Posted on 02/10/2004 4:52:32 PM PST by blam
Rover sets Mars distance record
Spirit can navigate over yellow and green colored terrain, but not red.
The US space agency's robotic Mars explorer Spirit has broken a record for the distance travelled by a robot rover in one day on the Martian surface. Spirit travelled nearly 21 metres (70 feet) across the rock-strewn surface of Gusev Crater, where it is looking for past or present signs of liquid water.
Scientists said Spirit's twin rover Opportunity had experienced slips during 50% of its drive on Tuesday.
This is thought to be due to loose soil at its Meridiani Planum landing site.
Spirit's drive was more than three times the longest distance covered in one day by Nasa's Sojourner rover, which landed on Mars in 1997.
Spirit drove "blind" for about half the distance, following a planned route to a stopping point.
For the second half of the trip, it drove to a second stopping point, executed a turn and then rolled onward before stopping.
Spirit creates a map of the terrain in front of it, dividing it into green, yellow and red areas based on how easy it perceives that terrain is to traverse.
The rover can navigate over yellow and green coloured terrain, but not red.
Command test
The trip, intended to test driving commands, was a success.
Over the weekend, Spirit drilled its first artificial hole in a rock - the football-sized Adirondack - and took readings from it using the science instruments on its robotic arm.
Before leaving Adirondack, Spirit took images and collected miniature thermal emission spectrometer (Mini-Tes) data from the hole it ground with its rock abrasion tool (Rat).
It will now investigate another rock called White Boat.
Later on in its mission, Spirit will investigate a large crater at its Gusev Crater landing site called Bonneville Crater.
On Tuesday morning engineers played Spirit's twin rover Opportunity a lighthearted wake-up call: the song Slip Sliding Away by Paul Simon.
Opportunity made it across four metres (12 feet) on its drive and is now poised to continue observing parts of the rocky outcrop that sticks out of the crater where it has landed.
It will begin close-up observation of the bedrock today (Tuesday).
The rover will drive up, down and inside the rim of the crater taking images of the outcrop as it goes, a procedure known as "scoot and shoot".
I can speak with authority about "drunken vision" . . . (survived the 70's) . . . "When I wuz young & dumb I wuz young & dumb."
No - I have no probs fusing the images into a stereogram (ability to make my eyes 'diverge' slightly to fuse the images - the opposite of crosseyed); it's just that there's very little common-area in the two images: you see a very narrow strip of 3D with too much extra on each side.
ALSO, the two cameras are set farther apart from each other than the typical human interpupillary distance (IPD): better for photogrammetry (and room for the filter wheels and stuff) but worse for stereograms. Take a look at some of the big, raw images: the stuff in the distance fuses well enough while the closest objects may be missing from either image. And, 'cause the IP distance is larger than human, the images appear to have less depth than they would if you were really there to see them.
Kind of like looking at a scene through large porro-prism binocs: the objectives are farther apart than your IPD so the objects in your field of view appear closer to each other (depth-wise) than they appear to the naked eye.
I spread out the fingers of my right hand, put the tip of my thumb against the bridge of my nose, and have my pinky hover about three inches away from the monitor's screen. My hand blocks the L image from my R eye and vice-versa, and, gives about the right distance so that I don't have to do much if any eye crossing/uncrossing. Woiks like a chahm.
Me too...we're best off to leave those memories in the past.
Perhaps this fellow did in the hapless Rodentia Jackalopus Barsoomi.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.