NASA MARS PROBE SUCCESS

A Nasa space probe has successfully landed on Mars.

There was jubilation at mission control when a signal from the "Spirit" was heard about 20 minutes after it touched down at the end of a six-month journey to the Red Planet.


It is believed to have landed in a crater just south of the Mars equator.

The six-wheeled robot aims to succeed where Britain's Beagle 2 apparently failed and find signs there may have been life on Mars.

It is the first of two identical robots that will roam the planet's rocky surface. The �450m Nasa project includes a twin rover, Opportunity, which is due to land on Mars on January 24.

The rovers will analyse rocks and soil for clues that could reveal whether the planet was ever a warmer, wetter place capable of sustaining life.

Spirit had appeared on track to make a bull's-eye landing within a cigar-shaped ellipse inside Gusev Crater, an indentation the size of Israel, just south of the Martian equator.

Navigation team chief Louis D'Amario said: "This is essentially perfect navigation. We couldn't have possibly hoped to do better than this."

NASA's last attempt at landing on Mars, in 1999, failed when a software glitch sent the Polar Lander crashing to the ground.

www.sky.com...

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Mars Rover Web Site

For some reason my earlier thread on this got deleted...anyway, what does everyone think we will find, if anything?

[Edited on 4-1-2004 by Shoktek]

Even though it should, I doubt that this will sway the conspiracy theorists.......

They did it right the first time with this...thats why it worked.

Cant wait to hear all the "NASA Lied about the Mars Rover" topics that will be posted....

There is already a thread on this, which was posted in your last thread.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

-B.

How fast do radio waves travel? 6 months to get there but only 20 minutes to get a signal back. We should really start concentrating on some faster travel times of our spacecrafts

Originally posted by Dusty
How fast do radio waves travel? 6 months to get there but only 20 minutes to get a signal back. We should really start concentrating on some faster travel times of our spacecrafts

uhh how old are you?

we cant make something that mass travel close to the speed of radeo waves.

unless we realy do have some "anti gravity" tech

That was supposed to be a little joke

I wonder how long it will be before some Martian refuse collector will wander past and dump it in his skip.

"Well, Xytyrp, those messy bastards from earth are driving me up the martian wall - they've turned their own planet into a dump and now they're coming here !!!"

Originally posted by Dusty
How fast do radio waves travel? 6 months to get there but only 20 minutes to get a signal back. We should really start concentrating on some faster travel times of our spacecrafts

It takes a spacecraft 6 months to get there. Light takes less than 20 minutes to travel there......

A neat program for those space exploration types: mars.telascience.org...

Here is what the Maestro Team says about it:

"NASA has released Maestro, a public version of the primary software tool used by scientists to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Anyone can download Maestro for free from mars.telascience.org and use it to follow along with the rovers' progress during the mission. You can use Maestro to view pictures from Mars in 2D and 3D and create simplified rover activity plans. During the mission, updates will be released for Maestro containing the latest images from Mars."

I have been playing around with it already. Very neat. No pics from Mars quite yet of course, but there are images from the tests they did with it on Earth, but i'm guessing they will start getting images from Spirit this coming week i think.

oh and to also add. Here's a link to a site with updates by the minute with new info: spaceflightnow.com...

And here is the first image of the landing site: spaceflightnow.com...

The first colour one should be this evening.

Guys, you should probably move your discussion here. This is a duplicate post and the mods may well decide to delete it again.

-B.

Originally posted by Banshee
Guys, you should probably move your discussion here. This is a duplicate post and the mods may well decide to delete it again.

-B.

That was just a news release saying that it was going to land...seeing as this is the science and technology section, it seems logical to have a thread here discussing what will happen.

Full story now on ATSNN.com Looks like we scooped several news sources on this one. www.atsnn.com...

Originally posted by Seapeople
Even though it should, I doubt that this will sway the conspiracy theorists.......

They did it right the first time with this...thats why it worked.

Cant wait to hear all the "NASA Lied about the Mars Rover" topics that will be posted....

LOL Or threads about the aliens duplicating the signal so we can stop sending probes there. I would imagine shooting all of them down costs those poor aliens a lot of money!