NASA Rover Touches Down on Mars

[Rooster_Ties]

Cheers erupt through mission control.

Rover touches down on Mars

By Richard Stenger

CNN

Sunday, January 4, 2004 Posted: 12:05 AM EST (0505 GMT)

PASADENA, California (CNN) -- A NASA robotic explorer touched down on the red planet Saturday night, sending a signal home that it survived the risky descent through the Martian atmosphere and bouncing landing.

The $400 million rover Spirit, designed to conduct unprecedented geologic and photographic surveys on the Martian surface, transmitted a simple hello to Earth within minutes after landing, which took place just after 11:30 p.m. ET.

The golf cart-sized Spirit went through what NASA assistant administrator Ed Weiler characterized as "six minutes from hell" -- the time it took to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend and land in Gusev Crater.

During the descent, Spirit deployed parachutes and fire retrorockets to decelerate. Seconds before impact, it inflated a protective cocoon of airbags.

A series of bounces and rolls probably sent the robot about four stories high and more than a mile from its landing spot, according to mission control scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

"It sounds like a crazy way to land on Mars, but it's actually tried and tested," said Steven Squyres, a Cornell University geologist in charge of the scientific instruments on Spirit and its identical twin, Opportunity, which will complete the 300 million-mile trip to Mars in the next three weeks.

Spirit launched June 10 and Opportunity took off July 7.

The airbag bounce method worked well with Pathfinder, NASA's last success on Martian soil.

The 1997 mission included a lander, which beamed back thousands of images, and Sojourner, a toy-sized test rover that scurried around the rocks and boulders littering the landing site.

Stunning panoramas

The new 400-pound rovers like Spirit and Opportunity, packed with a slew of geology instruments and cameras, have much more mobility and capability than previous missions.

Each is built to explore nearly as much territory in one day as Sojourner covered in three months, about 100 yards.

Their eight cameras should provide stunning panoramas of the Martian surface, with resolutions so sharp they retain crisp detail when blown up to the size of a movie screen, according to NASA. And their microscopes, spectrometers and drills could uncover history from long, long ago.

"It's a cold, dry miserable place today. But we have got these tantalizing clues that, in the past, it used to be warmer and wetter," said Squyres, who exudes a passion for planets like his one-time teacher at Cornell, the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

"You can think of these vehicles as being robot field geologists. A field geologist is like a detective at the scene of a crime. They go to a place where something happened long ago and they try to read the clues," he told CNN.

But this scene of the crime could easily include Spirit's corpse, NASA scientists acknowledge.

'Death planet'

Mars has proven a deadly place to visit. Two-thirds of the more than 30 spacecraft that have attempted to reach or orbit Mars have met with disaster, including two NASA attempts in 1999.

The most recent casualties include Japan's Nozomi, a satellite zapped by lethal solar radiation during its four-year odyssey to Mars. Mission engineers abandoned their attempts to steer the ailing craft as it neared the red planet last month.

Another possible victim is the Beagle 2, an ambitious life-searching lander from Britain, which has remained silent since its presumed touchdown December 25.

"A lot of people have had bad days on Mars," Weiler quipped last year. "They don't call it the death planet for nothing."

Edited January 4, 2004 by Rooster_Ties

[Rooster_Ties]

Credit: NASA

Edited January 4, 2004 by Rooster_Ties

[Rooster_Ties]

NASA engineer Wayne Lee cheers the landing.

(from CNN)

[BFrank]

[JSngry]

Preliminary analysis of data reveals that

[kinuta]

Great stuff. After a long series of failures, that have proved what a difficult feat this is, congratulations are definitely in order. I look forward to the forthcoming photographs.

[Dan Gould]

I'll tell you what though-if there're any Martians watching the landing, they'll know how technologically backward we are. I mean, every UFO that ever makes it to Earth just flies right down and hovers; no four-story bounces and mile-long uncontrolled rolls with their interplanetary spacecraft! B)

[Rooster_Ties]

[Claude]

Wow!

Almost as impressive as your new avatar

[7/4]

[connoisseur series500]

There was a magnificent color photograph in the Smithsonian magazine a couple months ago taken by the 1997 pod.

