Incredible pictures on Mars!

Read an article in the paper over the weekend about the folks who "drive" the rover and then drive home from work.

Every move has to be carefully planned, due to the lag time between the instructions being sent and the movements being executed. The crew of drivers get picked based upon their particular skill, such as arm movement, camera operation, etc., etc.

Apparently at one point they wanted the rover to back up a few feet and the instruction was interpreted in such a way that the rover was going to drive forward around the planet to get to a spot three feet behind it.

That's the way bumper to bumper warranties work

🙂

Yep, it's tricky to do this stuff. Which is why so many people at NASA + related agencies were so upset at Bush Jr's dictate that we land people on Mars by 2020. Nobody at NASA wanted to risk people's lives in such a short time frame, especially given our experience with unmanned missions, and their roughly 50% rate of failure.

I worked on the Mars Observer satellite project, the one that disappeared after the orbital burn went bad when someone failed to do a proper Imperial/vs./Metric conversion. Two years of flight, and millions of dollars of equipment lost, due to a simple math error.

But the thing that most upset some of my colleagues at Caltech/JPL was that some of them had been working for YEARS on various projects, some of which were about 80% complete, and they got cancelled because Bush tried to pull a "JFK" moment. Working as many as 8 years on a project, having it fully-funded, and then pull the plug just as you're hitting the end-zone...? That's what Bush did. He wasted so much money it's insane.

As a former JPL employee, and Physics major at Caltech, who spent three years working on a NASA satellite, this really hit me hard.

Oh, just thought I might mention that we got lucky. The boss of our old project made sure that we got a backup camera built, and when the MOC got lost, the backup ended up on the Mars Global Surveyor... Only three of the original seven instruments had this happen. But it meant that I have a small part in being one of the first Surveyors on Mars (from a distance)... We did the visual imagery, and the laser distance imagery (done by an instrument created by a team in Arizona) got the vertical... Net results are a lot of the imagery you see on the web today.

NASA was already going into huge funding cuts, so they didn't want to fund any sort of "backup" instrument. It was also at about the same time as several high-profile "failures", which were leading to less support for NASA. But three of the team-leads on the Mars Observer managed to fight their way through Congress, and get a backup instrument funded. We got lucky that ours was one. And all the images used from our backup were used to plan all of the recent lander rovers that we've seen lately, from Sojourner on out.

One of the neatest stories is that back in 1989, when we were developing hi-res CCD technology (now used in most video cameras), we hit the point of "quantum jumping", where the electrodes feeding the CCD elements were so small that electrons would randomly appear in unexpected locations (as dictated by quantum mechanics). This meant "noise" (or "blurring") in our images. Our engineers were tearing their hairs out of their heads, afraid we'd not be able to solve the problem, and the camera flat-out wouldn't work. Then this Richard P. Hoagland guy (often known as the "Face on Mars" guy) got an article printed in the National Enquirer that said we had actually launched the satellite in 1990. With the 2-year travel time (which is the best possible we had at the time, considering launch actually happened in 1992), that meant that we had two years to produce a "fait accomplie", and NASA could announce the end of the mission without taking high-res versions of the "Face on Mars" area. Richard Hoagland could announce (well, already did) that we secretly launched a mission that would avoid any actually scientific research. We got a fax of the National Enquirer article from GE Astrospace in New Jersey (where the spacecraft was being built), and written in the margin was "You Bastards! You launched without us!"

Of course, our Caltech engineers solved the problem (leading to much of what we see in digital cameras today), and we ended up getting the camera launched. And while the original got lost, the backup went up on the Mars Global Surveyor. And that's what's mapped most of the surface of Mars, up until recently, when they've expanded upon what we did and gotten improved technology.

And of course, Richard P. Hoagland still refuses to admit that there is no "Face on Mars", despite the incredibly high-resolution images we've taken of that area that show otherwise.