by De58te » Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:19 am
As a fan of sci fi and space exploration I try to keep up with all the latest news, but today I learned something new from APOD. I had never realized that the Opportunity rover was half way around Mars from Curiosity. I had thought they were just a hundred miles or so away. Guess maybe it was Spirit that was a hundred miles away. So, given that Mar's length of day is around 24 hours, just about the same as Earth, that means that when we see all these pictures of Curiosity taken during the daylight hours, that Opportunity is experiencing nighttime and so is in total darkness (assuming it doesn't carry a personal flashlight). So that makes sense the last line in the Apod description, when this Curiosity self portrait was taken, Opportunity was in the pitch darkness of night.
As a fan of sci fi and space exploration I try to keep up with all the latest news, but today I learned something new from APOD. I had never realized that the Opportunity rover was half way around Mars from Curiosity. I had thought they were just a hundred miles or so away. Guess maybe it was Spirit that was a hundred miles away. So, given that Mar's length of day is around 24 hours, just about the same as Earth, that means that when we see all these pictures of Curiosity taken during the daylight hours, that Opportunity is experiencing nighttime and so is in total darkness (assuming it doesn't carry a personal flashlight). So that makes sense the last line in the Apod description, when this Curiosity self portrait was taken, Opportunity was in the pitch darkness of night.