Mars Rover - An update
October 8th, 2006 by ashish
I was reading some news on CNN, and read about further progress of the Mars Rover ‘Opportunity’. and saw some incredible photographs as part of the CNN article. They show the rover perched at the edge of a massive crater that is 4 times the size a football field.
If you sit down to think about it, you have to wonder at 2 incredible marvels of technology. There is the simple feat of landing a vehicle on another planet’s surface which is 200 million miles away in a state that it can start working. This rover was programmed to work for 90 days, and has been running now for 900 days. And this is not all, there is another rover on the other side of the planet that is also working to explore Mars from a geologist’s perspective (and at the same time, provide some incredible photos as well).
The other incredible feat is having a spacecraft in orbit around Mars that has been able to take these photographs with this clarity. To possess these kind of abilities is symptomatic of a technological ability beyond compare. One can also start to wonder: These technological abilities are currently employed in the civilian sector, one can only wonder about the technological abilities that exist in the military and espionage sector. The only good part in all this is that if one were to think of any nation in the world having these abilities, it is difficult to think of any other nation besides the US that one would trust with these abilities.
