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Long-lived Mars Rovers to Keep on Roving
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Oct 20, 2007 01:28 PM
from the getting-to-be-nerd-mascots dept.
from the getting-to-be-nerd-mascots dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a ComputerWorld article about the ongoing saga of the Martian rovers. They've overcome amazing obstacles and they show no signs of shutting down any time soon. "'After more than three and a half years, Spirit and Opportunity are showing some signs of aging, but they are in good health and capable of conducting great science,' John Callas, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. Since landing, the rovers have had to surmount a host of technical issues. Just a few weeks after landing, the Spirit rover had an out-of-memory problem that almost ended its mission before it began, but scientists were able to get the rover back into operation. In April 2004, both needed software updates to correct problems and improve their performance."
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Submission: Long-lived Mars rovers to keep on roving by Anonymous Coward
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Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap... (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA succeeds or fails... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:NASA succeeds or fails... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm a bit curious if the rovers are actually doing anything all that useful at the moment... after all, they move at a painfully slow rate, and the landscape isn't all that varied in the areas they're in.
Re:Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap... (Score:5, Interesting)
Look around the NASA / JPL sites (links not provided, I'm lazy and cranky besides Google needs the ad revenue). Lots of good, albeit plodding research. Much of this is just data collection - it will take years of analyzing the data and cross referencing it with other Mars probes and historical research but just sitting there and acting as a Martian weather buoy yields enormously important information.
We know so little of anything extra terrestrial that even low hanging fruit is satisfying.
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Re:Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap... (Score:4, Funny)
That's the fun part of being an engineer - you get booed when things fail short of their predicted lifetime. But when you screw up your predictions the other way and underestimate the lifetime... suddenly, you are a hero. No wonder engineers are inclined to be conservative.
Welcome to the world of real science - where data collection takes years, and data analysis takes decades. It's also a world most activities are painfully slow and/or boring and things don't happen at any great rate, and that simply isn't very exciting.
This isn't Mythbusters where everything is dumbed down, sexed up, and edited to a pace suitable for the short attention span of the post-MTV generation.
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You also have to keep in mind that topography isn't the issue, geology is. In that respect, even with the small distances they'v
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So if some critical assumptions that cascade through longevity calculations turn out to be better than assumed, it makes sense that we'd see dramatically longer actual li
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Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Think about all the stuff we don't know about every other planet out there - we can figure out the mass from watching things orbit it, and we can figure out the composition of the surface... but what about tw
made in...? (Score:5, Funny)
Cause they're acting more like a Honda than a GM at this point.
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Re:made in...? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just think.. (Score:5, Funny)
-jcr
Re:Just think.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or to put it in numbers, a 99.99% chance of surviving for 3 months, could easily translate into a 50% chance of lasting 5 years.
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Damn! (Score:2)
Repeatable? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that always seems to be missing is: why did these two robots continue to work so well, and, how do we go about repeating their success?
I've got the answer (Score:2, Funny)
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Lack of human safety issues and KISS [wikipedia.org].
They are both identical (Score:2)
Re:Repeatable? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for repeating the success, first of all you can't. Now we know you can keep continous solar power working on Mars, and that'll be the expectation from now on. Secondly, you need some luck - they're way past their design life and probably the only reason they're working is because it's massively overengineered with everyone thinking "like hell if it'll be our part that kills it after a week". I'm not sure how good setting a three year design life would help, because I figure they're already using pretty much the best they got. It's not like the cost of metal piece on the rover is anywhere near significant compared to the cost of getting it to Mars.
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Re:Repeatable? (Score:4, Informative)
I think its too early to say that. They still don't know when the water was there, how long, and how much. That's gonna take a lot of time-consuming study of a lot of details. Scientists are still discovering new things in Viking data.
Now we know you can keep continous solar power working on Mars, and that'll be the expectation from now on.
The whirlwind effect is kind of hit and miss, though. A device that depends on solar power may have many months of down-time if a whirlwind fails to show up. And as we've learned, big dust storms risk freezing the electronics to death. Thus, solar is still risky.
I figure they're already using pretty much the best they got.
I've heard there are known spots that lack redundancy on the rovers. A more expensive mission could potentially have more areas of redundancy.
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Except the next rover [nasa.gov] will use a radio isotope power system [nasa.gov]. No Solar Panels on this thing.
It's also a behemoth, and doesn't use airbags to land.
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You spend a lot of money overdesigning and overtesting every individual component - then you get lucky.
Famous last words. (Score:5, Funny)
sheesh.
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agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
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advertisements (Score:3, Insightful)
talk about some serious bragging rights!
Give the Engineers credit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep rollin' (Score:2)
They jus' keeps scoopin', surveyin', and a viewin'
They jus' keeps on rollin', keeps on rollin' along
On "scooping" - Re:Keep rollin' (Score:4, Informative)
They don't have scoopers, by the way, at least not in the Viking sense. They take the instruments to the soil instead of bring the soil to the instruments.
However, they can and do use their wheels to dig small trenches in order to analyze deeper soil. They do this by holding 5 wheels mostly still and move the 6th wheel.
It is a remarkably compact yet flexible way to get the most out of existing hardware.
Spirit cannot do this well anymore because of one stuck wheel. However, by dragging it around, it has become a happenstance "auto-trencher" and because of it they've stumbled upon some soil with high salt content underneath the visible layer that many scientists think is an important clue to the continuing water study (although the pieces to the puzzle still have yet to be all fit together). Now they regularly do spectral analysis on the bum-wheel trenches to see what's below the visible layer.
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There can be only one reason for their success... (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously!
I recently went to see "Postcards From Mars" (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the rovers (Spirit?) has blown a motor on a front wheel. As a result, it's normal mode of travel is now backwards. Also as a result, it tends to drag a groove in the Martian soil. In a recent transit, they were taking photographs of where they'd been and realized that the dragging wheel had exposed a different layer of soil, significantly different from the surface layer. Had the wheel not been dragging, they never would have discovered this.
Choosing a landing site is a tug-of-war between the engineers and geologists. The engineers want to land someplace safe, so they can make it in one piece and functional. The geologists want to land someplace interesting. Usually "interesting" and "safe" are opposites. It's a compromise.
Likewise, choosing what to look at is a compromise between safety and interesting. They've recently taken one of the rovers (Opportunity?) into a crater, realizing that they may not be able to get it out. But they've done all of the doable stuff nearby, the crater is compellingly interesting, and if they don't make it out, it's been a good run, and there's more to do in the crater.
The rovers are really slow. You may hear it, but it doesn't hit home until you've seen a visual demonstration of how slow those things are.
The rovers had been "wintering over," and they were worried about them getting enough sunlight to keep from getting too cold. While the Jim Bell was on the road for this book tour, and before the engagement I was at, they'd reacquired contact.
During the early days of the mission, the scientists were on Martian time, living 27 hour days. After the first few weeks, they settled out procedures and policies to allow them to go back on Earth time.
this is why space commercialization is a bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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A private company would kept them going to milk as much value out of the rovers as possible and to raise their chances of winning the bid for the next project.
Re:this is why space commercialization is a bad id (Score:4, Interesting)
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So what is a good ROI for the Hubble? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Manned Exploration is a Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
I consider that a fine investment of my tax dollars.
Parent