New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100
wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."
Re:Overweaning care (Score:3, Funny)
Ah sorry, amend my previous figure...to $80,000/pound.
Dang, I knew the dollar was down against the pound, but that's just ridiculous.
Re:1 meter (3.3 feet) (Score:2, Funny)
How many kilograms was the baguette that shut down your LHC?
Ribbit.
Re:Wheels (Score:3, Funny)
NASA meets Pimp My Ride.
JPL: "We're not sure what happened. We powered down the rover ovenight and this morning its up on cement blocks and missing its wheels."
On the other hand, putting hydraulics on it might help getting it unstuck.
Re:Wheels (Score:3, Funny)
The Lunar Rover had a person there to kick it if the mechanism jammed.