it an American colloquialism that I'm not familiar with? Or is it something else? Aren't the Adirondacks a mountain chain in NE N. America?
  • "While the Beagle 2 may have been gobbled up by Mars--Eater of Spacecraft, the main part of the ESA's recent Mars mission is doing well."

    Um, excuse me, but wasn't the main part of the mission eaten by Mars? Let's not sugar-coat this now-- The biggest reason for going to Mars was to put something on Mars. That said, it's nice to know they're making use of the leftovers.

  • Mars ate Beagle 2.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by tUrBzY ( 688907 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:55AM (#8033040) Homepage
    and now Beagle 1 is eating up our computers!
  • I have a 50% deja-vu ;o)

  • Mars Mission... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BigJimSlade ( 139096 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:05PM (#8033151) Homepage
    ...the most expensive computer wallpaper generating space mission ever.

  • I hope they have audio gear! (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaptCanuk ( 245649 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @12:16PM (#8033299) Journal
    I hope they have audio gear on that expensive digital camera just in case that rock says "Owww! Stop grinding me!"

  • Looking at this picture(small) [esa.int] (Large) [esa.int], I see what looks to be 3 high areas that seem to have their tops sliced off. They look to be flat, almost like what you'd see here on Earth, like Devil's Tower [nps.gov].

    I'm wondering if these features were caused by similiar forces. Given the apparent size of the features on Mars, I'm thinking that whatever happened, it must've been big. Or maybe it was just gravity, given that these features are part of the canyon wall.

    I'm no geologist, or rocket scientist by any means. How

    • Re:Geological Event (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )
      It's not that the tops were sliced off. The whole area was probably a pretty flat plain before whatever (zillions of gallons of water, most likely) carved out the canyon. The flat areas are what's left of the original surface.

      You'll see the same thing in canyon areas on Earth. As the valleys widen you get less and less of the original surface left, until the whole terrain is rugged.
    • Given the apparent size of the features on Mars,

      You're doing better than me if you had any idea of the scale. At first look I couldn't tell if it was a microscopic or macroscopic image. Finally reading the text I get "The picture shows a portion of a 1700 km long and 65 km wide swath" which gives me an idea (how big of a "portion"?), but I still wish these guys would put a simple scale bar on the images for people like me.

  • How about pictures of the old Viking probe? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @01:05PM (#8033802) Homepage
    Didn't this rover land near the old Viking probe sent down in the 70's? How about sending the rover off on it's last mission to get a picture of the Viking Probe? NASA could see how the probe has held up all these years. NASA would also get mad props too. :)
  • I was just wondering. The pictures look very colorful. Do the colors on these photos correspond to the actual colors on Mars, or have the colors been enhanced?

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