Twin Mars rovers in instrument mix-up
New Scientist Print Edition, March 4, 2005

I thought this article might be relevant as we learnt about Mars this week in lectures.
In the lecture Dr Burton talked briefly about these 2 rovers, Spirit and Opportunity that had been sent to Mars and the important role that they played in finding irrefutable evidence that there was once liquid water on Mars. I thought that the concept of water once existing on Mars was very interesting and so I decided to research it further.

The article is mainly about how there was a mix-up with an instrument (as indicated by the title) but how scientists have been able to correct the mistake. However, the writer did include a little bit of information about the landing date, the scheduled time of the mission, what measurement are being taken and what instruments are being used, which I found helpful.

This article was the first one that I found about the topic and while it didn’t contain exactly the information that I was looking for it was interesting to read about the types of things that can go wrong with such space missions. Thankfully in this case the error was fixable and no damage was done to the spacecraft.

I also thought that the article was good because although the author is reporting an error that has been made she is not making it out to be worse than it really is. She hasn’t sensationalized it in a way that I would expect from a newspaper.

Previous Page : Radio burst may be from a new object

Next Page : Saturn Lights

Back to Contents