28 Aug 2007
Mars Exploration Rover Status Report: Rovers Resume Driving
NASA.gov:
After six weeks of hunkering down during raging dust storms that limited solar power, both of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have resumed driving.
The game is “collect as much solar energy as possible”. The rovers are suffering, but what do you expect more than three and half years into a three month mission?
August 28th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Like the energizer bunny…
August 28th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
THis has to be the singularly most successful, dollar for dollar, NASA mission. I cant think of any other piece of NASA equipment exceeding expectations as much as the mars rovers.
September 1st, 2007 at 10:50 am
Russia plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon by 2025 and establish a permanent manned base there in 2027-2032, the head of the space agency said Friday. Anatoly Perminov said that in accordance with Russia’s space program through 2040, a manned flight to Mars will be carried out after 2035. He said that toward the end of this year, Russia will have 103 satellites in orbit, up from the current 95. There are plans for a new space center in the country, but a site has not yet been selected, he said. Russia currently launches all manned flights from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. Perminov said previously that construction of a new launch facility would only begin after a new type of spacecraft was built. And better still, the Russians, who convinced that idiot Clinton to put the space station in an orbit useless for the assembly of space exploration vehicles in low Earth orbit, are now themselves going to assemble such a station: The agency chief said that in 2016-25, after the ISS is put out of operation, Russia plans to deploy a platform in a low-earth orbit to assemble spacecraft. It looks like both the Russians and Chinese will be there before we’re able to repeat what we did in the ’70s. We have squandered our lead in space exploration and wasted the resources we have invested there. The Russians and Chinese will have been mining the Moon for decades before we are able to set up even one permanent habitation there, if they allow us to do even that. We sell out our children by running up huge deficits, both our federal spending deficit and trade deficit, we sell them out by promising government ‘entitlements’ that we’ve never funded, now we’re selling them out by squandering our technological leadership. But the rovers keep roving on Mars.
September 1st, 2007 at 10:54 am
I got italics happy. The 3rd from the bottom paragraph is my own editorializing. The Russians love Clinton, for obvious reasons.
September 1st, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I’m going to try it again, with a fancy new feature I didn’t realize was available:
And better still, the Russians, who convinced that idiot Clinton to put the space station in a 56 degree inclination low Earth orbit useless for the assembly of space exploration vehicles, are now themselves going to make their own assembly station. What do you bet it ends up in a 23 degree inclination orbit like we origionally planned for our space station – before it was international. Remember when it was named Space Station Freedom? Naturally we removed the word ‘Freedom’ from the name so as not to insult our Russian ‘friends’:
It looks like both the Russians and Chinese will be there before we’re able to repeat what we did in the ’70s. We have squandered our lead in space exploration and wasted the resources we have invested there. The Russians and Chinese will have been mining the Moon for decades before we are able to set up even one permanent habitation there, if they allow us to do even that. We sell out our children by running up huge deficits, both our federal spending deficit and trade deficit, we sell them out by promising government ‘entitlements’ that we’ve never funded, now we’re selling them out by squandering our technological leadership. But the rovers keep roving on Mars.
September 1st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
By the way, have you noticed what our Russian ‘buddies’ are up to lately?
And how many new missiles have we developed? Oh yeah, none, zero, the big goose egg, 0. Because the world loves us. They would never do anything to hurt us. It’s just us and the big ol’ Stay Puff Marshmello man.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Maybe the Russians will use their space assembly station to build a craft to go to the Moon or Mars out of hardware launched by one of these. They could use their conventional rockets to get their cosmonauts to the station in low Earth orbit.