Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Opportunity is once again free of the sand dune and can continue on its extended mission.
The Mars rover Opportunity has successfully escaped from a sand trap. JPL engineers cheered when images returned from Mars showed the rover’s wheels were free. Engineers worked for nearly five weeks to carefully maneuver the rover out of the sand dune
I hope that this project isn’t plauged by the “faster, better, cheaper – choose two” thinking that the some space probes have had in the few years.
I think that the science that can be gathered from the polar regions of Mars will answer a lot of questions that scientists have about where the water might have gone.
The Phoenix Mars Mission, scheduled for launch in August 2007, is the first in NASA’s “Scout Program.” Scouts are designed to be highly innovative and relatively low-cost complements to major missions being planned as part of the agency’s Mars Exploration Program. Phoenix is specifically designed to measure volatiles (especially water) and complex organic molecules in the arctic plains of Mars, where the Mars Odyssey orbiter has discovered evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface.
Similar to its namesake, Phoenix “raises from the ashes” a spacecraft and instruments from two previous unsuccessful attempts to explore Mars. The 2001 lander, administratively mothballed in 2000, is being resurrected for the Phoenix Mission. Similarly, many of the mission’s scientific instruments have already been built, requiring little or no modification for flight to Mars.
Phoenix is a fixed lander, using a robotic arm to dig to the ice layer and analyze samples with a suite of sophisticated on-deck scientific instruments.
The Mars Global Surveyor has managed to image some of the sucessful (and not so succesful) landers that are on the surface of Mars. An astounding feat if you ask me.
MGS Finds Viking Lander 2 and Mars Polar Lander (Maybe)
MOC Views Viking Lander 1 Site Through Dust Storm Clouds
Way to go! Now hopefuly the funding will stay with the program so scientists will be able to use the new data received.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled so far in our Solar System that it’s reached the heliosheath. This is an area just past the termination shock region, where the solar wind crashes into the thin interstellar gas of the galaxy. It was difficult to detect exactly when Voyager 1 passed through the termination shock and into the heliosheath, because we have no data about interstellar space yet, just calculations.
More neat stuff from Boing-Boing today, this time it s little flying Linux web servers. What will they think of next?
Flocks of unmanned aircraft form Bluetooth Linux clusters
How very clever.
This 50,000 Euro, R2D2oid robot from the University of Pisa perambulates on two or three wheels and flees from humanoid shapes bearing lightsaberoid shapes. It is also Bluetooth and USB-enabled.
Italian R2D2oid bot recognizes and flees from lightsaberoid objects