Mars Rovers Return to Exploration

inkslinger77 writes "The two Mars rovers that have been carefully conserving critical power supplies since June, when the summer dust-storm season began on the red planet, are now springing back to work as the storms subside. Typically, the solar panels on each rover produce about 700 watt-hours of electricity per day — enough to light a 100-watt bulb for seven hours, according to NASA. But this year's dust storms reduced that to as little as 128 watt hours per day. When daily power generation is down to less than 400 watt-hours, the rovers suspend their driving on the planet and stop using their robotic arms, cameras and other instruments. But they are back in action now!"

It runs and runs and runs...

[zeromorph]

It runs and runs and runs...

The dust storm even kind of polished [nasa.gov] it.

Go rover go!

Since it seems to come up every time

[evanbd]

The issue of whether or not to put some sort of dust-clearing device on the panels was examined critically and decided on early in this project. In short: they didn't know what dust storms would do to the panels; it turns out they tend to remove dust. Several options for dust clearing were considered -- wipers, electrostatic techniques, peel-away plastic, and probably others I've forgotten. All of them would have *probably* worked, and all of them would have taken up space and weight. Essentially it came down to choosing between dust removal and an instrument. Faced with that decision, they decided that better quality, more complete data was more interesting than having the rovers run longer.

Of course, they got lucky, and the dust storms seem to clear dust off the panels. So there was even less need for dust-clearing than they thought there might be.

Re:Next?

[Soft]

It doesn't make much difference. Phoenix [arizona.edu] is on its way and MSL [nasa.gov] is being prepared for launch in 2009.

mars solar time

[harlemjoe]

Shame on me, but this is the first time I visited the mars rover website. It struck me as slightly odd that NASA researchers call the Martian Solar Day the sol.

Anyway, for those similarly bemused and/or further intrigued, here is the explanation of Mars Solar Time as Adopted by the Mars24 Sunclock [nasa.gov]

Re:I don't think you need NASA to say that

[Scutter]

But on Slashdot, uids under 20000 are only for old people!

We're not old. We're well-read.

Built NASA Tough

[Zorbane]

I grew up in a coal mining area of Illinois. The worlds largest shovel (Marion 6360 [stripmine.org]) was in the mine where my dad worked...and it used the same crawlers that NASA made for the space shuttle. Down at NASA, they have the thing crawl out on a carefully leveled bed of pea gravel....but down in the mines, they had some mats to lay down, but the crawlers would still crunch over stuff. Apparently, when some of the NASA people came up to look at how the shovel was doing on their crawler system, they were utterly horrified at the conditions...not one of them thought it possible for the crawlers to perform in half so "bad" of conditions and still work for any amount of time. The crawlers worked all the way till the shovel burnt in the early 90's and the thing was scrapped (an oil fire hot enough to split open the inches thick steel skin of the sucker)...

Re:Next?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the space business, if you have hardware on mars, it's already magnitudes better than anything newly developed that hasn't launched yet. Abandoning an old project for a new one risks the new one not making it there successfully. Far better to use what you have as long as you can. It it ain't broke....

Re:Batteries

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Hope they're not Li-ion."

When asked if the Rover was concerned about having lion batteries, it replied: "Hakuna Matata"

Re:Software Never Dies

[Cally]

Actually, the rover software has been updated several times since launch, most recently four or five months ago. They've added new features like "go and touch" (a development of the previous "touch and go".) TnG means they park by a rock, make sure it's in range of the arm, then they can uplink a sequence saying "get the arm out, study the rock with the Mossbauer / micro-imager / RAT / etc, then put it away and drive 35 metres on heading 182 degrees". It used to take a day or so of fine adjustments after the rovers arrived at a rock the team wanted to study before they were able to instruct it to get the arm out and start working on it. "Go and Touch" means they can tell the rover to drive to the rock 35 metres away on heading 182, then get it into range of the arm, then deploy the arm and start studying it. There's also visidom, improved image-detection code that makes the rover able to make longer drives into uncharted areas before stopping to call back home - it's more autonomous. This is a big deal when you're only doing one uplink sequence per sol.

As the chances of Oppy still being in a condition for long drives across the landscape after it's done with Victoria Crater are slim, it doesn't seem likely visidom will get much use on the MERs. I'm sure the libs will be reused in future though...