
Curiosity Self-Portrait at Martian Sand Dune - dimfeld
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia20316/curiosity-self-portrait-at-martian-sand-dune
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dammitcoetzee
I can't believe this thing lives out there. I had to spray a single mote of
house dust out of my Neato vacuum's laser range finder the other day. It was
causing my vacuum an existential crisis. Yet this rover is out there in robot
hell for years, and is just going and going. All I'm saying is the engineer
who designed the dust gaskets on those motors should win a medal. A big shiny
gold medal.

~~~
foxylad
Yes... and then you've got Opportunity still doing valuable science _48 times_
longer than the three months it was designed for. Gold medals aren't enough -
there should be a Nobel prize for engineering for the design team.

The operations team is just as smart. They're using tricks like driving it up
north-facing slopes in winter to keep the solar panels illuminated by the
lower sun, allowing them to continue high-power work (grinding etc.) year-
round.

All in all, a great testament to human ingenuity.

~~~
rtkwe
Three months wasn't it's designed lifetime it was just the original mission
span and funding. Calling that the time it was 'designed for' is disingenuous.

Curiosity has a harder deadline on it's life than Opportunity though, the RTG
will eventually not produce enough power to keep the rover warm and moving and
will degrade the same no matter how the rover is used.

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foota
This made me wonder why Opportunity doesn't have the same problem (answer: it
uses solar panels), after a couple of clicks on wikipedia I found this awesome
visualization of Huygen landing on Titan!
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huygens_descent.ogg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Huygens_descent.ogg)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That's an unsung triumph of data presentation. I've watched it a couple of
times, and it's amazing how much information it presents clearly and at the
same time. My favorite thing is how it uses multiple sound channels to allow a
knowledgeable listener to monitor multiple telemetry streams at once by sound
alone. I also love that space computers are finally beeping like sci-fi always
said they should. :D

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StavrosK
This isn't on Earth. At all. It's on an entirely different planet. It's in a
place you could conceivably go, but it's too hard, and you'd be all alone, on
an entire planet. And we sent a robot there. To take photos and wander around.
On a different planet that's nothing like ours. And there's a sunrise and a
sunset and everything.

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sdfjkl
Now here's something your selfie stick can't do:

> The view does not include the rover's arm. Wrist motions and turret
> rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's component images.
> The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images, or portions of images,
> that were used in this mosaic.

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joshontheweb
I wonder how hard it would be to make a selfie mobile app that did this.
Hmmm...

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edem
Every time I see a post involving the Mars rovers I think about the
technological marvel these devices represent. They were designed to work for
like months and they are still out there. Look at how beat up this rover is
and it still works. My hats are off to the engineering team who designed this
device.

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CamperBob2
It belongs in a museum.

Let's go build one for it.

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kriro
Very cool stuff, I kind of want to order prints of this.

Possibly the most expensive selfie stick made to date ;)

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edward
Book recommendation — Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space
Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens.

The author describes building scientific instruments for Curiosity. There is
certainly a lot of bureaucracy involved.

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anonfunction
Does anyone know what the temperature was like when and where this was taken?
It actually looks like it would be a fun hike.

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jon-wood
Average surface temperature on Mars is -55c. There's also the small issue of
their not being any oxygen.

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sandworm101
How long before the moon landing "shadows don't match" people start passing
this around.

See! Look! Someone had to be standing there in order to take this picture.
Either we have people on Mars, or Nasa is again filming the whole thing in a
studio! That does look very much like some parts of california.

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ojii
The first thing will be people pointing out how this was obviously not taken
by the robot, as nothing connects the camera to the robot. Because reading the
text below the image is too difficult for some. (I almost wonder if it
wouldn't have been smarter for NASA to leave the arm in instead of mosaic it
out)

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PhasmaFelis
There isn't anything NASA could ever say or do that would change those
people's minds. Better not to let them influence anything.

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niels_olson
Gotta love it. China releases picture of moon. NASA releases umpteenth picture
of Mars (wildly more difficult) and just to round things off, it's a selfie.
Do that, yutu!

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knowaveragejoe
I don't think this was in response to the pictures China released. It's not a
competition, and NASA's been putting out these sorts of pictures since
Curiosity has been there.

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jMyles
> It's not a competition

It is a _little_ bit. And that's OK! This is the kind of thing we need to be
competing over, instead of killing and stealing.

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kevin_thibedeau
Is there a reason why they can't just serve up an HTML page with an IMG tag
rather than a completely blank page that only works with JS active?

It gets even worse. It pollutes your browser history as you scroll down the
page.

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liquidise
Only on the internet would images of one of mankind's greatest engineering
marvels; the culmination of millennia of our insatiable urge to grow, build,
and explore, be pooh-poohed because of a person's insistence on using _less_
technology.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I know. Shame on me for expecting graceful degradation work as intended. We
should all be so lucky to enjoy the modernity of broken JS browser apps.

