MER-2 "Opportunity"

[Space Alien]

Марсоход Opportunity припарковали на зиму[/size]

Марсоход Opportunity встал на зимнюю стоянку. Об этом сообщается на официальном сайте миссии.

 Аппарат припаркован на северном склоне кратера Индевор. Место получило неофициальное название гавань Грили в честь скончавшегося в 2011 году геолога Рональда Грили, входившего в команду ученых, работающих с аппаратом. В бухте аппарат проведет несколько месяцев. Самого кратера он достиг летом 2011 года после трех лет пути.

 Для марсохода новая зима станет уже пятой, проведенной на Красной Планете. Раньше ученые специально не выбирали место для стоянки аппарата. Opportunity находится ближе к экватору, чем Spirit, и из-за этого его солнечным батареям раньше всегда хватало света. Теперь батареи покрылись толстым слоем пыли, поэтому аппарат пришлось поставить на наклонной поверхности так, чтобы они получал как можно больше солнечных лучей.

 Во время стоянки марсоход будет продолжать заниматься научной работой. Так, ученые планируют собрать данные о малейших колебаниях во вращении планеты - эти колебания должны пролить свет на внутреннее устройство Марса. Кроме этого аппарат будет изучать окружающую его породу при помощи манипулятора.

 Марсоходы-близнецы Opportunity и Spirit были запущены к Красной планете в 2003 году в рамках миссии Mars Exploration Rovers. Планировалось, что аппараты проработают на Красной планете 90 дней, однако они продержались более пяти лет.

 В апреле 2009 года Spirit застрял в песке, потеряв второе из шести колес. В течение нескольких месяцев ученые пытались спасти аппарат - для этого, например, они моделировали сложившуюся ситуацию с точной копией марсохода на Земле. Ничего сделать не удалось и в начале 2010 года NASA официально объявило о прекращении попыток спасти космический аппарат.

http://lenta.ru/news/2012/01/10/rover/

[Space Alien]

'Greeley Haven' Is Winter Workplace for Mars Rover[/size]

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will spend the next several months at a site informally named "Greeley Haven." The name is a tribute to planetary geologist Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who was a member of the science team for the Mars rovers and many other interplanetary missions.

 The site is an outcrop that provides a sun-facing slope to aid in maintaining adequate solar power during the rover's fifth Martian winter. It also provides targets of scientific interest for the rover's robotic arm to examine.

 Closer to the equator than its twin rover, Spirit, Opportunity did not need to stay on a sun-facing slope during previous winters. Now, however, Opportunity's solar panels carry a thicker coating of dust than in the previous winters. Unless an unlikely wind cleans the panels in coming weeks, the team will use a strategy employed for three winters with Spirit: staying on a sun-facing slope. For several months of shortened daylight before and after the southern Mars winter solstice on March 30, 2012, the sun will pass relatively low in the northern sky from the rover's perspective, and Opportunity will work on the north-facing slope.

 Plans for research at Greeley Haven include a radio-science investigation of the interior of Mars, which began this week; inspections of mineral compositions and textures on the outcrop; and recording a full-circle, color panorama: the Greeley Panorama. Greeley taught generations of planetary scientists at Arizona State University, Tempe, until his death two months ago.

 The radio-science investigation studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet's core. It requires many weeks of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to measure changes in the spin axis of the planet.

 The winter worksite sits on the "Cape York" segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. Opportunity reached the edge of this 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) crater five months ago after three years of driving from smaller Victoria Crater, which it studied for two years.

 Opportunity and Spirit completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004 and continued for years of bonus, extended missions. Both rovers have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit ended communications in March 2010 as its energy declined after losing the use of two of its six wheels, which prevented it from being able to gain a sun-facing tilt for its fourth Martian winter.

 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. More information about Opportunity is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the project on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers .

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20120105a.html

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Бояните

[Space Alien]

Бояните

Ой    , ну ошибся ... Бывает  :lol:

[instml]

Off-Earth Driving Champs

The total distance driven on Mars by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, 21.35 miles by early December 2011, is approaching the record total for off-Earth driving, held by the robotic Lunokhod 2 rover operated on Earth's moon by the Soviet Union in 1973. Lunokhod 2 drove 23 miles. NASA's astronaut-driven Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle drove 22.30 miles during the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972.

