Word: spirits
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Unlike little Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity are full-blown Mars cars, about the size of golf carts and fairly stuffed with instruments--including a bristle of cameras atop an almost 5-ft. antenna mast that will provide an eye-level view of the terrain, as opposed to the shin-level view Pathfinder provided. Like their predecessor, they will be visiting areas of the planet that scientists believe were once deluged with water, precisely the kind of spots extraterrestrial organisms would, at least in theory, love. If Mars ever harbored life, the 90 or more days Spirit and Opportunity will spend...
...planet last week passed closer to Earth than it has in almost 60,000 years. Even as Spirit and Opportunity speed toward their wintertime rendezvous, the European Space Agency has a probe of its own on the way, a stationary lander expected to touch down on Mars on Christmas Day. The Japanese, back in 1998, launched an orbiter, which, after a circuitous route through the solar system, should arrive sometime in December...
Nonetheless, it is Spirit and Opportunity that are generating the most buzz, at least partly because the 6.3 billion of us left behind on Earth will be able to share the trip. As with the Pathfinder mission, NASA will fling open a trio of websites that will track the surface explorations as they unfold. Whatever the spacecraft learn, we'll learn along with them--and it could turn out to be plenty. "We have on these rovers so many capabilities that have never been present on another planet," says Steve Squyres, the missions' principal investigator. "I guarantee...
Such plodding travel could yield remarkable science. NASA geologists sifted through 185 possible landing sites for the twin spacecraft, looking for ones that present a minimum of obstacles and a maximum of potential clues to the all important question of whether water has existed on the planet. The rover Spirit is thus headed for a formation known as Gusev crater, about 15º south of the Martian equator. Orbital photography has mapped a sinuous, 559-mile channel that slices into Gusev from the southeast and looks for all the world like a riverbed. "The water should have cut through that crater...
...Stripes were performing routines from the film. A crowd of young things stomped along while the Stripes tapped in a blue-lit fever dream. Shintaro Katsu's shuffling samurai couldn't have felt further away?or so close. For all their differences, the two Zatoichis share the same spirit as their creators: independent, charismatic, innovative. Kitano's Zatoichi succeeds, not by obliterating Katsu's character but by giving it a new Beat. The winning result (the film had critics swooning at the Venice Film Festival last week) is as cutting edge and timeless as the samurai genre itself. "There...