Rough Red Planet Rocks Rip Rover Curiosity Wheels

“Dents and holes were anticipated, but the amount of wear appears to have accelerated in the past month or so,” Erickson noted.

“It appears to be correlated with driving over rougher terrain. The wheels can sustain significant damage without impairing the rover’s ability to drive. However, we would like to understand the impact that this terrain type has on the wheels, to help with planning future drives.”

The team is now inspecting the new imagery acquired of the wheels and will decide if a course alteration is in order.

“Routes to future destinations for the mission may be charted to lessen the amount of travel over such rough terrain, compared to smoother ground nearby,” says NASA.

“Hasn’t the Rover already lasted WAY beyond its design specs?”

According to this wiki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_%28rover%29

Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17 UTC.[1][6] The Bradbury Landing site[7] was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the center of the rover’s touchdown target after a 563,000,000 km (350,000,000 mi) journey.

The rover’s goals include: investigation of the Martian climate and geology; assessment of whether the selected field site inside Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, including investigation of the role of water; and planetary habitability studies in preparation for future human exploration.[11][12]

Curiosity’s design will serve as the basis for a planned Mars 2020 rover mission. In December 2012, Curiosity’s two-year mission was extended indefinitely.[13]

In April and early May 2013, Curiosity went into an autonomous operation mode for approximately 25 days during Earth–Mars solar conjunction. During this time, the rover continued to monitor atmospheric and radiation data, but did not move on the Martian surface.

Mobility systems: Curiosity is equipped with six 50 cm (20 in) diameter wheels in a rocker-bogie suspension. The suspension system also served as landing gear for the vehicle, unlike its smaller predecessors.[41][42] Each wheel has cleats and is independently actuated and geared, providing for climbing in soft sand and scrambling over rocks. Each front and rear wheel can be independently steered, allowing the vehicle to turn in place as well as execute arcing turns.[27] Each wheel has a pattern that helps it maintain traction but also leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to judge the distance traveled. The pattern itself is Morse code for “JPL” (·-— ·—· ·-··).[43] The rover is capable of climbing sand dunes with slopes up to 12.5 degrees.[44] Based on the center of mass, the vehicle can withstand a tilt of at least 50 degrees in any direction without overturning, but automatic sensors will limit the rover from exceeding 30-degree tilts.[27]

Curiosity can roll over obstacles approaching 65 cm (26 in) in height,[45] and it has a ground clearance of 60 cm (24 in).[46] Based on variables including power levels, terrain difficulty, slippage and visibility, the maximum terrain-traverse speed is estimated to be 200 m (660 ft) per day by automatic navigation.[45] The rover landed about 10 km (6.2 mi) from the base of Mount Sharp,[47] and it is expected to traverse a minimum of 19 km (12 mi) during its primary two-year mission.[48] It can travel up to 90 metres (300 ft) per hour but average speed is about 30 metres (98 ft) per hour.[48]

Curiosity is 2.9 m (9.5 ft) long by 2.7 m (8.9 ft) wide by 2.2 m (7.2 ft) in height,[19] larger than Mars Exploration Rovers, which are 1.5 m (4.9 ft) long and have a mass of 174 kg (380 lb) including 6.8 kg (15 lb) of scientific instruments.

Well, those Hasselblad cameras they used were some of the finest photo technology in the history of mankind.

For years I (and you, I’m sure) heard stories about things being covered up. I tended to think yeah, well, maybe, etc etc etc

But after looking at a large number of photos from the lunar missions, including photos taken by the orbiters, as well as Clementine photos, etc, you have to come to one conclusion:

Many, many of them show obvious signs of tampering.

The question then becomes who and why!

djf - you may know all this, but here are my thoughts FWIW:
Some of the early image copies have what looks like scratches - but are actually razor blade marks - razor blades were used to retouch photos in the days before Photoshop.

More interestingly, the catalog has numerous images which are: a) misnumbered, b) duplicate images with different numbers, c) numbered out of sequence and, d) blank.

As for the Navy's Top Secret Clementine Lunar mapping mission: Why the Navy? The spin is usually they had the money, so why not spend it before it is gone. But that spin presupposes the Navy had no other spending priorities for the millions the mission cost.

There are several resolutions of the publicly available images, but of those of the very highest resolutions are still classified. The bulk of the Clementine images are also still classified - the Navy mapped the entire lunar surface in detail, not just strips here and there.

All that on top of the wholesale disposal of many of the Apollo images during what was billed as a purge of old and unwanted early data to make room for other things.

The only unretouched images to come out of the Lunar exploration programs were the Viking images, which were released before anyone realized there are some odd things showing up. Unfortunately, the resolution is so poor that the “odd things” could be just tricks of light and shadow as claimed - or maybe not. All subsequent missions never rephotographed the same areas at the same height, orbit, and sun angles - at least not publicly. We may never know what, if anything, the “Castle” or the “Tower” really are.

The recently released rescanned Apollo images are copies of copies of copies - the original negatives having been variously lost, degraded in storage, destroyed, or taken as souvenirs by various people in the Lunar programs. Keep in mind that every time a copy of a negative is made, both detail and resolution are degraded and lowered - so what ones sees now is not anyway close to the originals - partricularily given the far lower resolution of web images, even in Tiff format.

Someone once claimed they had an original Hasselblad Apollo negative (taken as a souvenir) which showed far more detail, clarity, and additional subject matter, when compared to the corresponding NASA official image.

There has always been something slightly fishy about what was released.

Thanks for the reply!

My point being that the technology we sent was so good, that anything inconsistent is not tech-related.

A smeared image on one frame, if it was the cameras fault, would most likely be smeared in the next frame... and all later frames taken by the camera.

It’s kinda like when we see pics back from Mars that look like squirrels or rats or lizards.

Seems to me it wouldn’t be hard to just sorta drive over and get a really good close up...

And they keep going on and on and on about water, hell, they proved years ago there is water on Mars, ice at least, and recent finds show there is frozen water.

But if there is something there, they cannot contain it any longer.

Pretty soon, the Maldives or Spain or Sri Lanka will be sending up a lunar probe, and those photos will be on the net.
Or the Chinese will publish photos.

We will see.

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