Mars Rover Broken Down

Check your favorite news source then come back here.

My plan is to raise enough cash to seal the cab of my truck airtight then have NASA give me a lift into space and I will travel to Mars with my jumper cables and toolkit and fix the rover. Anyone wanting to donate to my "Repair the Rover" fund contact me for my paypal address /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

It's too many miles to travel just to press CTL-ALT-DEL
when you get there... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Well... look at the bright side. If it were an internal combustion vehicle, it never would have operated in the first place. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

It's a conspiracy!

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tkl said:
It's a conspiracy!

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Yep them Martians are getting us to spend our money and then sabatoging the things when they get there. Just wait they'll be offering tours through E-Bay soon.
For more 'real' info check JPL's press release.
Or Rover's home

If my memory serves, recent Mars projects (from the US and EU) seem to have much more than its share of failures.

Perhaps the martians need the parts to build their own spaceprobe? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Who knows what's going on out there?

Morning talk show was discussing this, they said, wouldnt it be erie, if, when we re-connect, the rover is like thousands of miles from where it was supposed to be?

Or, what if was on another planet instead!

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BuddTX said:
Morning talk show was discussing this, they said, wouldnt it be erie, if, when we re-connect, the rover is like thousands of miles from where it was supposed to be?

Or, what if was on another planet instead!

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I was wondering, how it is that we can only recently guide munitions with some accuracy, but yet we can hit a spot on a planet millions of miles away, and be accurate?

Maybe because this one was directed by Caltech guys using giant computers and other smart stuff way beyond my vocabulary for years and years while we rarely take more than a few seconds to aim our guns using our eyes and questionable instincts...

The math involved in getting a payload from Earth to Mars certainly impresses me! How far off can you be and still get to Mars? How much capability is there to adjust the trajectory while in flight? And how precisely can you measure the position from earth??

On the plus side, flinging a probe to Mars doesn't involve compensating for winds and odd aerodynamics, or the erratic motion of a launch vehicle.

Steve K.

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Steve K said:
The math involved in getting a payload from Earth to Mars certainly impresses me! How far off can you be and still get to Mars? How much capability is there to adjust the trajectory while in flight? And how precisely can you measure the position from earth??

On the plus side, flinging a probe to Mars doesn't involve compensating for winds and odd aerodynamics, or the erratic motion of a launch vehicle.

Steve K.

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Nope, you only have to deal with cosmic radation, solar flares, EM interference, particles crashing into the craft at 30,000 miles/hour, orbital dynamics, temperatures ranging from -200C (in the shade) to 200C (full sunlight) to 2000C+ (re-entry).

And you must hit a target of 4200 miles in diameter at a range of 32 million miles (actually longer, given the real flight path they take).

So you must fire from a moving target and hit a moving target that appears to be 0.004 degrees in diameter. And you get to do most of this by looking at numbers coming back from your telemetry.

With a several minute delay.

So it's really hard.

Well at least you got a spare one, which is more than we did. Oh for a properly funded UK / European space programme, even better: just think what we could achieve if we all pulled together to create a worldwide effort.

I can only imagine how difficult that must have been, so I can understand their sense of elation when they landed it safely and then carefully rolled it off of the landing structure. And for as elated as they must have felt, they must now be feeling emotions that are every bit as intense but at the other end of the spectrum. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that whatever is wrong is something that is repairable from earth.

We need to stick with them in the failures as well as the successes.

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PhotonWrangler said:
It's too many miles to travel just to press CTL-ALT-DEL
when you get there... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

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Think of all the overtime pay! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Yah but after you think about the overtime think about the
back taxes and the intrest the IRS is going to take from you!