Opportunity Hits the Goal After All
It was announced yesterday that Opportunity holds the off-Earth roving distance record after all, the total odometry reaching 40.25 kilometers on July 27. In fact, the little rover became the holder of that record on or around April 19, when it passed 39 kilometers, but it appears that the distance traveled by Lunokhod 2 was only now recalculated yet again, being reduced to around 39 kilometers after it had been increased from 37 to over 42 last year, mere days before Opportunity reached 37.
While the press release states that the leader of the Russian team which initially recalculated the distance traveled by Lunokhod 2 was involved this time as well, it was obviously a NASA effort otherwise, which was only to be expected after the Russians’ rather amusing attempt to hold on to the lead in this aspect of the space race for a while longer despite the fact that what their space program makes the news with lately is losing control of satellites, not to mention particularly important probes. If anything, I’m rather surprised it took NASA so long to do this, but it does say they collaborated with the Russian scientists to verify that the methods used to calculate the distance traveled were comparable for the two rovers, so they probably started quite some time ago but were only now able to reach an agreement.
I was saying last year that what this shows is that there’s still a space race going on, but that most of the world’s governments, and the United States’ one in particular, don’t seem to care anymore. There are still some dedicated individuals who refuse to give up, plus some of the rest of us who just keep looking up, but the vast majority are too busy digging each other’s graves and crawling through the muck to do so, and have been for a long time… And the saddest thing about that is that they’re taking everyone and everything else down with them, and I’m definitely not only talking about other humans.