Mars didn't look like much. Needs women all right, plus a lot of other things. I'm staying put for now. -_-

[Rooster_Ties]

Source: What time is is on Mars????

Scientists Are Working on Martian Time

Mon Jan 5, 7:49 AM ET  Add Science - AP to My Yahoo!

By ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer

PASADENA, Calif. - The watch in Steve Squyres' pocket is off by some 39 minutes — and 106 million miles.

One of just a few in the world, the timepiece carried by the Cornell University astronomer tells the hours, minutes and seconds on Mars, where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration successfully landed a six-wheeled robot over the weekend.

To stay synchronized with the Red Planet and a rover that works strictly by the clock, Squyres and his 280 colleagues on the unmanned mission have had to leave Earth time behind — by 39 minutes and 35 seconds.

"We're essentially slaves to Martian time," said Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover program at NASA (news - web sites)'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The $820 million project includes a second rover, Opportunity, set to land on the opposite side of the planet from Spirit on Jan. 24.

The solar-powered rovers should do most of their work between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Mars time, when the sun is at its highest in the Martian sky.

Throughout each 90-day mission, that four-hour window falls each day during a slightly different period of the day on Earth, forcing mission members to adjust accordingly.

Mission member Julie Townsend copes by wearing two watches: one on her left wrist set to Earth time, a second on her right running on Mars time.

"It's very helpful, because there are some things I only know in Mars time," said Townsend, a mission avionics engineer, of her specially modified $150 Mars watch.

The length of a day is determined by how long it takes a planet to rotate on its axis. On Earth, a single spin takes 24 hours; on Mars, 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer.

On any given day, the difference between a terrestrial and Martian day would difficult to perceive.

Over the course of the three months each rover should last, the 40-minute daily lags begin to add up, quickly turning night to day and back again. Every 36 Earth days, Mars time falls another 24 hours behind.

To compensate, mission members have begun shifting the schedules of their every activity, including when they sleep and eat. The move came on the recommendation of sleep deprivation experts enlisted by the mission.

"Sometimes we'll be having breakfast at 10 p.m. and lunch at 6 a.m.," said mission science manager John Callas.

Agency officials also blacked out the windows in the mission operations center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to block the sun. The same has been done for the Pasadena rental apartments where 160 visiting scientists are living throughout the mission.

Also, mission members who end their shifts during daytime hours are told to wear sunglasses on their way home to bed, to further minimize exposure to daylight during what are nighttime hours on Mars, Callas said.

The steady shift in time should wreak havoc in coordinating with an outside world that remains on Earth time, said Nagin Cox, deputy chief of the rover engineering team.

It "produces interesting challenges, schedule-wise," Cox told reporters in November. "Baby sitters don't work on Mars time."

[Rooster_Ties]

Better article, same topic...

Source: Chicago Tribune

What a difference a (Mars) day makes

To make the most of their time, scientists for NASA's rover probes must advance the clock 39 minutes each day

   

By Michael Stroh

Tribune Newspapers: Baltimore Sun

January 1, 2004

The scientists whose rovers will explore the surface of Mars this month won't be leaving home. But they will have to get used to a hassle that no jet-lagged Earth traveler has faced--living on Martian time.

Starting late Saturday, when the Spirit rover, the first of two NASA Mars buggies, is scheduled to touch down (at 10:35 p.m. CST), more than 200 NASA personnel will begin waking, working and sleeping to the alien rhythm of the Martian day. It is only 39.5 minutes longer than our own day, but that's enough to gum up the works of a human's internal clock.

The idea is to squeeze as much science as possible from the solar-powered rovers--Spirit's twin, Opportunity, is to arrive about three weeks later. The rovers will search for signs of ancient water on the Red Planet. They are designed to last only 90 days and must do most of their exploring when the sun is shining.

That requirement will make life pretty strange. To keep up with the longer Martian day, scientists and engineers will set their alarm clocks 40 minutes ahead every night.

"In some ways it's nice because it means you can sleep later every day," says Andrew Mishkin of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, from where the rovers are operated.

