I’ve been following the news from Mars this morning. Everything looks good, but the rover won’t be heading out for another 7-9 days. You’ve got to power up and check out the skateboard, after all. Here are the links that I have been using to keep myself informed:
- Mars Exploration Rover Mission at JPL
- SPACE.com: Mars Rover Special Report.
- NASA TV (Real Player link)
- Maestro is a java-based program for viewing data from the rover. You can currently download it and play around with data from the test/sim environment. You should be able to feed it real data within the next day or so. #maestro on irc.freenode.net can keep you up to date.
- Press release images from JPL’s MERM site. (these are smaller images)
- NASA Planetary Photojournal: Mars has larger TIFF files from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)
- Another JPL MER site has links to photos and news updates.
- Raw images from Spirit.
- Via Joi Ito, animations by Maas Digital are quite amazing. I had seen the EDL part before, but there is some awesome animated footage of the rover coming to life and moving about. Tres cool stuff.
The MER is sceduled to wheel around mars for 90 days, but scientists hope that the rover will last longer than that. Sojurner was designed to last 30 days and lasted around 90 IIRC. Another rover will be attempting bounce-down in less than a month in a different location. Hopefully we can decrease the near 2/3 failure rate of Martian probes.