The chart also indicates driving distances for two earlier Apollo lunar rovers, one earlier Lunokhod, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit (Opportunity's twin) and the first rover on Mars, NASA's Sojourner.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/pia14859.html



West Rim of Endeavour with Vertical Exaggeration

This view shows portions of the western rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars from a perspective looking toward the northwest. The image exaggerates the landscape's vertical dimension five-fold compared with horizontal dimensions. The scene covers about 4 miles (6 kilometers) in length. Major portions of the rim are labeled.

The view was generated by producing an elevation map from a stereo pair of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, then draping one of the HiRISE images over the elevation model. Other image products from the HiRISE observations used in generating this view are at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_018701_1775 and http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_018846_1775 . Elevation data were calculated by researchers at Ohio State University, Columbus.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity examined targets in the Cape York area during the second half of 2011.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/pia15111.html

[smokan]

Есть какая то информация куда направят Опортюнити по окончания зимы?

Джипиэловцы мечтают побить рекорд Лунохода, и говорят об этом очень воодушевлен..
Где то я поверхностно читал слова драйвера что поедут назад через York к Tribulation.
Может есть у кого то конкретная информация о их планах.

[Дмитрий Виницкий]

Вид с зимней парковки.

[smokan]

Панорама вокруг  ...пока только часть панорамы )


http://roadtoendeavour.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/to-jan17b.jpg  

http://roadtoendeavour.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/to-jan17b.jpg

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http://roadtoendeavour.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/to-jan17b.jpg" Width="300" Height="100">


Ох нифига себе , шас в  html попробую загрузить и размер уменьшить  :oops:. ...если не получится просто ссылку оставлю

[sol]

Вид с зимней парковки.

горизонт завален...

[instml]

Dusty girl
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003339/

Today Opportunity sent back to Earth the last few frames of the "deck pan" self-portrait she took during the waning days of 2011. Her solar panels are very dusty, which isn't helpful. It's near winter solstice in her southern location on Mars, so the angled Sun is not providing as much power as it would in a different season. That's why she's parked for a while to take it easy. She's not idle; she's shooting a panoramic photo of her surroundings, just a few frames each day, while she does some slow, paitent work with the aging M

[Vj.Sj]

Удивительно читать в английском обращение к предмету "она". Хотя, конечно, понятно. Интересно, какого "пола" будет MSL?

[pkl]

Если судить по внешности, то это, скорее, здоровый мужик.

[Vj.Sj]

Главное, чтобы характер не оказался капризным и своенравным. Тогда точно будет "она"  

[instml]

8 лет на Марсе!

http://astro0.wordpress.com/mer8/

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Opportunity on Mars - Eight years and counting
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=129990071

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Durable NASA Rover Beginning Ninth Year of Mars Work

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago.

Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian history than anything it examined during its first seven years. It also has begun an investigation of the planet's deep interior that takes advantage of staying in one place for the Martian winter.

Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time and EST (Jan. 24, PST), three weeks after its rover twin, Spirit, landed halfway around the planet. In backyard-size Eagle Crater, Opportunity found evidence of an ancient wet environment. The mission met all its goals within the originally planned span of three months. During most of the next four years, it explored successively larger and deeper craters, adding evidence about wet and dry periods from the same era as the Eagle Crater deposits.

In mid-2008, researchers drove Opportunity out of Victoria Crater, half a mile (800 meters) in diameter, and set course for Endeavour Crater, 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.

"Endeavour is a window further into Mars' past," said Mars Exploration Rover Program Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The trek took three years. In a push to finish it, Opportunity drove farther during its eighth year on Mars -- 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers) -- than in any prior year, bringing its total driving distance to 21.4 miles (34.4 kilometers).

The "Cape York" segment of Endeavour's rim, where Opportunity has been working since August 2011, has already validated the choice of Endeavour as a long-term goal. "It's like starting a new mission, and we hit pay dirt right out of the gate," Callas said.

