First 5 Years On Mars - Spirit Rover Reports A-OK-UPDATED
This post is about a week late, but there is that pesky delay between the 2 planets. And the celebration has been really big around here.
NASA's scientists and engineers did some mighty deeds to put the MERs where they are still - over 20 times their expected lifetimes - collecting information and rolling around carefully chosen routes on Mars. These are the Methuselahs of all planetary explorers. They are a little arthritic, but - hey - aren't we all. And who among us expect a lifetime of 20 x (3 score plus ten)?
And one other little thing - lost heroes of the Space Program were remembered on Mars through the MERs.
NASA named Spirit's landing site the Columbia Memorial Station in honor of the astronauts lost on February 1, 2003. Spirit carried a plaque designed by MER engineers commemorating the space shuttle Columbia astronauts. This photograph made by Spirit's navigation camera on thelanding site shows the six-inch aluminum plaque mounted on therover. A larger photograph of it is available at
< http://www.spacetoday.org/images/Mars/MarsRovers2003/MarsRoverSpiritFirstPix/SpiritColumbiaPlaque627x768.jpg>
On the 18th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy, Opportunity's landing sight was named Challenger Memorial Stationto honor the space shuttle astronauts lost in that explosion. The seven Challenger crew members were killed when the shuttle exploded during launch on January 28, 1986.
Three Martian hills near Spirit were named in memory of the American astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire on the 37th anniversary of their tragic deaths. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed January 27, 1967, in a fire as they sat in an Apollo capsule on the launch-pad during a ground test at Cape Canaveral.The hills named after them are shown in this picture:
A much larger format picture is here: < http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040127a/HorizonHillsApollo_br.jpg>
My little SUV Spirit has had some ups and downs, but it's a great machine and, being solar, it's also a green machine. On the Red Planet. In honor of 5 years of good work for the American public, I suggest you read an Edgar Rice Burroughs John-Carter-On-Mars book, or better yet, the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Fiction about Mars is getting harder to find every day.
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Update: I want to post some links and replies to comments, but OS won't let me. So - here is what I wanted to post.
catnmus: The 3-D pictures of Mars are fantabulous. You can get yourself 1 free set of anaglyph viewing glasses (the inexpensive paper kind) from Rainbow at this URL "http://www.rainbowsymphony.com/freestuff.html " Be sure to specify you want the Mars 3-D ones.
Here is a good place to start looking at 3-d pictures "http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/3d/spirit/" but there are others. Just make sure the red lens is on the left eye. I used some Hanna Montana 3-D glasses once and couldn't tell up from down with them, until I remembered "red on left." It's counter-intuitive. Then search the web for photographs of Mars online. Yes, there are hundreds of 3-D pictures of Mars online, with very good descriptions of what you are seeing. When I first beheld a 3-D picture on my computer screen, I felt like a kid again!
Jim: You'd maybe rather spend the money on another war? Make your point.
Dean - Come on in, the water (now that we found it) is fine! If a little cold.
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Comments
The Nasa website is great at posting all the great shots and movies, as well as keeping all that’s going on well organized and available. How can you not love Nasa? A few years back, my wife gave me a huge treat by uncovering the fact that Nasa-JPL has (almost?) yearly ‘open house’ days; she took me on a surprise visit. HUGE fun. You can even view the control room where they direct the various robot exploration projects. I was there in 2004 just around the time Cassini was entering Saturn’s system, and we went again this past summer.
There are links all over the place from there. Spirit had a rough time of it in (Earth) November when a dust storm kicked sand in its face, most probably covering over the solar cells that power it. Then, a few Sols later, probably another storm blew the sand off the solar pack and signals were confirmed again.
It is this sort of serendipity that has marked this program from the beginning. These Rovers were made from a lot of spare parts, plus a few parts engineered especially for the program. The science packs have proven remarkably robust as well. No one could have predicted this long a life time. It certainly wasn't engineered into them.
NASA redeemed itself with the MER program. And proved beyond a doubt that robotic exploration is the cheap and effective way to see the other planets. Phoenix did the same for the Mars polar area. We have direct pictures of water ice there now. And I haven't (personally) ruled out a re-awakening of that probe after the long Martian winter. Wait and see.
I'm wondering what the long term ramifications of what we will learn from the data will mean.
Space exploration is something that should get any person's blood flowing. The possibilities are literally endless.
rated
Dean
ISBN 9781402756207.
You hit the nail on the head. And with NASA developing robotic instruments that have many applications on Earth as well, the money is well spent. Look far afield, there is and always has been a huge return on investment at NASA.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
OS is swallowing my links to other pages and spitting them out.