Me too. I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can't think of any rational reason why I would think of them that way.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

A lot of girl's names end in "y", like Charity, Mary, Emily, Serenity. Maybe that's why.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Not silly queation at all.

The closest successful landers are Viking 1 & Mars Pathfinder @ 835 KM / 518 miles apart.

Chart here showing distances between landers & other features.

Andrew Brown.

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"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before". Linda Morabito on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.

i didn't see Spirit and Opportunity on that chart...

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Last revised in 1999 ...

I had wondered if one of the rovers could have gone to look at one of the previous probes to see what it is like after all this time so we can assess if we need to modify our designs for a Mars habitat

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Wouldn't they have to charge themselves a house call?

Besides what could they tell from pictures of the outside? The demise was on the inside. Wasn't there quite a few good sized rocks close to the Vikings? That would be a pretty rough ride just to get that close to them. Bouncing over those rocks would not be good for our little friends. But it would be nice to see pictures of Beagle guts strewn around.

Flat out MER long distance driving - you can cover something like 16 km per year. That's faster than the Opportunity sprint to Victoria, it's based on the 45 sol sprint from Bonneville to West Spur by Spirit.

Now - neither vehicle could do that today - not enough power and a few mechanical failures put a stop to that.

But - assuming we had healthy vehicles - Opportunity is ROUGHLY 2,000 km from Mars Pathfinder.

125 years.

Which is why I just laughed when I read on a forum elsewhere, that someone genuinely suggested sending one of the MER's to watch the Phoenix landing. It would take most of a millennium to do so.

Doug

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Very cool! It sure gives a different perspective about the mission.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

There's a definite possibility that MSL will be sent to the same general part of Mars, though a ways to the east.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Imagine what all the BAUTers who own beagles will do when they read that sentence...
;-)

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

They will probably want to set them on him!!!

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"A wild scheme, it would be useless undertaking”

Charles Darwin's father on hearing of his son's plans to join HMS Beagle

SpaceMad's Space Page

Helmut Lotti Fan Club

Join me on the BeyondSpace forum at
http://beyondspace.info/forum/index.php
A bilingual forum in English & Spanish

What would Charlie Brown think?

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

he would wonder what that cute red headed girl thinks, then go talk to Lucy in her little booth about it- and her advice would be to stop being a blockhead and get over it.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Not exactly rover news, but a different way of watching them at work

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/i...topic=5035&hl=

Spirit, as seen from MRO / HiRISE, over a period of about 18 months. Watch carefully, you can see it driving around - very funky. I'd attach it to BAUT, for for reasons I can really appreciate, the image size limit is low, so I've just linked to it at UMSF, hope you enjoy it

Doug

link is timing out.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com site is currently hosed.

I'll paint you a word picture of what I saw, earlier. It's maybe a half-dozen shots of Home Plate in sequence, with Spirit visible. The rover covers a lot of territory between shots, so it's not a smooth animation, more of a strobe effect. It does leave tracks, though, so you know where it's been, coming onto Home Plate at about the 3 o'clock mark and moving clockwise until it settles in for the winter at the 12 o'clock.

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0....

Yeah - the site's currently screwed (thank god we're moving hosts in April) - It's every HiRISE observation of Home Plate from '06 to the most recent, in January. (now working again)

Grrr...

Cut forces NASA to park a Mars rover