On the other hand, it means a workday that starts at 8 a.m. Earth time at the outset of the mission will begin at about 10 p.m. three weeks later, and at roughly 2:30 a.m. a week after that.

To help scientists and engineers adjust, NASA has enlisted experts who train long-distance pilots how to battle fatigue. They have draped blackout curtains over the windows of the Jet Propulsion Lab's mission control room to keep the sun from messing up controllers' Mars-tuned body clocks. NASA has even ordered 150 custom-made Mars watches.

The mission--the largest coordinated experiment in off-world living ever conducted--also may shed light on how humans would hold up on manned voyages to Mars, or in Martian colonies.

Investigators from the NASA Ames Research Center in California are recruiting 30 volunteers at the laboratory to strap on watch-sized accelerometers. The devices record changes in motion and will help researchers deduce when Mars mission volunteers are snoozing. Volunteers also will record catnaps.

"We're trying to see how people adapt," says Melissa Mallis, director of Ames' Fatigue Countermeasures Group and leader of the study.

The problem of keeping time on Mars has intrigued scientists and science fiction writers since the 19th Century.

In February 1954, the Hamilton Watch Co. unveiled a Mars clock. Described as "the world's first inter-planetary timepiece" by The New York Times, it had a 16-inch face and four dials that simultaneously showed the hour, day, month and year on Earth and Mars.

Not until NASA's twin Viking landers crunched down in 1976 did scientists begin measuring time on Mars more precisely. Accurate timekeeping is essential for the study of weather and climate, says Michael Allison, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

By convention, a Martian day (a "sol") is divided into 24 hours, just as on Earth. But each Martian hour, minute and second is nearly 3 percent longer than its counterpart here. The result: A sol equals 24 hours and 39.5 minutes on Earth.

Engineers will communicate with the rover through NASA's Deep Space Network, the global collection of giant antennae. The network operates on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC (colloquially known as Greenwich Mean Time). UTC is eight hours ahead of the Pacific Standard Time zone where the lab is located.

The arrival of the rover Opportunity on Jan. 24 could make life even more confusing. Its landing site is on the opposite side of the planet from its twin--the time zone equivalent of a New York-to-Sydney flight. Some scientists and engineers will shuttle back and forth between the two missions.

"We'll all be feeling Martian jet leg," says Jim Bell, a Cornell University astronomer in charge of the panoramic cameras on both rovers.

In another space-related development, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter on Wednesday failed for an eighth time to contact the Beagle 2 probe, which was to have touched down on the planet almost a week ago. Scientists say there might be a problem with the software in the Beagle's clock, or the craft might have tumbled into a crater.

[BruceH]

Very heartening news. Now to get that thing rolling!

[Rooster_Ties]

Almost as impressive as your new avatar

Not my cat, nor my turntable. Just something I stumbled on, on-line.

[Soulstation1]

Ted Nugent---Cat Scratch Fever

Well I don't know where they come from

But they sure do come

I hope they comin' for me

And I don't know how they do it

But they sure do it good

I hope they doin' it for free

They give me cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever

The first time that I got it

I was just ten years old

I got it from some kitty next foor

I went and see the Dr. and

He gave me the cure

I think I got it some more

They give me cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever

It's nothin dangerous

I feel no pain

I've got to ch-ch-change

You know you got it when you're going insane

It makes a grown man cryin' cryin'

Won't you make my bed

I make the pussy purr with

The stroke of my hand

They know they gettin' it from me

They know just where to go

When they need their lovin man

They know I do it for free

They give me cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever

[Jerry]

Some good pics available now at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

[.:.impossible]

The way the Mars surface has reacted to the rover's impact is so strange! It looks sort of like clay or thick mud, but there is a serious lack of humidity in the atmosphere, so it must be a gravitational effect. I don't know, but I stop what I'm doing whenever they throw this sh... up on the tv screen.

When do you think the Mars people will emerge from their underground civilization to greet/comandeer the rover?

[Claude]

[Rooster_Ties]

SOURCE

Can't really explain why, but I love stories like this...

