Interesting Curiosity Rover Tidbit

Clever idea, but I'm having a hard time seeing Morse code letters in those pictures... what do the dits look like? The dahs?
 
Clever idea, but I'm having a hard time seeing Morse code letters in those pictures... what do the dits look like? The dahs?

Looked to me like there are gaps in the tread, then some tread, then another gap. It is hard to see with the early photos so far.
 
Best pic is here. If you look at the holes in the tread, you can see the Morse code letters. "J P L" reads left to right on the wheel itself. To be a little pedantic the dot/dash/space ratio is not really correct, but the pattern of long and short elements is.

682308main_pia16112-43_946-710.jpg
 
Best pic is here. If you look at the holes in the tread, you can see the Morse code letters. "J P L" reads left to right on the wheel itself. To be a little pedantic the dot/dash/space ratio is not really correct, but the pattern of long and short elements is.

682308main_pia16112-43_946-710.jpg
Another good pic:

cutiosity-wheel-jpl-morse-code.jpg
 
Reminds me of two earlier rovers, Spirit and Curiosity. Both ran long missions, but one of them, early on, developed problems with the memory system. The rover was good otherwise, except for the memory issue.

In other words, Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak. :-)

Anyway, they fixed it...deleted a bunch of unneeded files.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Movie star Tom Mix rode around in a custom yellow supercharged Cord 812 Phaeton coupe with his ''TM'' brand molded into the tire tread so he could leave his mark all over Hollywood.
 
Movie star Tom Mix rode around in a custom yellow supercharged Cord 812 Phaeton coupe with his ''TM'' brand molded into the tire tread so he could leave his mark all over Hollywood.
When Bruce Willis played Tom Mix in "Sunset," was he A Tom Mix Re-actor?

Ron Wanttaja
 
Another good pic:

cutiosity-wheel-jpl-morse-code.jpg

Yeah, I see it in the NASA sketch, but I'll be damned if I can see it in the tracks, or even in the actual picture of the wheel. In the rightmost two characters on the wheel, I couldn't tell if it was two J's or a J and a P, or even two P's. It's just not clear from the picture which of the holes are dits and which are dahs.
 
When Bruce Willis played Tom Mix in "Sunset," was he A Tom Mix Re-actor?

Bruce Willis....wasn't he on a tv show about some creepy looking old guy that adopted 3 young children.. and the youngest one kept saying...''whatchuu talkin' 'bout, Willis''.??
 
You're thinking of Tom Brady in the Brady Bunch.
 
Movie star Tom Mix rode around in a custom yellow supercharged Cord 812 Phaeton coupe with his ''TM'' brand molded into the tire tread so he could leave his mark all over Hollywood.
He did, until said Cord (powered by a Lycoming engine) went off a desert road into a wash, and the unsecured suitcase on the back shelf flew forward, hitting Mix's head and killing him. This marker is at a rest stop on Hwy 79, 18 miles south of Florence, AZ.



 
He did, until said Cord (powered by a Lycoming engine)...

A flathead, no less. Lycoming did a bunch of quirky automotive/marine stuff back in the day, such as V-12s used in American LaFrance fire engines of the 1930s.

cord_v8.jpg
 
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