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Mars Exploration Rovers || Spirit & Opportunity |
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Written by Administrator on
Sunday, 25 May 2008
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Opportunity sets sights on Endeavour Crater
02 October 2008 - Opportunity, the little rover that could, just recently climbed up out of Victoria Crater on Mars after spending two years studying the large crater Now, its setting a course for a crater 20 times the size of Victoria: Endeavour Crater. Endeavour is eleven km (seven miles) to the southeast of Victoria, a distance equal to the total mileage Opportunity has racked up since landing on Mars in January 2004.
| Mars rovers awaken from winter slumber
28 August 2008 - Having successfully survived another southern hemisphere Martian winter, the solar-powered Mars rovers are back at work, with Opportunity again stealing the spotlight. Having rolled down into Victoria Crater nearly a year ago, NASA mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, have accomplished everything they set out to do when they went into the crater, and are now taking the same route back out. Their efforts could be stymied by a potential wheel failure, though - Opportunity experienced an unsettling power spike in its left front wheel motor, a similar electrical current spike spelled doom for the right front wheel of the rover’s twin Spirit in 2006.
| Opportunity's arm jams
30 April 2008 - Since 2005, the Mars rover Opportunity has had a problem: arthritis. Starting a few years ago the motor that controls the sideway’s movement of the rover’s robotic arm has suffered from intermittent stalling, and now the glitch has grown worse. On April 14th, Opportunity started to extend its arm and the motor froze. With the arm stuck where it is, the important instruments on its tip cannot be used.
| Mars rovers teeter on brink of financial doom
26 March 2008 - For the past several years NASA has struggled with its budget. While it has not recieved any funding adjustments in nearly a decade, the space agency has been ordered to develop a new launch system to replace the space shuttle, finish the International Space Station, and complete all the rest of what it has to do with what's left over. And what's left over simply isn't enough. The Jet Propulsion Lab was recently informed by NASA that it had to cut $4 million from the $20 million used annually to run the two Mars rovers. The JPL responded by saying that the budget cut will force one of the two rovers into early retirement.
| Human-shaped rock on Mars is just that - a rock
26 January 2008 - Ever since we figured out that Mars was a planet, there have been those that thought there could be life on the red planet. While astronomers and astrobiologists are certain that Mars is currently life-free (whether microbial life may have existed in the path is still undetermined), that hasn’t stopped people from ceasing on supposed evidence of artificial structures on the planet. From the massive canal system that spans half of Mars (a network of canyons) to the mysterious face discovered by the Viking 1 orbiter (later missions have discovered that it was just an odd coincidence of shadows), now we’re looking at a rock formation photographed by the Spirit robot that looks like a seated female human figure. Turns out it's just a rock.
| NASA extends Mars rover mission... again
15 October 2007 - For a mission that was only slated to originally last 90 days, nearly four years later NASA has extended the mission of the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, possibly through 2009. The rovers have survived through Martian winters and global dust storms, and have returned almost 200,000 images of our rusty planetary neighbor.
| Opportunity rover reaches inside Victoria Crater
27 September 2007 - NASA's Martian rover Opportunity has reached its first stop inside the half-mile-wide Victoria Crater. The crater has long been a goal for the rover, which finally entered it earlier this month after enduring an energy-draining planet-wide dust storm. Opportunity is parked by a band of bright material that runs along the crater's walls, much like sedimentary deposits found on Earth.
| Opportunity prepares for crater descent
09 September 2007 - The Opportunity Mars rover is once again preparing to descend into a half-mile-wide (800-meter-wide) crater, after spending weeks waiting out waves of dust storms, NASA said Friday. Opportunity is scheduled to start rolling into Victoria Crater as early as Tuesday, the space agency said in a mission advisory. Meanwhile, the rover's twin on the other side of the planet, Spirit, climbed onto a plateau of layered bedrock nicknamed Home Plate this week to renew scientific observations.
| Storm Subsides: Mars Rovers Now Battle Fallout
16 August 2007 - Mars' globe-engulfing dust storm has died down during the past several weeks, but the two robotic rovers on its surface now face the fallout of dust from the thin atmosphere. Conditions were so bad in early August that just before the launch of the Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft, rover scientist Mark Lemmon feared the demise of the Opportunity rover.
| Mars rovers weather worst of dust storms
24 July 2007 - The twin rovers on Mars are in good shape today despite widespread dust storms that worsened last week and threatened to cut off solar power to the robotic explorers. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) project, said that both Spirit and Opportunity are in "excellent shape" based on a radio transmission received this morning. "Both came through the weekend beautifully," Squyres said in a telephone interview. "They were both power positive over the weekend, meaning they were generating more power than they were consuming."
| Mars rovers lose power amid huge dust storm
06 July 2007 - A major dust storm on Mars has worsened and is causing the Mars Exploration Rovers to lose power. Opportunity's highly anticipated and risky entry into Victoria Crater is delayed for at least several days, NASA announced. The regional storm, first reported by Space.com, is the most severe to hit the rovers since they began exploring Mars in January 2004. Already last week it was thousands of miles wide. At first, scientists did not expect it to affect rover operations.
| Risky crater descent planned for Mars rover Opportunity
28 June 2007 - The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) "Opportunity" will perform a risky descent into the red planet's giant Victoria Crater early next month. The announcement was delivered during a NASA teleconference today, and came after months of debate about whether or not to proceed. Officials said the decision has been difficult to make because some scientists think the crater may become the aging rover's final resting place.
| Huge dust storm breaks out on Mars
27 June 2007 - A major dust storm has developed on the red planet, blocking sunlight and prompting Mars mission managers to keep a close eye on it, SPACE.com has learned. It is not known how large the storm might grow, but already it is thousands of miles across. If it balloons, as dust storms have done in the past, it could hamper operations of NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
| Did Mars rover see water two years ago?
09 June 2007 - A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars. The report identifies specific spots that appear to have contained liquid water two years ago, when Opportunity was exploring a crater called Endurance. It is a highly controversial claim, as many scientists believe that liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars today because of the planet’s thin atmosphere.
| Mars rover unearths evidence of wetter past
22 May 2007 - A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.
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"Shall I flog them as well?"
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