Anyone else see a cheesy movie in this?
I can see Spielberg salivating already, the heroic tale of Opportunity circumnavigating the planet to rescue Spirit, ala "Silent Running"?
No...? OK, Just me then..........
NASA says that its "scrappy" Mars rover, Spirit - which has spent six years prowling the ochre wilderness of the red planet - may finally be stuffed. Bogged in a sand trap, the machine is unable to align its solar panels correctly for the coming Martian winter, meaning that it will probably expire from the cold. According to a …
Strange timing....
The project team had recently announced that they were about to try something that they'd previously said would be a last desperate, nothing-to-lose technique - using the robot arm to try to move dust and sand out of the way of the wheels. (The main problem with this, apart from it being very unlikely to help, is that it might well b0rk the scientific instruments on the end of the arm, eg. the Mossbauer spectrometer. However they then unexpectedly tried a new driving technique: reversing, which is to say moving further along in the direction it was going when it first got stuck. (Spirit's been mostly driving backwards for a couple of years now, since the front-right wheel popped. It's much easier to drag than push a locked-up wheel, of course.) To general astonishment in the community, progress has been pretty dramatic -several cm of movement, which is more than has been seen since last May. She's definitely not out of the woods yet - in fact hasn't quite reached the end of the track she'd followed when driving into the hidden crater in the first place - but it was looking promising at least.
Hurrrm well, have to wait til I get home and jump on the forum to find out WTF gives.
...must be the inner geek in me but every time I read on the progress (or lack thereof) of poor little Spirit I get an overwhelming sense of empathy and visions of this lopsided Wall-E take off, wheezing and spluttering in the dusty sand whilst it slowly and helplessly sinks...oh man...here I go again :'(
"of poor little Spirit I get an overwhelming sense of empathy and visions of this lopsided Wall-E take off,"
Doesn't Spirit pre-date Wall-E by several years? I wonder if the Wall-E character was actually inspired in part by these hardy real-life explorer robots, that have kept going well past their "best-before" dates.
I have tremendeous respect for the people who designed and operated them. In this era of throw-away technology and cutting corners in the name of profits, I find it actually inspirational that some people have had the skill and care to create technology that operates better than required under very harsh conditions.
By no means do I wish the end of our rugged metallic robo-boffinry on Mars. I more wish to thank them for their contribution to space exploration at large. They have provided much more valuable data then they were intended to and lasted far longer than their design life. So i'll drink to that
"It's lookin' good... it's goin' good... we're gettin' great pictures here at NASA Control Pasadena! The landing craft touched down on mars 28 kilometres from the aim point. We're lookin' at a remarkable landscape, littered with different kinds of rocks... red... purple..."
...
"Hey wait a minute, now I'm losing one of the craft. Hey Houston, you getting this?"
...
WEEEEEooooooooo, WEEEEoooooooo, WEEEEEooooooo....
(+1 internets to anyone old enough to pick the reference!)
Thanks for the +1 internet, Steve, as I did get the reference...
it's the very last track on Jeff Wayne's War of The Worlds album, as I recall, & the voice on said track is Jeff Wayne's father...
"No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st Century, that the original double album could be digitally reconstructed from it's many fragments of the original analogue mutitrack tapes...
No one even dreamed of attempting to re-sync 48 tracks without the long defunct Maglink timecode...
But slowly, surely & with immeasurable wizardry, Gaeten Schurrer drew his plans, & against all odds, suceeded..." - Jeff Wayne's War of The Worlds 27th Anniversary Collectors Edition
It's a funny thing that with photovoltaic cells and pissy cold winters, that the boof heads at NASA couldn't get their shit together enough to make the solar cells TILT at the sun; nor to include a "windshield wiper" to clear the dust off the panel.
Like a "track the sun" set up would be nice, but a more basic one that simply tilts at the average direction of the midday sun would still be a HUGE improvement over a FLAT horizontal panel that gets buried under the dust....
IDIOTS.