You are browsing the archive for MER.
13 August 2008
Dusk at Cape Verde
Hello everyone! I am back from my adventures in Hawaii, and have learned a lot about volcanism and conducted some valuable research on the consistency of Hawaiian beach sand… I have a bunch of emails to catch up on before making a real substantive post, but I couldn’t resist sharing the latest view of Cape Verde from Opportunity. This mosaic was taken at dusk after the sun had set, and …
16 July 2008
Spirit's Bonestell Panorama
Hey folks, as you may know, the Spirit rover has been sitting at the north rim of home plate all Martian winter, struggling to stay alive through the short winter days and long nights. She’s been doing some science though: every day or so, we’ve been taking a few more pictures that will eventually go into a gigantic panorama. After more than 120 sols, we recently hit the halfway point …
26 June 2008
Does martian soil contain evidence for rain?
There’s a news story floating around on the net about a new study on soil at the Viking, Pathfinder, and MER landing sites that’s coming out later this month. The study, by UC Berkeley prof Ronald Amundson and his team of terrestrial geologists, suggests that the chemical profiles in the soils at the landing sites may have been the result of precipitation (i.e. water rain). Trench at Meridiani (Unmanned Spaceflight) …
14 June 2008
Which is Earth?
We had another great day at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve today, with lots of pictures, but it also involved a lot of hiking and I’m tired. So instead of a full post, I will refer you to my adviser’s post about our first day at the dunes, over at the Planetary Society blog. I’m also stealing the image that he posted over there, comparing granule ripples on …
12 May 2008
Lego Mars!
Targeted ads in gmail sometimes show me some awesome sites. I posted before about the chance to buy land on Mars, and now I learn that Lego has a Mars Mission set of toys! They even manage to slip a few facts in on the web site. For example, they have “transmissions from Mars” and one of them describes working in Valles Marineris, giving all its impressive stats. Of course, …
30 April 2008
Opportunity Update: Sols 1515-1516
Opportunity is still sitting on the slope of Victoria crater, doing diagnostics on her arthritic arm. I’m afraid I don’t have any pretty pictures to post today; Pancam has a light load lately. I do have some news about the arm though. I am not deeply involved in the diagnostics process, so take my updates with a grain of salt. It sounds like only one joint is acting up (as …
29 April 2008
Lol Rovr
I’m on downlink duty for Spirit this week, and here’s an update on the winter power situation, inspired by the site everyone loves to hate (or hates to love?):
Opportunity Update: Sols 1513-1515
Hey folks, I’m on downlink duty again this week, once again working with Opportunity. When I last posted an update, Opportunity was making her way to the tantalizing layers in the Cape Verde cliff face. Unfortunately, we’ve made little progress since then. First a small sand trap held us in place for a week or so, but we escaped that. Now we’re sitting still for something more serious: arthritis. Opportunity’s …
14 April 2008
Cape Verde Mosaic
Last week I posted a nice mosaic that Opportunity took of her current target, Cape Verde. Ever since the dust storm last summer, the camera lenses have been a bit clouded up, and it takes some time to fix the images up so that they look a little more normal. A new, touched-up false color version of the image is now available, as well as an approximate true color mosaic. …
7 April 2008
Opportunity Update: Sols 1492-1494
Opportunity is still making her laborious way over to Cape Verde. This weekend we had a drive planned, but the wheels slipped too much in the loose sand that we’re driving on, so just to be safe, the drive was cut short. The good news is that this week Opportunity will be driving every day, so we should make better time. More good news is that we got some pretty …
