The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Mars Lander shows rock who's boss

For it's work all day for the sugar in your tay

Cloud based data management

In case you've been living under a rock on some distant planet, NASA apologizes for the intrusion.

Image courtesy of NASA

The Phoenix Mars Lander has completed the tricky task of nudging aside a Martian rock roughly the size and shape of a VHS tape so that curious Earthling scientists could peer underneath.

The lander's robotic arm moved the rock, called "Headless," about 40 centimeters from its previous location during the mission's 117 Martian day on September 22. Phoenix had spent Saturday enlarging a trench close to Headless to make a suitable place to place the rock.

Scientists hoped to displace Headless while keeping ground disturbance at a minimum in order to study the soil and depth to subsurface ice underneath.

Because the lander receives commands for an entire day during the morning, engineers on Earth had no way to make adjustments during the move if anything began to slip.

Quarry work is also not among the many tasks Phoenix is built to do, making the job one of the more interesting feats of rock rolling since Sisyphus gave it a go.

"The rock ended up exactly where we intended it to," said Matt Robinson, head of Phoenix's robotic arm flight software at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scientists can now take a gander at the ice table under the rock to get a better idea why the rocks are darker than the material around them. ®

SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Latest Comments

@Vladimir Plouzhnikov

So spending money now to get soil/ice/CO2 samples, surveys and environmental tests using expendable, hardware is "frustratingly useless"? y'idiot, the US can't even launch the space shuttle without having another one on standby 'just in case', they can't even go back to the moon, do you have any idea of the scale involved sending a person to Mars? Even if it was possible, let alone affordable, anything went wrong, and all your eggs, being in one basket would be a omlettey mush, doing stuff now in space much cheaper, giving results now is far more sensible than some pie (biodome) in the sky (space) idea that wouldn't get of the ground (launch) for decades. Crawl back under your rock and stay there until my robot arm comes and gets you......

0
0

"mars lander shows rock who's boss"

This has got to be one of the best headlines I've read about the Mars lander.

0
0

Pease explain...

just what we get from showing that universe is the huge and sub-atomic space is tiny. SHOW ME THE PATENTS. show me the benefit to anyone who isn't on a grant. Make me a better (off) person. you PhDtards. I'm paying for this crap.

Woah, I've calmed down now. No I haven't. SHOW ME THE BENEFITS NOW!

0
0

More from The Register

New material enables 1,000-meter super-skyscrapers
Before you read on, see if you can guess how the new stuff will be used
Boffins build headless robo-kitties
Soft kitty, warm kitty, cuddly little ball of wire kitty
 breaking news
Latest NASA ASTRONAUT class is HALF FEMALE
Newbie 'nauts include lady Marine fighter pilot, male doctor
 breaking news
You've seen the Large Hadron Collider. Now comes the HUGE Hadron Collider
International Linear Collider ready to rock and roll
Boffins find evidence Atlantic Ocean has started closing
'Embryonic subduction zone' that flattened Lisbon headed for Blighty
House bill: 'Hey NASA, that asteroid retrieval plan? Fuggedaboutit'
Republican-led committee also swings budget axe at climate science
Google launches broadband balloons, radio astronomy frets
A careless Loon could blind the square kilometre array
Hubble spies unlikely planet being born in hostile neighborhood
Hoovering a cloud of sand 7.5 billion miles from a tiny star
 breaking news
Jaguar to open new car-making factory in Blighty (virtually)
Britain still makes stuff, it's just not real any more...
 breaking news
Spin doctors brazenly fiddle with tiny bits in front of the neighbours
Quantum computer address bus just nanometres wide