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Product Description This comprehensive set of three CD-ROMs provides a thorough guide to the mission of the twin NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003 for an early 2004 landing on the Red Planet. In addition to MER-A and MER-B, there is coverage of the Mars Express mission, including the Beagle 2 lander. This historic program is documented in NASA reports and mission images - there are over 385 images and 30 video clips reproduced here. Every aspect of the program is covered: * Preflight Tests, Launch and Cruise Phase * Landing Site maps and detailed photographs * Mission Objectives, Science Objectives * Entry, Descent, and Landing System * Science Instruments (Pancam, MINI-TES, Spectrometer, APXS, Magnets, Rock Abrasion Tool RAT, Microscopic Imager) * Spacecraft Description * Mission Timeline * Communications with Earth * MER Project Team Members This CD-ROM set has over 11,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems, and Reader software is included. Advanced search and indexing features are built into our reproduction, providing a complete full-text index. This enables the user to search all the files on the disk at one time for words or phrases using just one search command! The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material. There is no other reference that is as fast, convenient, comprehensive, and portable! NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars in 2003 in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. The program seeks to take advantage of each launch opportunity to go to Mars, which comes around every 26 months as the planets move around the Sun. Launched on June 10 and July 7, 2003, the rovers will land on sites on Mars in January 2004. Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars. The spacecraft will be targeted to sites that appear to have been affected by liquid water in the past. After the airbag-protected landing craft settle onto the surface and open, the rovers will roll out to take panoramic images. These will give scientists the information they need to select promising geological targets that will tell part of the story of water in Mars' past. Then, the rovers will drive to those locations to perform on-site scientific investigations over the course of their 90-day mission. Our CD-ROMs are privately-compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed, searched, or printed without untold hours of tedious searching and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain government information that might otherwise remain inaccessible are available for instant review no matter where you are. This book-on-a-disc set makes a great reference work and educational tool.
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Opportunity Vs. Spirit Photographers and brothers Cornell and Robert Capa have often been considered as a salient study in contrasts. Perhaps their shared skill behind the camera could be attributed to some genetically endowed gift. Robert gained fame as the man who hauled his Leica equipment to battle zones from the Spanish Civil War up through the start of the conflict in Vietnam, giving war its "human face." Cornell quietly established an impressive career that would one day earn him notice as his brother's near-equal but opposite, as the "Photographer of Peace." Living in the expansive shadow of his brother the war hero, Cornell pointed his lens in the opposite direction, opened the shutter wide and produced a classic meditation on symmetry and light through his image of an afternoon at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet School; of narcissism at the dawn of the Age of Television in the 1959 photo, "Jack Paar Watches Himself on TV"; and of everyday people at play, whether it was the early morning cold baths at Winchester College or couples out on a Friday night at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. While combat photojournalists such as Robert Capa and Gerda Taro might have snagged the lion's share of magazine covers in the day - What with their work's shocking urgency and the tales of daring-do that accompanied them - there was a subtle balancing act at work. For every image of brutality provided from battle fronts around the globe, photographers such as Cornell Capa, and his contemporaries Henri Cartier-Bresson and Grace Robertson, offered gentle reminders of the beauty and joy found in humanity, be they a candid shot a young delivery boy haughtily marching across Paris' Rue Mouffetard with bottles of wine tucked under each arm, or a series of pictures chronicling the slightly tipsy patrons of London's Battersea women's pub on an outing to an amusement park, giddily holding down dresses on windy roller coasters and starting impromptu conga lines. In the early oughts of the 21st century, with images of mechanized carnage, bloodshed and war pouring out of every media orifice available, it's of no surprise that public interest should drift out to the cosmos and clutch desperately onto the prosaic, still images being captured on Mars, depicting gently bowed landscapes and baby skin-smooth rocks. But while such escapism into the wonders of the fourth planet out might provide temporary relief from the eye-strain of horrific imagery found here on earth, all is not in equilibrium amongst the photography community on the Red Planet. It's fitting that in our modern age the two brightest stars of the photo world should be robotic. However, while one of them is a true visionary producing images worthy of oversized, hard-bound coffee table books, the other is a free-riding loafer whose work possess, at best, flash-in-the-pan cleverness, but often lapses into tired gimmicks which seem designed to compensate for a lack of artistic ability and a minimal respect for the medium or subject. NASA refers to its two Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, as twins, bringing comparisons of the Capa brothers to mind. Instead of two photographers in possession of comparable skills showing us different sides of the same world, however, we have a contrast in talent. Opportunity is a master of its craft, displaying the full knowledge of the rules of its art form, even in its cunning ability to occasionally bend those rules, often with wondrous results. Spirit, meanwhile, muddles in vapid self-consciousness, usually abandoned in the trenches of undergraduate programs at small, Northwest liberal arts colleges. Spirit's use of obscure angles, extreme close-ups and a grotesque use of color saturation are pedestrian, and it indulges itself in an unearned, over-the-top indignant artistic temperament, pettily shutting down and refusing to work as its colleague and sibling, Opportunity, lands on the planet. As these two up-and-coming photographers launch their careers among the Martian dunes, let us examine their work thus far, and observe the strikingly opposing trajectories of these two media darlings. One will be remembered. The other will diminish into a trivia question for game shows. On January 4, Spirit launched its career with a crude mosaic baring the self-congratulatory title, "First Look at Spirit on Mars." Seemingly happy with the lack of competition on the planet's dust-blown terrain, Mars' premier landscape photographer falls into producing a pretentious set of self-portraits that are hardly on par with the Catherine Opie "alter-ego" series Spirit so obviously seeks to emulate in its own works dubbed "First Look at Spirit at Landing Site," "View from Above Spirit on Mars," and the obtuse "View in Front of Spirit." Oh, it's always about you, isn't it Spirit? These images are not unlike the juvenile attempts of pretenders who insist on being called artists because they produced grainy photographs of their own feet that were displayed in some trendy coffee house in their hometown for a week. Over the subsequent days and weeks, Spirit has the exclusive luxury of being the sole camera jockey to capture the mystique of its surroundings. But the photographer seems to be adrift and unable to tackle the subject. Spirit is intimidated by Mars and cowers into the comfortable realm of moderate technical proficiency. Unable to offer up a single image that says "this, ladies and gentlemen of Earth, is the real Mars," Spirit offers us 3-D stereo images to distract us from poor composition. Saturated colors and strange cropping techniques are employed to counter the lack of clarity and purpose that runs though Spirit's work. It's as though Spirit believes it can make up for its artistic shortcomings in the darkroom. While finding perspectives and angles that offer a wink and a nod to Chris Simpson's "Sun and Sand II" and "Atacama Desert," Spirit's work contains no stamp truly of its own. It has often been opined that the United States should send a poet into space. While those who parrot this quip are really pleading for something more elegant than Neil Armstrong's clumsy, over-rehearsed "one small step for man" one-liner, that call might have finally been answered, at least in the visual arts, with the arrival of Opportunity on the Martian photography scene. In Daisaku Ikeda's poetic homage to Cornell and Robert Capa, "Eternal Voyagers toward the Light of Peace," he writes, "A photograph is a consciousness painting, the instant's art that opens on the unbound vistas of the inner life." That was inspired in equal measure by the works of both brothers. It would be difficult to imagine such praise divided half and half between the twin shutterbugs of Mars. When Opportunity landed Jan. 24, selecting the road "less traveled by," on the opposite side of the planet from its sibling, Spirit went into a snit, shutting down and refusing to submit any more of its work. Almost immediately, Spirit apologists at NASA rushed to the premadonna's defense, saying "we should expect we will not be restoring functionality to Spirit for a significant amount of time - many days, perhaps two weeks - even in the best of circumstances," and "we believe, based on everything we know now, we can sustain the current state of the spacecraft from a health standpoint for an indefinite amount of time." Yeah, right. These cover stories as transparent as Spirit's deplorable aping of Robert Glenn Ketchum's work for its own "They of the Great Rocks" series. As Spirit wallows in self pity, Opportunity astounds from the get-go with a run of crisp black and white offerings. Consider one of its first images, "Meridiani Planium in View." So sharp and barren, the photo's composition also pays subtle homage to the "Rule of Three." On the left, the rover's mast is seen in its stowed position, but unlike Spirit's blatant self-promotion by centering itself in the image, Opportunity uses part of it's own body as a gentle lead for the eye, guiding it back toward the photograph's center. And while its close-up work (specifically with "Meridiani Soil" I and II) shows a playful agility at balancing darkness and light to reveal pattern, it is when Opportunity shows us its breadth by taking "First Look Behind Opportunity," using only available lighting and its hazard-identification camera, that we are truly amazed. Utilizing the fisheye lens in the way it was intended, Opportunity renders what could have been a banal landscape, if captured by a lesser, with the intimacy and erotic electricity of Christian Coigny's high-contrast black and white "Le Reveil" nude. Playing with light and shadow, Opportunity titillates more with what it obscures than through what it reveals. And while Opportunity displays informed talent with its use of muted colors to show the stark reality and melancholy of vast Martian vistas and the solitary nobility of the simple, reddish-brown, wind-eroded stone, it is the magnificent "First Panoramic Look at Meridiani Planum, Mars" that will become Opportunity's signature work. With the sharpness, depth of field and the utter sense of contentedness it portrays, This 360-degree vista would not suffer in a gallery hanging among contemporaries, even next to the likes of Ansel Adems' "Mt. McKinley, Clouds." NASA has sent two rovers to the Red Planet. Spirit arrived first, and overcome with fear and anxiety about the task at hand, turned in on itself, announcing "I am on Mars." Opportunity came second, allowed the alien environs to take the lead, let itself be consumed by the landscape, and through the timeless images it beams home it proclaims, "Mars is on me!" January 28, 2004