The first outcrop that Opportunity examined on Cape York differs from any the rover had seen previously. Its high zinc content suggests effects of water. Weeks later, at the edge of Cape York, a bright mineral vein identified as hydrated calcium sulfate provided what the mission's principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., calls "the clearest evidence for liquid water on Mars that we have found in our eight years on the planet."

Mars years last nearly twice as long as Earth years. Entering its ninth Earth year on Mars, Opportunity is also heading into its fifth Martian winter. Its solar panels have accumulated so much dust since Martian winds last cleaned them -- more than in previous winters -- the rover needs to stay on a sun-facing slope to have enough energy to keep active through the winter.

The rover team has not had to use this strategy with Opportunity in past winters, though it did so with Spirit, farther from the equator, for the three Martian winters that Spirit survived. By the beginning of the rovers' fourth Martian winter, drive motors in two of Spirit's six wheels had ceased working, long past their design lifespan. The impaired mobility kept the rover from maneuvering to an energy-favorable slope. Spirit stopped communicating in March 2010.

All six of Opportunity's wheels are still useful for driving, but the rover will stay on an outcrop called "Greeley Haven" until mid-2012 to take advantage of the outcrop's favorable slope and targets of scientific interest during the Martian winter. After the winter, or earlier if wind cleans dust off the solar panels, researchers plan to drive Opportunity in search of clay minerals that a Mars orbiter's observations indicate lie on Endeavour's rim.

"The top priority at Greeley Haven is the radio-science campaign to provide information about Mars' interior," said JPL's Diana Blaney, deputy project scientist for the mission. This study uses weeks of tracking radio signals from the stationary rover to measure wobble in the planet's rotation. The amount of wobble is an indicator of whether the core of the planet is molten, similar to the way spinning an egg can be used to determine whether it is raw or hard-boiled.

Other research at Greeley Haven includes long-term data gathering to investigate mineral ingredients of the outcrop with spectrometers on Opportunity's arm, and repeated observations to monitor wind-caused changes at various scales.

The Moessbauer spectrometer, which identifies iron-containing minerals, uses radiation from cobalt-57 in the instrument to elicit a response from molecules in the rock. The half-life of cobalt-57 is only about nine months, so this source has diminished greatly. A measurement that could have been made in less than an hour during the rover's first year now requires weeks of holding the spectrometer on the target.

Observations for the campaign to monitor wind-caused changes range in scale from dunes in the distance to individual grains seen with the rover's microscopic imager. "Wind is the most active process on Mars today," Blaney said. "It is harder to watch for changes when the rover is driving every day. We are taking advantage of staying at one place for a while."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. More information about Opportunity is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the project on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marsrovers and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marsrovers .

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20120124.html

[Старый]

Удивительно читать в английском обращение к предмету "она". Хотя, конечно, понятно. Интересно, какого "пола" будет MSL?

Машина - "она".

[smokan]

Удивительно читать в английском обращение к предмету "она". Хотя, конечно, понятно. Интересно, какого "пола" будет MSL?

Машина - "она".

Наверное окончания имени на ty передает ласковую форму женского род., ну типа Dorothy.
...хотя может и нет, спрошу жену, она у меня филолог английского языка  

[Старый]

У них и морские корабли - женщины. Вероятно такой менталитет.

[Octopus Sapiens]

Машинку с днем варенья!
32 гарантийных срока!
Это если-б автомобиль то 6 млн км без капремонта, 200тыс без замены масла и 128 лет без замены аккумулятора!!!! Или стиральная машинка работающая без поломок 160 лет. Огромный респект конструкторам. Их аппарат весьма достоин побить луноходовский рекорд..

Есть какая то информация куда направят Опортюнити по окончания зимы?

Джипиэловцы мечтают побить рекорд Лунохода, и говорят об этом очень воодушевлен..
Где то я поверхностно читал слова драйвера что поедут назад через York к Tribulation.
Может есть у кого то конкретная информация о их планах.

Слышал где-то тоже самое. А больше и некуда. Вокруг пески на десятки километров. Всего насовского оптимизма не хватит туда доехать...