Posted on 08/22/2012 10:49:07 AM PDT by jb729
The NASA rover Curiosity has taken its first test drive on Mars.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Allen Chen on Wednesday tweeted an image of marks left in the soil and declared, "Wheel tracks on Mars."
Details of the brief drive are expected to be released at a late-morning news conference.
The rover was expected to move forward 10 feet, turn right and back-track close to where it started.
Curiosity touched down near the Martian equator earlier this month on a $2.5 billion mission. Scientists plan to drive it to the base of a mountain where it will drill into rocks and scoop up soil to determine whether the Martian environment was hospitable to microbial life.
this thing is a lot bigger than those 2 little end tables were, right?
Cool! ... Any coding on the treads this time?
oooh, oooh! Is that the laser cannon on the right? WANT!
Morse Code that says “J-P-L”
Any sign of Neal Armstrong’s footprints?
Coding on the treads? Enlighten me on that, pls. I hadn’t known of it.
Coding on the treads? Enlighten me on that, pls. I hadn’t known of it.
LOL! That’s STILL funny.
not getting stuck on a pebble
priceless (or rather $2.5 billion)
JPL is encoded in Morris on the left front wheel. You can see the openings that leave little raised dots and dashes
A newbie usually corrects me by now.
Is that a Martian footprint?
Scientific discovery of the first magnitude easily worth $2.5 billion. Maybe they'll discover the valley of lost SUVs next.
It looks like Mars is still made of rocks and dirt - just like the last set of expensive taxpayer funded robots found.
Whaaatttt?
Morris the Cat?
Johnny Morris?
Philip Morris?
Dick Morris?
Those two martians look a lot like terrestrians!
they have been on the planet for a week- what have they been doing?
IIRC, one of the earlier little remotes was sent to Mars without a distance gage and when the techies tried to firgure out how far their little remote had driven and thus how far from some item of interest, they were stumped. Until one of the techies realized the tread ont he tired was something they could measure on earth (as a duplicate was here for comparisons) and extrapolate distance covered by counting the number of times a pattern on one wheel tread repeated.
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