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NASA: Mars rover Curiosity finds bright object
- ceejayoz 14y agoReally, really hope this is a shard of a meteorite or something, not a piece of the rover's arm.
- ef4 14y agoHere's hoping it's the Martian equivalent of an arrowhead. :-) Or at least, let's hope it's not some critical piece of the rover itself.
- saraid216 14y agoThe first thing that struck me when reading the headline was, "That's exactly the kind of thing we'd do. Drop a shiny thing in front of the foreign lifeform and see what it does with it."
- zheng 14y agoSo the picture doesn't really make it obvious, but I believe they are talking about the item emphasized here[0]. I might just be dense, but why would NASA think that is a part of the rover, it really doesn't seem like it to me. As an aside, it also doesn't seem particularly "bright". --- [0]: http://i.imgur.com/NOnPK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/NOnPK.jpg
- mseepgood 14y agohttp://postimage.org/image/ouvupuniz/ http://postimage.org/image/ouvupuniz/
- artursapek 14y agoTangent, but what a misleading use of those stupid Facebook and Google+ buttons. For a moment I was asking myself how your upload could have amassed so much attention so fast.
- whatshisface 14y agoFor those that don't click on the image, there is a hole in the rover where a screw would normally be found. Does anyone here know if this is intentional?
- bennyg 14y agoLooks like the screw is on the ground in the bottom of the picture. Circled in the original of this comment thread.
- miahi 14y agoThe ChemCam image (see links below) shows that it's not a screw.
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- tisme 14y agoIt looks like someone forgot the locktite. The rover must have experienced lots of vibration on its long voyage, anything that wasn't secured properly could have vibrated loose. Vibration is a pretty weird thing, the forces can be enormous with very little visible effect until something suddenly breaks or pops loose.
- weinzierl 14y agoWhen I worked in satellite design we never used loctite because of outgassing. Washer thickness and diameter as well as torque was calculated for every screw and bolt. At the assembly at least two people were involved, one would use a digital precision torque wrench to apply the calculated nominal torque, another one would document the applied torque besides part number, date, time, etc. in a report. Assembly in aerospace is a bureaucratic process.
- sampo 14y agoHappened to a Soviet lander on Venus in 1982: "The quartz camera windows were covered by lens caps which popped off after descent. Venera 14, however, ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap, which landed right where the probe was to measure the soil." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14#Landing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_14#Landing
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- InclinedPlane 14y agoYou find a piece of metal on Mars next to a 1 tonne rover made mostly out of metal. I wonder what the most likely source of the item could be...
- fla 14y agoLink to the latest (raw) ChemCam images : http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=62&camera=CHEMCAM_ http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=62&camera...
- thesis 14y agoHave you seen a picture of the "bright object" this post references? Unless it's in that picture and I'm just missing it.
- jere 14y agohttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/images/pia16225-Sol61-Mastcam34-br2.jpg http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/images/pia16225-Sol61-Mastcam34... According to the article it's "In the foreground, near the bottom of the image." I do see something near the bottom, halfway in the gap between the rover, that looks grey.... maybe metallic.
- libria 14y agoA reddit user[1] enhanced a closeup: http://i.imgur.com/99jDI.jpg http://i.imgur.com/99jDI.jpg This was taken from http://www.universetoday.com/97774/curiosity-finds-something-on-martian-surface/ http://www.universetoday.com/97774/curiosity-finds-something... [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/116q6s/curiosity_finds_something_on_martian_surface/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/116q6s/curiosity_fi...
- chucknelson 14y agoAs a casual observer, I would think that it is just some bit of material that fell off of the rover.
- ceejayoz 14y agoWhich I'd imagine shouldn't ever happen, and that's why they're taking a very cautious approach to using the robotic arm until they can rule that out.
- joering2 14y agooh boy you gotta love Yahoo, even now under Mayer. Spent 10 minutes looking at the photo and realized that photo caption is layered over it... good job Yahoo team!
- phogster 14y agoYeah, come on, CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. Stop pandering to stock holders, board directors, and senior management, and go look at a line of text on your photos!
- ceejayoz 14y agoOh, FFS. The important part of an image being a tiny portion at the very bottom edge is a tremendously rare edge case.
- podperson 14y agoThis reminds me that the HN spoof page a few days back really needed a "NASA: Curiosity moves three inches to the left" item.
- samwilliams 14y agoWhile that post was very amusing, I don't believe this can really be compared to your example. If this really is a piece of the rover that has fallen off it could spell disaster for a hugely important and expensive mission.
- aik 14y agoTrue but you have to agree that opening HN and seeing, "NASA: Mars rover Curiosity finds bright object" is a bit humorous on several levels. The dichotomy makes it so: 1. Big impact: Science and our understanding of the universe is being explored in new and very promising ways. 2. Big impact: Billions of dollars and years of time spent are on the line. 3. Generally tiny impact (except for this situation): What is often seen as a child-like curiosity: Look, shiny object! What is it!? Which also makes it humorous that we see the title and think, "that sounds interesting".
- nikic 14y agoI've seen this story on a few sites now, and none of them bothered to show just where exactly in that image the part is supposed to be. Very helpful.
- alexpenny 14y agoThey don't actually know where it is, they're just quoting NASA to jump on the page views.
- hnriot 14y agoThe story yesterday on Digg showed the bright object, plus it's not that hard to find since it's the only thing that's not rover or not red. I forget the source of that Digg linked to, but it speculated that most likely the bright shiny silver object was something from the sky crane or shielding from the entry stage. Considering the violence with which Curiosity entered martian 'airspace' it would seem very unlikely not to find some debris.
- sixothree 14y agoMaybe its because they're all in the habit of resizing images and forgot to look at the original.
- FootballMuse 14y agoooo shiny thing! #ADD
- johncarpinelli 14y ago"The rover team's assessment is that the bright object is something from the rover, not Martian material," mission team members wrote in an update today. "It appears to be a shred of plastic material, likely benign, but it has not been definitively identified." http://news.yahoo.com/bright-object-mars-actually-plastic-curiosity-rover-200931416.html http://news.yahoo.com/bright-object-mars-actually-plastic-cu...
- kghose 14y agoI find it impressive that they can find that tiny thing. I imagine it is some image processing algorithm that identifies anomalies in the texture. Or do they have humans scanning through each full res picture?
- gosub 14y agoMaybe hoards of undergraduates?
- tersiag 14y agoIts amazing to view the surface of Mars from my browser
- vtail 14y agoHere is how you can find this object with Mathematica: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11819/help-find-a-bright-object-on-mars/11822#11822 http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/11819/help-fi...