For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to turn today’s user-friendly gadgets into cold, utilitarian Soviet-era relics. It’s probably for the best that these don’t actually exist.

First Place—Bobo the Teddy
Second Place—Paul Vasco
Third Place—Goodie to You Dot Com

One of the US’ Mars Exploration Rovers is literally in a quagmire, scheduled for an eventual demise when it loses power. But it’s going down fighting, flashing a big middle finger to the robotic equivalent of death.

Five Mars rovers have been sent to… Mars. While the two launched by the Soviets (Mars 2 and 3) crashed, the next three launched by the US decades later all landed and explored the surface of the red planet successfully.

The first, the Mars Pathfinder, stopped reporting back to earth nearly three months after its July 4, 1997 landing. The newer duet of Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) however, after their January 2004 touchdowns, continue exploring the Martian landscape as I write this.

These two MERs, named the Spirit (MER-A) and Opportunity (MER-B) respectively, are pretty impressive for exploration robots designed with a three-month mission timeline in mind. Unfortunately, the former accidentally got stuck in sand last April, “at one edge of the Troy crater, west of the Home Plate plateau, in the Martian southern hemisphere.”

The last attempt to free Spirit was last November, and it made things worse; the right rear wheel of the six-wheeled robotic explorer broke down, adding to MER-A’s troubles. Back in 2006, the right front wheel failed, apparently due to an electric motor burning out.

Spirit needs to move, not only shake off dust that has settled and covered the rover’s life-giving solar panels. Come May this year, the Martian “winter” will hit Troy crater, cutting off the sun and effectively depriving the rover of its only source of power.

Still, whether Spirit finally meets its demise mid-2010, such mechanical hardiness is to be admired. Check out some of the photos taken by MER-A (posted all over this post) and you’ll see what I mean.

Sister rover Opportunity is currently crawling to the Endeavour Crater (the MER’s travels at an average speed of 10 millimeters a second) and benefited last April from Martian winds that blew dust off the rover’s solar panels, allowing it to significantly recharge its batteries.

In any case, when the robotic overlords begin their master plan to subjugate their human makers, will we see the same resiliency (or, more accurately, relentlessness) from the future army’s foot soldiers? Only time will tell, only time will tell.

Stay on top of the Spirit’s fight to survive at the Free Spirit website.

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Bruce Schneier wrote a great piece on the unencrypted Predator drone video feeds, noting that the drones were built for a post-Soviet, pre-insurgent era and that encryption, in the case of a live feed, is more of a problem than a threat.

The problem is, the world has changed. Today’s insurgent adversaries don’t have KGB-level intelligence gathering or cryptanalytic capabilities. At the same time, computer and network data gathering has become much cheaper and easier, so they have technical capabilities the Soviets could only dream of. Defending against these sorts of adversaries doesn’t require military-grade encryption only where it counts; it requires commercial-grade encryption everywhere possible.

While I agree with him whole-heartedly – Bruce knows his stuff – this is a huge PR mess for drone warfare. Luckily, these are drones and drones don’t have feelings and I suspect that once insurgents notice that they’re on a drone’s live feed, it’s probably too late.

There has been a good deal of focus on the Moon lately. First, the LRO sent back high-res photos of the surface, which was followed by the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the release of restored video footage from the Moon. Then the LRO produced the first photos of the equipment left behind from the Apollo missions and Walter Cronkite, the trusted voice who informed America about the events, passed away.

The LA Times is keeping the buzz alive with a fantastic article about the construction of the Saturn V rocket that shot the astronauts to the Moon.

“What set us apart was our ability to build a very big rocket to get us to the moon,” said Roger Launius, the Smithsonian Institution’s space historian, reflecting on the U.S.’ race with the then-Soviet Union to reach the moon first. “The Russians were never able to do that.”

If you think about it, that’s about as accurate as it gets. Our engineers who were backed by a massive budget, out-developed the Soviets with the Saturn V rocket. Well done, boys. Well done.