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20 years ago
Mars Exploration Rovers Update - February 24, 2004
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- posted
20 years ago
I am completely blown-away by how impressive this is.
FANTASTIC!!!
Has anyone on this newsgroup even come close to building a robot capable of doing this in an outdoor environment?
This is superbly great.
Thanks R>
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20 years ago
[...]
Opportunity is located 3° from the Equator and the Season on Mars is shortly after northern spring aequinoctium. Martian days are not getting shorter at the equator, and the sun angle is almost as high as it could be at this So what is the real reason for the power shortage ? Of course the Mars - Sun distance is slowly increasing but ...
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20 years ago
Marsgate. If Bush goes, O'Keefe goes too.
Thomas Lee Elifritz
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20 years ago
The heater is stuck on.
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20 years ago
The Sun angle *is* getting worse, because the Sun is moving into the northern sky, taking it away from the equator, i.e. it is no longer passing directly overhead.
And there is some slight reduction in day length as well -- Opportunity being 3deg *south* of the equator -- although I wouldn't have thought it significant.
That too. And there is some dust on the solar arrays by now.
But more generally, beware of reading press releases as if they were scientific papers. A certain amount of sloppiness and imprecision is to be expected; it's *NOT* the technical people writing these things.
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20 years ago
It will get worse in the next months, but at the moment it is passing almost overhead. The difference in power is only 1.6% between 90° (directly overhead) and 80° sun angle.
Of course it is not significant let alone at this season of the mars year.
Yes these are real reasons, so why do they not tell us, instead of inventing something.
Usually yes, but this was not sloppiness and imprecision but a fairy tale to cover something up, otherwise they could have told us the real reason. They know that almost nobody looks in a mars calendar.
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20 years ago
Why do you make baseless accusations against hard working, honest people based on what you read in a press release (written by someone in the JPL press office)? That's the *real* issue here. Usenet is just crawling with self-important dolts who live in fantasy land. I'd take even a badly written press release over your kind of delusional thinking any day.
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20 years ago
Of course NASA's lying. Thye don't want to admit that the Martians are stealing power to run their jacuzzi....
chris > Henry Spencer wrote: