Long-lived Mars Rovers to Keep on Roving

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."

Re:Just think..

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a rover would be so big and heavy, it would never make it to mars. In order to make sure the rover will last for a couple of months given everything that could possibly go wrong, it has to be so over engineered, that odds are it will last many years.

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.

Re:Just think..

[pushing-robot]

Not [wikipedia.org] so [wikipedia.org] long [wikipedia.org]. As another poster mentioned, most planetary missions are spectacular either in success or failure.

Re:NASA succeeds or fails...

[IceD'Bear]

It just seem so to you, because you hear only of the spectacular missions. Routine missions aren't really interesting news.

Re:Repeatable?

[Tablizer]

You have to admit that over these three years it hasn't been very many scientific accomplishments they didn't do in the first three months

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.

On "scooping" - Re:Keep rollin'

[Tablizer]

They jus' keeps scoopin',

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.
         

Wrong

[Chmcginn]

Okay, so it didn't turn out as exciting as dozens of Hollywood movies would have you believe. The reason the rovers, the Viking probes... hell, every space mission that's landed somewhere... is important is because xenogeology needs up-close and personal data, rather than just spectrometer readings.

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 two inches down?

Re:Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap...

[DerekLyons]

It would be more advantageous to have such a rover - it would also cost at least an order of magnitude more (and probably a great deal more than that), and may or may not work. Also, you have to keep in mind that when they built this set, they only expected them to last a couple of weeks because of dust on the solar panels. They've been lucky in that respect, very lucky.
 
You also have to keep in mind that topography isn't the issue, geology is. In that respect, even with the small distances they've traveled, the science results have been astounding - they've encountered numerous different types of rocks already. Insofar as groundbreaking results go, we are back to the Mythbusters again. In the real world of science, groundbreaking comes from painstaking data collection and analysis. It doesn't come from Eureka! moments mostly, and it especially doesn't come from scattershot observations.
 
A friend of mine who is a retired field geologist pointed out to me that he spent nearly a decade in an area a little over five miles on a side - and his entire career working on the same general type of topography and geology. (He also points out that it's taken nearly two centuries and a metric buttload of man hours just to get a working handle on the geology of the continental US alone.)

Re:So what is a good ROI for the Hubble?

[religious freak]

A commercial venture would never get off the ground. There is absolutely nothing that is economically viable for a commercial venture in space. The closest thing is perhaps mining, but the ROI on that is non-existent http://www.forbes.com/2006/01/17/space-investing-mining-cx_lh_0118space-mining.html [forbes.com]