back to article Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity snapped a dramatic photo of itself roaming around the planet's Endeavour Crater today. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ The image caught the clear shadow of the hardworking robot, which to our wise eyes on the Vulture space desk looks a bit like the cute movie character …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. NomNomNom
    Alien

    <--- you know what I am thinking

    "In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location."

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    time on mars

    I like the way they refer to "about 5pm" local time - wondered what they hell they meant for a bit.

    It happens that the Mars day is 24h 39m long, so it sort of makes sense, but if it had alternatively been 4000h long they'd have had to find a better way of describing when they made their picture.

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: time on mars

      4000h day? Wouldn't it just have been "about 830pm" then ?

    2. Bakunin
      Pint

      Re: time on mars

      I assume it's "between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m" because it took several pictures over half a half hour period.

      If the day was 4000 hours long then I suppose late afternoon would be something like "between 1620:30 and 1621pm local time". (Assume you still bother with am and pm)

      Mind you a 166 hour long lunch would be nice addition to any Friday.

      "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: time on mars

        "Assume you still bother with am and pm"

        I advise against it - the am/pm time format isn't compatible with planets where a day lasts less than 12 hours. Attempting to use it on such a planet causes a potentially fatal problem: you never reach lunchtime.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: you never reach lunchtime.

          I can assure you that I *always* reach lunchtime, no matter what the timey-wimey thing on the wall might say...

        2. Stoneshop
          Boffin

          @Chris 19 Re: time on mars

          - the am/pm time format isn't compatible with planets where a day lasts less than 12 hours.

          You may want to rethink that, and ponder the meaning of the 'm'. Hint: it's to do with the middle of the day; the moment your local star is highest over your local horizon. Whether that's just a few earth minutes after sunrise, years or even ages, unless your planet's rotation is exactly in sync with its orbit, your 'meridiem' will be there. If your planet is synced you will have to travel to lunch if you're not there already.

        3. akicif
          Alien

          Re: time on mars

          No - the am/pm FORMAT is fine - there's still a noon for the time to be before or after - it's just the value of noon or midnight that change.

          For example, if the day was 28 hours long, there'd be nothing to stop you saying something happened at 14 noon precisely, or at 13.55am

          1. SYNTAX__ERROR
            Boffin

            Re: Shirley

            I would hope that when NASA say "between about 4.30 and 17:00" they mean just that, which is a period of twelve-and-a-half hours.

            Because it would be bloody stupid to mix time formats within a single sentence.

    3. Stoneshop
      Alien

      Re: time on mars

      "It happens that the Mars day is 24h 39m long"

      And our human wake/sleep cycle tends to lengthen roughly three-quarters of an hour when left free-running (i.e. no synchronisation with daylight/nighttime). This can only mean one thing.

      1. Richard Ball

        Re: time on mars

        Yep.

        When are we going to get back up off this stinking blue rock and go back to our cold, red homeland.

        1. RAMChYLD
          Boffin

          Re: time on mars

          Patience, we need to send trees there first to terraform the environment and turn all those carbon dioxide into oxygen.

          That will take a few hundred years.

          And will only happen once someone at NASA has figured out a way to get tree saplings onto the planet en masse.

      2. ZankerH

        Re: time on mars

        I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's definitely aliens.

        1. Graham Marsden
          Coat

          But...

          ... is there Life on Mars?

          1. Jim Carter
            Coat

            Re: But...

            It wouldn't be a god-awful small affair...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: can only mean one thing.

        Our body clock is a PLL ?

    4. Kubla Cant
      Alien

      Re: time on mars

      So who decided where the Greenwich of Mars is? And how? Has it got a dome?

      There is obviously more on Mars than we've been told.

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: So who decided where the Greenwich of Mars is?

        Merton Davies, apparently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy-0

  3. Kevin Turvey

    Dramatic?

    Hardly what I'd call dramatic! Interesting maybe, not dramatic.

    @time on mars, they could still divide the 4000 earth hour long local day into 24 giving them local hours, it'd just mean a "local" hour would last 166 earth hours, it just would'nt be so accurate, though giving local minutes and seconds and maybe tenths/hundredths of a second would help narrow it down!

    1. Stoneshop
      FAIL

      Re: Dramatic?

      "Interesting maybe, not dramatic."

      Ok, then you go there and make that dramatic photo.

    2. TeeCee Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: Dramatic?

      What was that sound?

      Ah yes. That'll be all the smugness evaporating from those who have carefully coded bulletproof routines for handling UTC offsets, as the impact of variable length units of time measurement sinks in.

      Who's going to raise the RFC?

  4. Blue eyed boy
    Boffin

    It's all a fake

    "In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location."

    It's a fake. We never went to Mars at all. That pic was taken in the Mojave Desert somewhere.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's all a fake

      No it is mars, its just the same sound stage where they faked the moon landing.

  5. Stevie

    Hoorah!

    A true credit to the engineers wot built and designed it.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Surprised noone has posted the xkcd cartoon yet.

    1. Tim Parker

      @Sir Wiggum

      "Surprised noone has posted the xkcd cartoon yet."

      Very good point Sir, although it is tremendously sad.... here it is for them that would like a pointer

      http://xkcd.com/695/

    2. oregonensis
      Thumb Up

      Thankful no one has posted the XkCd yet. Pretending the reply below yours doesn't exist.

  7. Johnny Canuck
    Thumb Up

    We've honoured heroic humans and animals with plaques, maybe its time we honoured these 2 little rovers with something similar. I realize I'm anthropomorphising the rovers and that it would really be a tribute to the engineers and operators, but I think we should in someway commemorate them.

