"Alright - who let Clarkson drive the rover?"
Looking at those tracks, I'd say someone's been getting Opportunity to do doughnuts.
Mars rover Opportunity has sent back this panoramic holiday snap of the Martian winter. Panoramic pic of Greeley Haven Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University The robot wintered on an outcrop on the Endeavour crater, and this photo shows its own tracks across the ruddy terrain as well as its solar arrays …
And now we know the REAL purpose of the next mission to Mars.
Curiosity is due to touch down in less than 30 days and I've just had a look at some hi-res images from a secret source. I thought it had been sponsored by the AAA - [American Automobile Association] but now I know differently, it's an AAA tow truck complete with a set of traffic lights to set up so that it can tempt homeless Martians out from their caves to clean off the solar panels.
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It's a RAD6000. It's a radiation hardened, single-chip version of the venerable POWER1, so yeah, it kind of does have a POWER chip on board. A whopping 1.1M transistors, a 33MHz clock speed and 35MIPS. At the best part of a quarter of a million dollars per chip it isn't exactly cheap, either.
I am very suprised that the giant laser cannon clearly pictured on the right of the image at the edge of the large paved area has not raised more comment.....
You can even see some manner of small spacraft taking off from near it's base and heading across the picture.
....and not the (Nasa's) red sky, red ground guff that they've been trying to palm us off with for years.
I'll bet in a few months, the sky will be even bluer, like it was in the original colour pictures taken of the planet before someone decided that Mars must be red, for Earthlings at least.