What? No talk about the Mars Rover?

[Atrocities]

Sh*t that thing didn't land on Mars. It's sitting in my Uncle Bob's back 40 in lower Texas. He has been taking pot shots at it with his varment rifle.

All I can say is it is about time they succeeded. I guess the new calculators worked.

[Growltigger]

Full credit to NASA for landing Spirit. I think that the initial photos are phenomenal, and look forward to some even better shots when the rover starts trundling around. Even better when Opportunity lands.

Over this side of the pond, we are a bit gutted that our very own British Beagle 2, which landed (or was meant to) on Christmas Day, has disappeared off the face of the planet. They are going to try and contact it again over the next week, but if it does not get in contact by 14 Jan, all bets are off (apparently) - is it the intervention of little green men or just bloody bad luck??

[narf poit chez BOOM]

i'm voting it's little green men, just because.

[dogscoff]

Over this side of the pond, we are a bit gutted that our very own British Beagle 2, which landed (or was meant to) on Christmas Day, has disappeared off the face of the planet. They are going to try and contact it again over the next week, but if it does not get in contact by 14 Jan, all bets are off (apparently) - is it the intervention of little green men or just bloody bad luck??

Yeah I know, I would love to have seen it succeed if only to see the guy running the Beagle2 project catapulted to international fame. You know the one, he looks like he should be into organic gardening, real ale and steam engines rather than space-robotics. He's got utterly insane facial hair and a broad west country accent (alroight tharr moi luvvlies?) and I was really looking forward to the look on america's face when he suddenly appeared all over international news. I'm pretty sure that guy would need subtitles on US telly.

Seriously though, how is this rover so different from that one that landed a few years back? That sent back images very similar (to my eyes) to the ones we are seeing now.

EDIT: A Beagle2 press conference to announce the results of the latest contact attempt to be held in about 2 hours... http://www.beagle2.com/news/index.htm

[ January 07, 2004, 11:44: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Loser]

This rover is much, much bigger. Much bigger.

It also does new and different things.

[Cipher7071]

I missed the PBS show Last night, but I did see the one on Saturday. It's true that these rovers weigh 50% more the Last ones. The big problem that they had to overcome was that they had to fit them into the same sized capsules, which meant they had to figure out how to fold them up for transport, and unfold them on landing. They had to rework both the airbag and the parachute designs. So far, it looks as though it worked.

[Atrocities]

I just heard on the news that the images, the color ones, are fantastic. Big smiles.