Mars Rover Upgraded 132
MrShaggy writes "According to a BBC article, NASA is upgrading their MARS rovers. The upgrade will allow the rovers to sift through the pictures of dust-devils, decide which is the most appropriate, send it
back. 'Clouds typically occur in 8-20% of the data collected right now,' Castano said. 'If we could look for a much more extended time and select only those images with clouds then we could increase our understanding of how and when these phenomena form. Similarly with the dust devils.' The article also discusses upgrades to the Mars Odyssey. They plan to make it self-reacting to events on the planet as they are happening."
Old News (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Absolutely amazing (Score:5, Informative)
They were originally supposed to last for 90 sols, or Martian days. They've now gone far past the origianl design goals and the benefit has been lots more data about Mars. Spirit is currently on it's 853rd sol. http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/home/ [nasa.gov]
Re:What Upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)
Not a PR conspiracy (Score:4, Informative)
Hogwash. It is a combination of factors:
1. Nasa increased quality control effort and spending in response to the Polar Lander failure and two orbiter failures.
2. Wind has blown dust off of the solar panels. Many expected the dust to be probe-sticky and accumulate based on the Viking lander data.
3. Constructor contract payments were actually stipulated based on a 3-month survivle. It is not an arbitrary deadline.
Re:Rumors that they're 'upgrading' from Ada. (Score:3, Informative)
Arianne 5 was the result of pure, old-fashioned incompetence. An obsolete component - left on when even its original function would not have been needed - dumps debug info on the bus, that's then interpreted as trajectory data. And the backup system runs identical hardware and identical software to the primary (I believe the backup actually failed a fraction of a second before the primary).
The rover software on the other hand - written in C, btw - is a gold standard of excellent engineering and testing practices. Most of the time it's not the platform that counts, it's the development team.