Spacer, but curiosity already has holes in its wheels

yeah and it's quite suprising me. the wheels design should be better than the design of the old rovers design. but it seems the old rovers's wheels survive longer.
probably because curiosity climbed more and faster. and maybe the terrain is rougher. curiosity wheels designed to not sink in the sand of mars and to climb steep hills.

yeah and it's quite suprising me. the wheels design should be better than the design of the old rovers design. but it seems the old rovers's wheels survive longer.

Compromises in weight and material cost have to be made.

Here is Jupiter taken on May 19, 2017, More info *HERE*

(unofficial) word from one of the people who is involved with the Opportunity program:

"After the initial tests I'm not sure we know where the problem is, whether it is close to the motor, or the wheel. I would say that only after we have a reasonable idea we will come up with a solution (if it exists). All the suggestions so far are good but unfortunately we have pretty severe restrictions due to power and volatile storage (cold and hot temperature testing). We also have to get ready for Conjunction and Winter 8 while providing meaningful means to explore Perseverance Valley. I don't think anyone has kept track of the odometer on the testbeds but I would be surprised if it was a significant percentage of either Oppy or even Spirit. We typically use it to do small-motion tests (a few meters at most) and the tether is pretty short.

The torque at the output of the gearbox is so strong that any attempt to force a stall by manually locking a wheel was fruitless. So on the one hand we would need to apply a very strong force to do anything significant, and on the other hand one could cause more damage. So if you won't see us try more crazy things, please understand that we rather drive a crippled vehicle than a lander.

Not sure what flavor of lemonade we will make this time (maybe Orange Crush?), but we thought it was almost impossible to use the IDD after Joint 1 became unreliable. I'm sure we will learn how to drive this thing (again!). There's still some of us that remember how to drive a-la-Spirit. "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They got it to move.
http://i.imgur.com/JCPtYbp.gif[/img]]Wheel

Ten new earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone, released in the newest & 8th Kepler data set.
NASA's exoplanet interactive archive

Weird orbits hint ‘Planet Ten’ might lurk at solar system edge
so there could be not one, but two planets that are out there to be found.
the ninth and this one.

More likely the tenth and not the ninth.  Also, possibly neither.  All evidence for them is statistical and based on behavior of minor planet orbits, and recent surveys suggest evidence for Nine was just bias.  Evidence for Ten is also fairly weak at this point.

Goodbye Planet 9, Hello Planet 10

The biggest takeaway is that there really isn't a whole lot of room remaining in terms of observations for more planets to be out there.  Either they are there and we will find them soon, or they aren't there and we'll be soon be confident that they aren't.

But will they pass the "cleared its neighbourhood" criterion?

Testing their qualification by Soter's Discriminant is observationally difficult, but classifying by Margot's Pi would be fairly easy.  It will depend on their mass and orbital distance.

For those unfamiliar, Soter's Discriminant is a measure of orbital clearing by the ratio of the object's mass to the total mass of all other objects sharing the orbital space.  The more the object cleared the orbit the bigger that ratio will be, and there's a pretty large gap between planets and dwarf planets.  Of course, using it requires some knowledge of the population of objects in that space, which right now is rather poor that far out.

Margot's Pi is a dynamical measure of the object's ability to clear its neighborhood over the lifetime of the star.  The larger the mass and the smaller the orbit, the shorter the clearing time:



So for example, if Planet Nine is at 700AU, then it must be at least twice the mass of Earth to clear its orbit over the age of the solar system.

The biggest takeaway is that there really isn't a whole lot of room remaining in terms of observations for more planets to be out there.  Either they are there and we will find them soon, or they aren't there and we'll be soon be confident that they aren't.

There's a helpful (and humorous) chart from xkcd that shows this. (From xkcd.com/1633/.)

I wish I had a planet that would fit through my door.  

Looks like the neighbourhood might get bigger soon.

Actually we can easily see the moon during day, so it doesn't really fit that position.

First image of another star's surface, betelgeuase.
http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1726a/

This is the first time ALMA observed its surface.  Betelgeuse was the first star (besides the Sun) whose surface was resolved, but this is not the first image of its kind, and lots of other stars have been resolved, too. :)  E.g. Altair in 2007.

Another fun fact:  The Milky Way's central black hole's event horizon has an apparent size 1/1000th that of Betelgeuse.