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Home Front
Mars Rover Opportunity Lands, Opens Second Front
2004-01-26
PASADENA/MARS – With one rover now ailing on Mars, NASA scientists were thrilled when its identical twin sent dazzling and intriguing photos from the other side of the Red Planet. Images of a smooth red surface arrived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about four hours after the rover Opportunity bounced to a landing late Saturday some 6,600 miles from its temporarily crippled twin, Spirit. "I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," said Steven Squyres of Cornell University, the mission’s main scientist. "I still don’t know what we’re looking at."
Dude, chill out
JPL director Charles Elachi told ABC’s "Good Morning America" on Monday that the outcroppings of bedrock visible in the pictures were "particularly exciting." "For a geologist, this is really a gold mine because that will allow us to learn where the oil is about the history of the planet and look at the layering in those rocks in a very specific location," he said. "So the scientists from Haliburton are absolutely ecstatic." The six-wheeled rover landed in Meridiani Planum, believed to be the smoothest, flattest spot on Mars. Opportunity lies 6,600 miles and halfway around the planet from where its twin, Spirit, landed on Jan. 3. On Sunday, NASA said Opportunity was in excellent health and Spirit was on the mend after a serious software problems had hobbled it. Opportunity could roll off its lander in 10 to 14 days, mission manager Arthur Amador said. Opportunity’s possible targets include a larger crater, maybe 500 feet across, that lies an estimated half-mile from where the spacecraft landed and a possible location of the banned Illudium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator program. On Wednesday, Spirit developed serious problems, cutting off what had been a steady flow of pictures and scientific data and prompting calls of quagmire. Engineers now believe the problem arose with software that manages the file system within the rover’s flash memory, project manager Pete Theisinger said. Other possible culprits include broken hardware or solar radiation. "Spirit is still serious but we are moving to guarded condition," Theisinger said, adding Spirit could resume normal operations in two to three weeks.
"As soon as we insert the boot disk".
As of early Sunday, there were a record five spacecraft operating on or around Mars, including two NASA satellites and one from the European Space Agency orbiting the planet.
Martian Defense spokesman Qaotz denied any landing had been made and threatened action against any overflights by orbiters as a "Violation of Martian Sovereignty".

"They are committing suicide at the gates of Deimos! Their digestive apparati are roasting in Quatspore! A curse on their palps!"
Posted by:Steve

#11  here it is:
http://www.instapundit.com/archives/013519.php
Posted by: Anonymous   2004-1-26 2:39:24 PM  

#10  The story has been out for days that Bush's Mars plan will provide Haliburton with lucrative space building contracts.
Posted by: Anonymous   2004-1-26 2:34:28 PM  

#9  is there oil there too? We NEED oil for the empire
Posted by: Jon Shep U.K   2004-1-26 1:32:51 PM  

#8  We creating an inner sanctum for peace loving sentinents.
Posted by: Shipman   2004-1-26 1:19:41 PM  

#7  Look... if you make martian WMD... (neutron x-beam ray guns, and the like...) you have to deal with the consequences.

We're simply fighting to make the inner planets safe for democracy.
Posted by: ----------<<<<-   2004-1-26 1:06:32 PM  

#6  END U.S. IMPERIALISM AND AGGRESSION ON MARS! THOUSANDS OF MARTIAN CIVILIANS HAVE DIED AS A RESULT OF U.S. BOMBING OF CYDONIA!
Posted by: 4thInfVet   2004-1-26 12:40:09 PM  

#5  how long till the lefty loons start saying were tryimg to take over the galaxy and steal its oil?I say build a constellation of space based lasers just to piss them off
Posted by: Jon Shep U.K   2004-1-26 12:05:08 PM  

#4  "We are now working on the basis that this is a corrupt system and the only way we might resurrect it is to send such a command and completely reload the software, if it's still alive," Pillinger said at a news conference in London. "Of course, that is a very dangerous command to send because if the thing is AWOL, or even if it's there, it may never respond to it, so it's pretty much a last resort," he added.

How "dangerous" could it be? The thing isn't responding anyway, so what're the alternatives?

It's sink-or-swim time.
Posted by: Bomb-a-rama   2004-1-26 12:03:21 PM  

#3  Just send the rover from Opportunity out on service calls to the other two probes.

(Yeah, it doesn't have the range. What a pity!)
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2004-1-26 11:53:51 AM  

#2  As Europe's first Mars probe remained stubbornly silent, British scientists announced a "last resort" plan Monday of switching off the missing Beagle 2's coColin Pillinger, lead scientist on the Beagle 2 program, said Mars Express passed over the probe's landing site twice over the weekend, but nothing was heard. Pillinger said his team would ask NASA to send a command from its Mars Odyssey orbiter on Tuesday to tell Beagle 2 to switch off its own computer and reload its software. "We are now working on the basis that this is a corrupt system and the only way we might resurrect it is to send such a command and completely reload the software, if it's still alive," Pillinger said at a news conference in London. "Of course, that is a very dangerous command to send because if the thing is AWOL, or even if it's there, it may never respond to it, so it's pretty much a last resort," he added.
Hundreds of high paid scientists, and all you come up with is Ctrl - Alt - Delete?
Posted by: Steve   2004-1-26 11:16:34 AM  

#1   "I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," said Steven Squyres of Cornell University, the mission?s main scientist. "I still don?t know what we?re looking at."

Um...Mars, sir.

Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski   2004-1-26 11:12:22 AM  

00:00