[Closed] will mars curiosity try to plant anything?

Red weed.

<Jeff Wayne>Ooooh aaaah!</Jeff Wayne>

Can just see the Daily Mail headline "Mars taken over by Japanese Knotweed".

<Jeff Wayne>Ooooh aaaah!</Jeff Wayne>

😆

Forget growing stuff, what are the trails like?
Imagine zooming down a huge crater on your mtb and popping the lip as a kicker for mahoosive air.

[Eddie_Izzard]..a flag..[/Eddie_Izzard]

gravity still bites Jane

Should have taken some Japanese Knotweed, give it a couple of weeks and Mars would be crawling with the stuff.

Can just see the Daily Mail headline "[i]House prices on Mars crash after [/i]Mars taken over by Japanese Knotweed"

[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection ]Planetary protection[/url]

I know the whole idea isn't THAT new but I still can barely get my head round the fact that there is a robot driving around on a distant planet, being remote-controlled by some chaps here on earth.

It's utterly bonkers.

I hope is buries it's own poo.

Nothing would grow. Or would it? Can we find something from Earth that'd kick start a biological revolution? I bet we could.

Can someone re-create mars in a lab to find out, please?

- the labs on curiosity - trying to work out what's it like on Mars. 😉

https://twitter.com/sarcasticrover

Trouble is, Mars appears to have already been through a biological period, but the planet sadly didn't have the necessary structure that gave it the gravity to hold onto its atmosphere. You'd have to get masses of water there, then get processes under way to create a suitable atmosphere, but how do you keep the atmosphere around the planet without gravity?
Mars lacks the heavy metals in its core to give it the mass to then gain gravity, and that's insurmountable. The ice isn't; you just lob a bunch of chuffing great icebergs at it and seed it with appropriate organisms to boot up the biological processes, like generating gasses for the atmosphere, and simple plants, but you're still faced with the planet's problem with the atmosphere leaching away over time.
Kim Stanley Robinson details the processes in his Mars Trilogy.

will mars curiosity try to plant anything?

If you can't sustain yourself on Mars you could try a Milky Way or another Galaxy.

Seems to me that there are massive areas on this planet that could do with a bit of gardening work, before they start on Mars.

TeeJ, Elfinsafety, don Simon and The Southern Yeti are up there setting up some trails for the 2024 Mars Triathlon

If you can't sustain yourself on Mars you could try a Milky Way or another Galaxy.

mmmm chocolate

Mars lacks the heavy metals in its core to give it the mass to then gain gravity, and that's insurmountable

I do wonder if by sending this rover (Austin Metro) up there that it's covered in Earth bacteria.
So we've contaminated it already..
You may think it sterile, but...

Ain't that how the Earth got plants n all..? Bacteria, or did God do it?

like this badboy?

[img] [/img]

This little guy is a Tardigrade, or a water bear. In 2008, water bears were the first animals demonstrated to be able to survive the vacuum of space. They are virtually indestructible and can survive being blasted with radiation, intense pressures and years of desiccation.
Specimens were launched into space by Swedish scientists and they returned unharmed after eight days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12855775

Bunnyhop - Member
Forget growing stuff, what are the trails like?
Imagine zooming down a huge crater on your mtb and popping the lip as a kicker for mahoosive air.

what tyres for Mars?

(can't believe no one has asked that already!)

being remote-controlled by some chaps here on earth

Less than you might imagine. Such remote operations require a high degree of autonomy. By remote, I mean:

* The indirectness of contact (relay via an orbiting satellite)
* Infrequency of Earth-station -> Mars rover contact (both planets are rotating at different phases and speeds and the orbiting satellite is orbiting)
* The time-delay (many minutes) for signals to travel back-and-forth the distances as they varies over the differing orbits of both planets.

With each mission, the degree of autonomy increases. Our current prototype robots and prototypes in the company are able to visually navigate (no GPS) and drive 5km autonomously through terrain similar to Mars. (tested in the Atacama desert a few months ago [url= http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM90SAXH3H_index_0.html ]ESA Rover Autonomy[/url])

Note. The article says 6km but it only managed 5km as the "truck" overheated mid-afternoon in the hot sun. It would have managed further otherwise.

and no one is there to flip it back over if you mess up! 😀

and no one is there to flip it back over if you mess up!

They should've sent two.

Needs a "flipper" on its back like the ones in Robot Wars 😉

Our current prototype robots and prototypes in the company are able to visually navigate (no GPS)

How do they manage without a map and compass?

GPS would be no good anyway.

"At the red rock, take the third left, towards some red rocks"

"How do they manage without a map and compass?"

Good question.

Mars has no usable magnetic field so compasses simply don't work. But we do have excellent 3D maps thanks to a series of excellent orbiter missions with High-Res cameras.

One of the trickiest parts of the software is "Localisation" i.e. working out where it is and which way it is pointing, just by sight, comparing with it's maps. It has to match near-field and far-field features to give itself location with error-bars. The error-bars dictate some of the route decisions it makes. And then it also has to cope with local obstacle avoidance, such as rocks, ruts and sand-traps - all spotted autonomously using visual pattern matching.

Progress tracking is constantly monitored by a combination of wheel odometry and also by watching near-field features.

All these technologies existed to some extent already. The Seeker project was about integrating these into a rover robotics architecture and showing that, with a realistic robot prototype in a Mars-like environment, they could meet the mobility requirements for a future mission.

You might like this scenic picture from Seeker (Atacama desert), comparing it with a scenic picture from Curiosity (Mars). Can you tell which is which?

[img] [/img]

cool- like Moravecs in Dan Simmonds Ilium (awesome book btw)