    1. Richard Ball

      re: commemorate

      Playmobil

  8. Tankboy
    Pint

    Very proud

    Made in the USA.

    1. Tim Parker

      Re: Very proud

      "Made in the USA."

      Oh good lord...

    2. Peter Simpson 1
      Thumb Up

      Re: Very proud

      "Made in the USA"

      By Real Engineers. Designed to last a month or two, and still going strong. Now, *that* is good design, no matter what nationality.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Very proud

        Whilst I upvoted Tim's salient comment above I agree that this team, along with that of Voyager, deserve a medal.

        1. Tim Parker

          @AC Re: Very proud

          "..this team, along with that of Voyager, deserve a medal."

          Hear, hear. Well put.

    3. seven of five

      Re: Very proud

      I bet you: At least half of it is "made in Taiwan" (or its mainland provinces*eg*).

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Very proud

      At what point of interplanetary exploration do you think the yankss will begin to comprehend that our concepts of nations and nationalism are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things? You would have thought pictures from another planet would maybe provide some perspective, but no.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        WTF?

        Re: Very proud

        "concepts of nations and nationalism are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things?"

        Everything human is meaningless in the grand scheme (whatever that is) including you. That doesn't make them worthless. like it or not , humans are tribal animals and that is never going to change.

  9. Wile E. Veteran
    Mushroom

    Not a Disney/Pixar design!

    WALL-E was patterned (strongly) after the "Johnny 5" robot in the earlier film, "Short Circuit." It is not a "Disney/Pixar" design.

    I have great respect for the Pixar folks who happily admit their inspirations but none at all for Disney who has been ripping off the public treasury of tales, slapping their name in front of it and promoting it as if it were their own original creation since the 1940's.

    Local classical music station ran a program about movies using unattributed classical compositions to make their "own" movie music. Guess which company supplied most of the examples? The melody of "Hi-ho, hi-ho it's off to work we go ...." was written by Mozart. Yes, that Mozart.

    1. Darryl
      Happy

      Re: Not a Disney/Pixar design!

      You mean Kyle Mozart? I LOVE his work!

      Seriously though, you forgot to mention how litigious Disney is when someone gets too close to their stuff too. Kind of ironic.

    2. oregonensis
      Black Helicopters

      Re: Not a Disney/Pixar design!

      PIXAR FOLKS ARE DISNEY FOLKS

      YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED

    3. the old rang

      Re: Not a Disney/Pixar design!

      As one noted, and I add that you young Hu-Persons (stupid political correct name for de-tailed apes) have poor memories of a great character...

      There is so much Johnny 7 in that shadow (Tall, Dark and... Squarish)...

      And so little 'what's his name' (short, odd-eyed and shortish)...

      Nothing like the shadow of 'the squat one' that was drawn, mostly the shadow of the real one in hard metal.

      (I am not dis-allowing, that there may have been the old "I never forget a face, but I suck at names" error, just to allow for gray matter loss.) Spelling/Grammar not included...

      1. frankgobbo

        Re: Not a Disney/Pixar design!

        Think you'll find it was number 5 who was alive...

        1. Andrew James

          Re: Not a Disney/Pixar design!

          And he was number 5 of a series of 5... there was no number 7. Or 6 for that matter.

  10. Trevor Marron

    That's not Wall-E

    That's a bloody Gatso!

    1. P. Lee
      Coat

      Re: That's not Wall-E

      ... and you can also see the shadow of a little green man getting out of a white van with an angle grinder!

  11. Winkypop Silver badge
    Alien

    How come?

    This image was on Twitter a full hour before NASA received it.

    Just sayin'

  12. Aqua Marina
    Happy

    Where's all the red????

    I'm surprised by how colorful that picture is. I guess you can blame it on film and TV, but I expect everything to be a shade of red when looking at images from Mars.

    *note to devs, why is the spell checker insisting I use the US spelling of 'colourful'? This is a UK site.

    1. Cameron Colley

      Re: Where's all the red????

      Unless I'm very much mistaken the spiel chocker is built in to your browser. If you're using Firefox then I seem to recall that US English is the default but you can add proper English by right-clicking and selecting Add Dictionaries form the Languages menu.

  13. xyz Silver badge

    Well at least Nasa has started to allow some blue in the pix

    instead of that awful red colour they usually paint over anything Mars.

    1. Crisp

      Blue skies on Mars?

      That's a new one.

  14. aldolo

    Defensive design

    To defend the workplace from budget cut. As long as the rover live, they work....

  15. leeph

    Might be a rather ignorant question, but why do all these images have to be mosaics, and in some sort of strange false-colour? Why can't the rovers taken a Canon 60D up there and take some 'normal' pictures with 'normal' colour so we can actually see what it would be like through human eyes?

    1. Tim Cockburn

      Normal eyes?

      Your eyes were made by Canon?

      1. Stoneshop
        FAIL

        Re: Normal eyes?

        Why can't the rovers taken a Canon 60D up there

        Because those rovers were launched some eight years before the Canon 60D was?

    2. Simon Harris
      Go

      The page at http://www.ominous-valve.com/pancam.html has a list of the filter specs.

      Why would you want to limit yourself to the limited gamut and issues that go with a Bayer filtered CCD image, when, with the right filters and optical elements you can image all the way from near ultraviolet to deep infrared?

  16. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    "same size as the city of Seattle"

    Can't remember the city of Seattle being a proper unit of measurement.

  17. Caerwyn

    Vulture Central you are too modest:

    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/pia15037.html

  18. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Blue skies on most planets with atmospheres

    Even on Jupiter in the top few hundred km.

    Raleigh scattering, etc.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like