14 DAY TRIAL // The endurance displayed by NASA's Mars twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, has been nothing but good news for astronomers and other scientists. Nearly 250,000 images were transmitted between the two planets in their 5 full years of operation. Originally scheduled to last a couple of months, their missions quickly extended as the tiny robots proved to be more resilient to the harsh conditions of the Red planet than anyone ever thought.
Besides analyzing and indexing each photo it received, NASA also decided to make all of them available to the general public, thus triggering a huge wave of astronomy-related enthusiasm on the part of regular people worldwide. Many teenagers and adults alike started following the news posted on NASA's official website, tracking down the rovers' every movement. They even got their own Facebook group, where people fascinated about their achievements meet and discuss images and exchange opinions about ongoing missions.
"If I had to chose, [sic] I would say I like Spirit better. She's had to work for everything. Opportunity gets a major discovery handed to her by landing nearly on top of it, but Spirit's had to work hard for everything she gets," says 20-year-old meteorology major Keri Bean, a student at Texas A&M College Station, in Texas. She is one of the founders of the group featuring the two space probes.
"Steve Squyres, the scientist in charge of both of the rovers, messaged me and said he liked my site. I knew then I had to get serious," she says. At this point, her group numbers approximately 1,700 online friends, from literally all around the globe, as far as Norway and New Zealand. "I do not have a lot of time this semester, but I try to check it once a day. It is all about reaching out to people who would normally not pay attention," the girl adds.
"Our membership includes a care worker for the elderly here in the U.K. to a teacher in North Wales to a government employee in California. In London, I recently met for the first time someone I had known through the Web site for four years. There were no "getting to know you" pleasantries. Straight off the bat it was right into a detailed, in-depth, insightful discussion about something ridiculously space-geeky," says Doug Ellison, a United Kingdom resident, who has been obsessed with Mars since Pathfinder first landed on the Red planet's surface in 1997.
She owns the unmannedspaceflight website, which attracts thousands of visitors on a regular basis. "Mars grabbed me in an unhealthy way. Just on the fringe of acceptable," Ellison says.
"Our members share results from stitching together rover images and working with those images. Say Opportunity does a long drive. We download those pictures from the rover Web site. Somebody will make a mosaic from the imagery taken at the end of the drive. Somebody else will keep the route map up to date to show where Opportunity has been. Somebody else will then stitch together the next mosaic and have the full mosaic all together and then keep track of what the following day's activities are going to be," the website owner concludes.