Decius wrote:
] ] When scientists wanted to explore what kind of life might
] ] exist on Mars, public television's "NOVA" recorded the
] ] building and launch of the rovers sent to the planet.
] ]
] ] Now, a year later, the "NOVA" team is back with "Welcome
] ] to Mars," featuring data collected by the robots as they
] ] searched for signs that the planet may once have harbored
] ] tiny forms of life. The program airs at 8 tonight on PBS.
]
] This was fun. Hope you can catch the rerun.

Those that missed it can watch it online as well.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/program.html

] ] Now, a year later, the "NOVA" team is back with "Welcome
] ] to Mars," featuring data collected by the robots as they
] ] searched for signs that the planet may once have harbored
] ] tiny forms of life. The program airs at 8 tonight on PBS.
]
] This was fun. Hope you can catch the rerun.

I saw this last night and was pretty impressed. A nice overview of what each rover found, what is means, and theories about Mars the findings support. Some cool facts:

-The rovers go to sleep every night. So the engineers pour over the data that was received, and form the next day's mission plan, uploading it at the start of the next day.

-Rovers were mostly batch driven: NASA would download extreme resolution pictures. They would then use a CAD representation of the surrounding landscape and create a series of commands to do the next days mission. A lot like LOGO graphics! The rovers didn't seem to be controlled in realtime.

-Mars' days are 24 hours 40 minutes. This forced the NASA members to keep getting up later and later, until they were going to work at 8pm at night!