Opportunity landing

shammy

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Well, it's now a bit over six hours until the second NASA Mars rover, Opportunity enters the martian atmosphere and finally lands at Meridiani Planum around 9:05 pm PST. Im going to watch the event again - live from NASA TV, as I did when Spirit landed.

I hope the landing is as successful as the previous one. I also hope they will be able to get the rover off the lander faster than before. The original plan was to get the rover off in five to six days.. but I guess that was overly optimistic, at least for the first rover, but might be done now that they have learned more.

Mars Exploration Rover Mission Home
NASA TV - (rm sources)

Simulated view from Opportunity, 5 hours before landing :
 

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Its gonna be a big success to have two back-to-back successful landings if Opportunity lands successfully :goodjob:
 
Is it possible for this lander to have the same software problem as 'spirit'?

I hope not :)

They said it was a hardware problem that caused the software to malfunction - If I understood correctly. They tried to move some motivator on the rover, and the task never finished correctly (or something), causing the rover reset itself over and over again, up to 60 times a day.

But, as the hardware is also identical, them being identical twins and all.. gives me the creeps.
 
What's money? I want to see the first Mars robot champion crowned!

Although they aren't fit for battle...but I guess slamming the cameras into each other may do something. Or maybe even one climbing on top of the other and blocking its solar panel.
 
Originally posted by cgannon64
What's money? I want to see the first Mars robot champion crowned!

Although they aren't fit for battle...but I guess slamming the cameras into each other may do something. Or maybe even one climbing on top of the other and blocking its solar panel.

They could try to flip each other on their backs, like helpless cattle.
 
Ack! Arnold is watching in mission control as MACHINES start take over Mars.

But seriously... Opportunity has now landed.

About 20 minutes has passed since the lander had come to a stop after bouncing and rolling on the Meridiani Planum. They are getting a signal from the rover and no fault tones, so everything seems to be fine. The vehicle landed side pedal down, unlike Spirit that landed the face pedal down. The vehicle is still inside its cocoon and airbags are still inflated.

I guess it will take some hours before we are going to get the first images.
 
At least we can be sure that they'll prevent the same glitch that effed up Spirit from happening to Opportunity.
 
Definately a success so far. Here are some of the very first images from Meridiani Planum:

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Oh my GOD! Artifacts of an advanced Martian civilisation! We are NOT alone!
 
It looks like the Opportunity won't be getting any faster to the martian soil than Spirit. They don't want to rush things even if the egress path straight forward looks clean, no airbag problems etc coming up. They said it might be closer to the end of the second week on Mars that Opportunity would roll off the platform. Oh well.. better safe than sorry.

I would definately want to see whats behind the crater rim as fast as possible because it's pretty much blocking the view out. Maybe there's a plain reaching to the horizon with that bedrock exposed here and there, perhaps we'd be even able to see the bigger crater rim. (not to mention abandoned alien city, crashed spaceships and huge skeletons of martian creatures)

We'll have to wait some days to get the full mission success panorama (the Spirit panorama from Gusev crater totally blew my mind, you could just keep on zooming in on that gargantuan image). However, since they are doing that inside that crater.. it might not be as spectacular. But im sure they'll do a new one when they get to the rim.

Today they released a color closeup view of the bedrock deposit, or at least part of it:
 

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