Word: rovers
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True, you have seen a Mars landing before. Pathfinder's spectacular little rover, Sojourner--a remote-controlled vehicle about the size of a microwave oven--toddled across the Martian terrain in the summer of 1997. But you won't want to miss the show the two new ones promise...
...rovers, no matter how good their vision is, will have to take things slowly. There will be no scooting from rock to rock when the cameras spot an interesting outcropping. At their fastest, the rovers will move only about 2 in. per second--or about 0.1 m.p.h. And that movement will not take place in anything like real time. Controllers will plan in advance any expedition the rovers attempt, then transmit an entire bundle of instructions, telling them every turn they are to make on the trip. Says Joy Crisp, the project's lead scientist: "In the morning, after each...
...want summer not to count because what happens as a result counts for so much. Maybe we adults idealize our own red-rover days, the hot afternoons spent playing games that required no coaches, eating foods that involved no nutrition, getting dirty in whole new ways and rarely glancing in the direction of a screen of any kind. Ask friends about the people and places that shaped them, and summer springs up quickly when they tell their story: their first kiss, first beer, first job that changed everything. The best summer moments were stretchy enough to carry us all through...
Pathfinder's rover was a toy-size machine. Barely 1 ft. high and 2 ft. long and weighing 24 lbs., it operated for three months and in all that time toddled across a stretch of Martian terrain little bigger than a football field. The new rovers are much closer to true space cars. Measuring 5 ft. tall from their wheels to the top of their camera masts, the 2003 models weigh about 400 lbs. each and should be able to cover up to 3,000 ft. in their 90 days of life--including many days they will spend standing around...
When they go, they will take 6 billion earthlings with them--after a fashion. Each rover carries an array of eight cameras, including one perched atop the mast for a you-are-there view. On the 1997 mission, the rover's camera was barely 10 in. off the ground. "It was like crawling around on your belly," says project scientist Joy Crisp of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory...