Mars Lander Faces Slow Death 212
Riding with Robots writes "It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. Starting today, mission managers will begin to gradually shut the lander's systems down, hoping to conserve dwindling solar power and thereby extend the remaining systems' useful life. 'Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.'"
Well, it's been a great track record lately... (Score:5, Insightful)
what I do not understand. (Score:4, Insightful)
so no sunlight = no power. the lander dies.
but in the next season, assuming it has not been buried in dust it will then get power again from the solar array, so what then? surely some basic SW should be functional as the power rises over a certain point. and it does not need a huge amount of power to transmit basic telemetry like temperature, light, perhaps the odd photo in low res broadcast at low power.
with all the research and development that went into the thing, I do not see why one season should kill it.
however, I recognize I am not an expert and the people who write the articles presumably are, so what have I missed?
corrosion in the environment?
batteries that cannot survive being fully discharged?
lander cannot run on solar alone?
anyhow, kudos to NASA for lasting well beyond the tables life span in the first place.
Re:Well, it's been a great track record lately... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well, it's been a great track record lately... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair here, Luna 24 returned 170.1g of regolith. NASA on the other hand landed six 14.7 tonne probes on the Moon in the late sixties to early seventies. They deployed a total of twelve autonomous intelligent versatile exploration units, traversing a total of 97km of lunar surface, and gathered some 381.7kg of samples and returned them to Earth.
To follow that spectacular accomplishment with a few petty robot landers seems... pointless.
Re:Well, it's been a great track record lately... (Score:4, Insightful)
But much cheaper.
Nuclear batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell aren't we putting nuclear batteries on these things?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NASA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what I do not understand. (Score:2, Insightful)
You've got it. Firstly the batteries will be destroyed by the prolonged cold. The other thing is that the entire site will be cloaked in a couple of meters of CO2 ice over winter; as it accumulates on the solar panels, the weight is expected to physically snap them off.
It would be neat if they could watch the entire process of this happening. I really wish they could build a probe that could monitor this on the ground.
Re:what I do not understand. (Score:1, Insightful)
We probably could, but this goes back to the entire part where it was only designed to last about 90 days or so, and to minimize costs.
Re:what I do not understand. (Score:3, Insightful)
But testing over a wider temperature range and getting it build to this spec would be expensive as hell.
On the other hand, 'expensive as hell' is not that much when compared to the cost of getting a pound of stuff from Earth to Mars - so if it allows us to use the rover twice as long, then it may be cheap enough to do, as sending a ten times more expensive rover would be much cheaper than sending two current rovers, just due to the high cost of transport.
Re:Nuclear batteries (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, it's been a great track record lately... (Score:3, Insightful)
The secret to exceeding expectations is to set them very low. In this case, they built rovers that might last several years, then slapped a "90 day warranty" sticker on them.
Re:Nuclear batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty confidentent that even a catostrophic failure wouldn't create a nuclear meltdown even remotely like that. I could see the nuclear material falling to the ground and needing a cleanup crew to take care of it as a worst case, but I can't see something like this creating a new Cherynobyl (spelling probably off missing my coffee this morning) unless someone REALLY screws up.. but if your worried about that you should probably be more worried about them wanting to install new nuclear powerplants then some "nuclear battery"
Re:From another Australian (Score:3, Insightful)
Very well.
The war in Iraq has cost America, at the time of writing, approximately 566 billion dollars.
The entire Apollo project, $25.4 Billion in 1969 dollars (or approximately $135 Billion in 2005 dollars.) Sources = (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program, http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home [nationalpriorities.org])
So what I'm saying is, for the cost of the War in Iraq, America could have over four complete moon programs. Not moon missions, mind, four complete *programs*- built entirely from scratch.
Let's say NASA take one moon mission to *actually* return to the moon properly- with return trips, flybys, dozens of manned and unmanned missions, reuse of the hardware for other projects, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions [wikipedia.org] for what this one single "mission" is buying, and remember that still leaves three whole other missions and change to do other things.
Let's spend two missions on doing all of the above, but for Mars. That means multiple manned missions, return journeys, the works. Give Mars the full lunar "One small step for man" treatment and assume it costs twice as much (and takes a lot longer).
We still have one mission left. Let's do something crazy with it- and I'm open to suggestions here. Permanent lunar settlement? Completely and utterly explore our planet's oceans (which we know less about than space, BTW...)? Solar-system wide Internet? (Aliens need lolcats too..) ... the possibilities here are truly staggering. And don't forget your change.
This is what I meant by more funding. I mean to say that NASA, which has endured endless budget cuts since the 60's (which, I'll concede, have forged a more efficient government agency), deserves far, far, far more of America's money. America's money which is being horrifically misspent.
Essentially, what I'm trying to say is... yes, it's inefficient. Horribly so. So? Throw money at it. I'll say it again- THROW MONEY AT IT. The capslock shows I'm serious. NASA is one of the few (read- the only) organisation I'll say this about, but... throw money at it. Seriously. For the cost of the Iraq war, we could have had so much.