That's no Mt. Everest, but it's a heck of a climb for our little rover, ... When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away. |
That's no Mt. Everest, but it's a heck of a climb for our little rover, ... When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away. |
That's no Mt. Everest, but it's a heck of a climb for our little rover. When we first touched down at Gusev Crater on Jan. 4, 2004, the Columbia Hills looked impossibly far away. |
The berries are more numerous here, and some seem to be smaller than any we’ve ever seen. And interestingly, some don’t appear to be round. We’re still debating what this means, but clearly the hematite is distributed a bit differently here than it has been in any other rocks we’ve seen at Meridiani, |
The British mountaineer George Mallory was once famously asked why he was trying to climb Mount Everest and his famous reply was 'because it is there.' That's a compelling argument when you are a mountaineer. But for an $850 million rover mission you better have a better reason than that. |
The deciding factor will be how good the geology is. I think going downhill has the potential to go a bit faster, it's easier to go downhill with these vehicles than going up. |
The hill is very steep in places ... and the orbital images show a lot of tasty geology, some of it in pretty nasty-looking places. All in all, the next several weeks are going to present us with some of the most interesting route-finding decisions that we've faced in a long time, on both sides of the planet. |
The launch is a milestone, but just one of many along the way. Landing historically is where the most risk is involved. |
The root cause of the reset remains a mystery, but I guess the occasional odd glitch is to be expected from a vehicle that's been on Mars for almost 600 sols. |
There are cliffs the rover could fall over and die if we aren't careful. We are gong to proceed carefully and methodically. |
There's a lot of good stuff beyond it. |
These look like hard outer shells on some parts of some outcrops, and they're darker and a little redder than the rock that they encrust. |
These look like hard outer shells on some parts of some outcrops, and they’re darker and a little redder than the rock that they encrust, |
They provide a wonderful glimpse into what Mars was like in the earliest part of its history, ... It was a violent place. It was a place where meteorite impacts were happening frequently. It was a place where there volcanic explosions happening frequently. Hot stuff was raining from the skies. There was water. When rocks were deposited, water would flow through those rocks and change their chemistry. This is a glimpse into the ancient past of Mars. |
They'd had to deal with huge technical as well as financial challenges. Just to get Beagle 2 to the launch pad is a huge accomplishment. |