Watchmaker With Time to Lose

January 08, 2004

They said it couldn't be done. But in the sleepy little town of Montrose, California, nestled in the hills surrounding JPL, master watchmaker Garo Anserlian of Executive Jewelers is perfecting a timepiece for hundreds of Earthlings bound to Mars' irregular day. Past the glass cases of what looks like an ordinary jewelry store is a workshop where watches are losing 39 minutes a day.

Rover controllers have to monitor Spirit (and soon, Opportunity) all the time; this doesn't just mean 24 hours a day " it means 24 hours, 39 minutes a day. The martian day is longer than Earth's, but this minimal variance can amount to physical and mental fatigue. Every day, team members are reporting to work 39 minutes later than the previous day.

"Everything on this mission is based on local solar time on Mars," said Julie Townsend, Mars Exploration Rover avionics systems engineer. "From home, during the mission practice tests, it was very difficult to constantly translate Earth time to Mars time."

Townsend and her co-worker Scott Doudrick, a systems engineer on the project, set out to find a solution for this otherwordly problem. The pair began to ask watchmakers to tackle the challenge but each one turned them away, saying that it couldn't be done unless they placed a large order (10,000 plus) for quartz-controlled watches; they insisted that attempting to convert mechanical watches was not possible.

A neighborhood store located on a strip of distinct specialty shops "not a chain store in sight " Garo's workshop is far from a cookie-cutter assembly line. Tables covered with disassembled watches and clocks seem to mirror the intent watchmaker's mind; taking things apart and fixing them is, for him, second nature.

"When I do something I like to know the maximum about it," he stressed. "This is not just a hobby, it is my career."

A man who found his passion at the age of eight, an underling to his father, now guides his own young apprentice, nine-year-old son, David. Clearly enamored of his father, David relayed his own novice clock-making prowess and declared that he would one day take over the store. When he does inherit the business, he will have benefited from his father's finely honed skills, acquired under master watch and clockmakers in Switzerland and Germany.

Garo acknowledged that the Mars watch request is the strangest he has ever received. It took him about two months to design, fine-tune and streamline the process that would keep the watch on Mars time.

"Since I was a young child I've put my heart into making very precise time pieces, now I was being asked to create a watch that was slow on purpose " it was going to be a challenge if it was even possible," Garo said. "I spent more than $1,000 trying to figure this out " damaging watches, trying different parts, just searching for a way."

Watchmaking is a careful process that involves very small parts and wheels. In order to make the watches useful to the Mars Exploration Rover team, Garo had to physically attach additional specific lead weights thus precisely altering the movement of the wheels and hands on certain existing famous-maker wristwatches. Working on the 21-jeweled self-winding mechanical wristwatches was sometimes frustrating.

"At one point my helpers and I looked at each other and said ‘forget it, we're wasting time and money.'" But Townsend and Doudrick wouldn't let him quit. The two came by his shop every week, assuring him that his highly anticipated watches would be a valuable asset to the team.

Garo finished Doudrick's watch first and after initial testing, discovered that it was off by no more than ten seconds in 24 hours Earth time " an amazingly accurate feat for an entirely mechanical watch. Now, when the store is fully staffed, the experts can retrofit and thus create about ten watches per day. After he accommodates all rover team members who wish to own a custom-made Mars watch, he will market his patented rarity to the public.

Garo watched with million of others as mission control described Spirit's near-perfect landing. But his connection to the mission was personal.

"I felt proud; I got goosebumps," he said. "I saw that some of them had two watches on and I thought, one of them was mine! I was proud as an American that it landed and secondly that my watches will be used."

Used, indeed, by a team of scientists and engineers who looked to a truly old world craft for a solution to a very modern problem. And like the rover team, that faced countless challenges and criticism, Garo gets to say, "I told you so" to those who said it couldn't be done.

Garo Anserlian, master watch and clockmaker

Mentor and apprentice

Mars watch face

[Rooster_Ties]

[Claude]

It looks just like the cartoon above

[Upright Bill]

That latest picture is here :

Edited January 16, 2004 by Upright Bill

[Upright Bill]

Another update: