Curiosity parks for a day, looks back in wonder Wall•E wannabe Curiosity has driven another 21 metres, then given itself a day off to admire the view. The little rover that could trundled to the east last Thursday (US time). That effort exhausted the craft, which spent Friday resting. It did find time to snap the panorama below depicting its tracks on the Martian surface. …
"How do know east from west on Mars?"
It doesn't have a magnetic field any more, but it's believed it does have. However it's relatively easy to assume north is the same orientation for Earth (bear in mind, "North" isn't fixed for us either, the magnetic pole moves, and the entire field can reverse). As for telling east from west on Mars, the Sun still rises and sets... :wink:
Not really mate, when I was on admin sec duties for the national grid when CSC took over, we had a young lady work on the front line, who quite often aired her misconceptions of the world around her, but one of my favorites was her trying to fathom the ambiguity presented when someone mentioned traveling south, which involved a drive out of the valley up a hill, and she told us all that it was not possible, seen as North is uphill, not south...
"(bear in mind, "North" isn't fixed for us either, the magnetic pole moves, and the entire field can reverse)"
Actually, North is very much fixed for us and it's not dependent on where the magnetic North is (they are different even now). True geographic North is at the North pole.
For Mars its true North will be at the pole located in the same hemisphere above the Solar invariable plane as the Earth's North pole...
Vlad,
I suspect you know this, but don't you think "very much fixed for us" might be a bit of an overstatement, when we need an entire international agency to constantly keep track of where North is, amongst other things?
I am, of course, talking about the International Earth Rotation Service [IERS], which by the way must be the coolest name of any agency ever created.
"But of course there is an Universal Universe UP and DOWN!!!! Look at all the SciFi movies, especially Star Trek - you can easily see that all the space ships move on the same plane and have the same UP and DOWN as everyone else!!!"
Not many people know this, but in the Star Trek universe, all starships (whatever the race that creates them) are equipped with sensors allowing them to detect and orient themselves to the edges of your TV set.
> They talk about trundling east or west
NASA could always adopt the SF terms: spinward and antispinward that can be applied where there is no magnetic pole to drive a compass, nor any significantly bright star to rise or set in a particular direction. The terms have been popular for quite some time, though maybe aren't as "taxpayer friendly" as the more familiar east and west.
"Hey Marvin! Wotcha doing on Mars?"
"Writing Morse code in the dust with my laser. It's very depressing."
"Hey cool metal man, that's one hoopy trip you got there!"
"I know. Here's me brain the size of a planet, and they just tell me to drive along shooting rocks and then taking pictures of them."
Helpful, thanks.
But I could find no help with the North Pole of Uranus, which spins in the opposite direction to the other planets. So which end is North?
Surely it has to depend on the spin because in deep space there are only distant spots of light as reference. As was almost written above, every stationary object rises in the East, then use a compass card.
Lots of loose objects are found without spin, how are they mapped ?
And the north pole of a magnet is more correctly named 'North seeking'. I don't know how we would settle this linguistically if civilised humans live through a reversal of the earth's magnetism. Of course we may visit planets with reversed magnetism so the needle points the wrong way, no problem as NASA will produce special compasses at $125K each.
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