LPSC: Images to make you weep with joy
The latest news on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity is always a highlight of any planetary science meeting. Even if the science starts to sound a little samey – these minerals formed in water, those minerals are volcanic – the pictures just blow me away.
Now the Pancam team have upgraded their website, and are adding images to their open-access catalogue as soon as they are downlinked from Mars. Go look at them now, I promise you your jaw will drop ...
This morning, Jim Bell, the Cornell astronomer who leads the Pancam team, took us on a visual romp through the rovers’ greatest achievments over the last martian year (that’s almost two Earth years).
He was particualrly keen on some of the snaps of the night sky taken by Spirit when it was on top of Husband Hill. “I always dreamed of being an observatory director,” he jokes. For 32 nights, the robot gazed skywards to study Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ lumpy moons. It even snapped Jupiter on one occasion. “And not a single night was rained out,” he says to appreciative chuckles.
His talk reminds me that many scientists would argue that Spirit and Opportunity are the perfect examples of how much more robots can achieve than human explorers. It’s hard to imagine how a manned mission could have stayed on Mars for this long, or cover as much ground.
The tired old argument about whether we should send robots or humans to space is surely dead. It’s clear that robots and humans together can potentially achieve so much more than either alone. But one point that is often overlooked is whether robots would be assisting the humans, or vice versa. After all, they’re a lot more experienced at exploring the Solar System than we are.
Comments
"It’s hard to imagine how a manned mission could have stayed on Mars for this long, or cover as much ground."
Have we all forgotten the distances the astronauts of Apollos 15, 16, & 17 traversed in their LRVs? The Apollo 15 LRV alone covered over 27 km and did so in the space of a few days. By contrast, Spirit & Opportunity have taken 2 Earth years to cover about 6 km apiece.
Indeed, a human on foot could have travelled faster and farther in one day than the MERs have gone in two years.
None of this to detract from the MERs achievements, but at the same time let's neither overrate them nor blow then out of proportion with hyperbole.
(The MERs must also wish they had a friendly human around with a soft cloth to give their solar panels a clean every now and again. :)
Posted by: Stephen Souter | March 16, 2006 09:54 AM
You're right, I had forgotten - I was all pumped up on rover enthusiasm :-)
Posted by: Mark Peplow | March 16, 2006 03:25 PM