After staying up late last night watching the landing of the Opportunity rover land on mars, I woke up this morning to more good news. Whilst I was asleep, MER-B sent back a couple hundred photos after successfully righting itself and opening safely. One of the first color photos shows 3 bounce marks and some drag marks where the airbags scraped the ground when they were deflated. It still astounds me that they were able to successfully land not only craft, but two, on the surface of a planet over 100million miles away, and with good accuracy!
I am currentlyl watching NASA TV and their rebroadcast of last nights activities in a condenced form to show only the critical parts. It's still exciting. Before this, they were showing the mission control checks that they were running with Opportunity to make sure that all of the equipment and scientific instruments were in working order. They were discussing data transfer rates and said that Opportunity was transmitting at a screaming rate of 31 bits/second. Very slow by any of our current standards, but more than 4 times the speed in which Spirit was transmitting at only 7 bits/second. It just seems funny that they are so excited at those speeds where we are used to being able to pull gigabytes of data across the internet in a matter of minutes. And these signals are traveling at the speed of light through a vaccum, not through a copper wire.
Posted by doug at January 25, 2004 10:47 PM