Long-lived Mars Rovers to Keep on Roving 177
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."
Anyone who gives NASA a bad rap... (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA succeeds or fails... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NASA succeeds or fails... (Score:4, Informative)
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It's called nominal (Score:2)
Until Vista End-Of-Life. Which will be before the rovers die.
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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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Back on topic, given the HUGE size of mars compared to the absolutely miniscule portion of what we've looked at, I can't help but think that it'd
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Would it be nicer if we had a rover that could do 25MPH over rough terrain, on another planet? Sure, I'm sure that'd be awesome. But there are a lot of technical problems doing that, and if you want to go faster you have to spend more weight on motors, solar pan
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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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The book, too (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the saga cuts off two years ago. Those robotic drama queens kept writing the story long after the book ends.
A
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I agree wholeheartedly, but most of the "regular" people giving NASA bad rap do it since they are conspiracy freaks. One of my buddies here is such a freak and he constantly keeps bugging me with various suitable entangled plots about how NASA hid a UFO or lied about the rovers or whatever.
The latest thing is that some photo is floating around that app
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But remember - all the races are the same, right? I'm sure when enough Africans have lived on previously WHITE land, the LAND itself will magically make them intelligent enough to land a rover on Mars, right? Since that's the 'official' story: white people aren't more intelligent than blacks, no sirree... It's the LAND that whites LIVE ON, that makes us more intelligent! Nothing to do with our genes, of course...
Nope. It's a strict case of upbringing. There are any number of "whites" in Africa who are dumb as rocks (same here too, btw.) And there are also numerous examples of "African Americans" who were quite simply brilliant -- the only reason why there weren't more blacks involved in the Apollo program was racism, plain and simple.
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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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.
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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I thought most electronics would run better at extremely cold temperatures.
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That is only the case if designed that way. Besides the effect on electrical characteristics, the things that have to be taken into consideration include physical changes in the materials themselves and the thermal expansion coefficients. I suspect the later is a major issue for the landers because failure will tend to be irreversible. I suppose if they are RoHS compliant and use tin solders that could also cause a problem at low
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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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...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.
Exactly! Too many people seem to believe that there's some wonderful magic at play here. There isn't; it's just that every engineer on this project did their best within the constraints they were working within, and many of their design decisions would have been exactly the same if they had been expecting a three-year mission.
The engineers were obviously given the funds and the time they needed to produce a great design -- that's the real miracle here!
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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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I totally agree about spending money in the pursuit of knowledge over violence, but statements like yours make me cringe:
zero on things like this which expand our knowledge for the betterment of us all
How does this help the people that have core human needs that are not being fulfilled. And I'm not talking about laptops or vaccinations. I'm talking about basic food and shelter.
Space exploration is a good thing. I'd put it in the top 10 ways to spend public money. But I also don't pretend that it's a great leap forward for all of humanity. It isn't.
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True, but I can't think of a better alternative. Giving food and shelter to starving countries doesn't help humanity either. The advancement of science and technology clearly has the potential to help all of humanity; I don't see nearly the same potential in handing out bags of grain to third world countries.
I'm not a fan of human su
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Throughout human history, those civilizations that have advanced have done so at times when their individual lives were unencumbered by a constant search for food and shelter.
What the fuck does a starving kid in Detroit, or Sierra Leone for that matter, care about a 1TB hard drive or mapping another solar system.
keeping a few million uneducated people from starving is only beneficial to those few million uneducated starving people
So let's look at it from a purely economic standpoint: If we can get people healthy and sheltered enough to get them an education that's a few million more people to make your Nikes, to dig th
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Interesting opinion. Doesn't seem very historically sound, but I'll ignore that for now. Are you saying those people are unencumbered by a constant search for food their own food and shelter or anyone's? If the US were encumbered by a constant search for food for other countries I can see were that would impede advances.
So let's lo
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Agreed. If it makes you feel better, give all you want. It's a worth while activity, but let's not try to compare feeding a few people to bettering humanity.
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Space race is all PR now. All you need is the capability to launch nukes into space and aim them down and you've won. That means we won decades ago.
advertisements (Score:3, Insightful)
talk about some serious bragging rights!
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Mostly because they are very small and very specialized companies that don't market to the general public in the first place. A prime example is Honeybee Robotics [honeybeerobotics.com] who built the rock grinding tools for the rovers.
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it would reduce the expense of space exploration.
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Give the Engineers credit... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I believe that an understanding of both sides helps solve problems while dramatically reducing the need for engineers to translate to science and vice versa.
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Engineers deserve a huge proportion of the credit, but this statement is too much. In the first place, scientists worked closely with engineers in the design and during the manufacturing process. Plus, how do you know whether some scientist didn't come up with an idea the engineers could use during a crisis? Not to mention the fact that a lot of people are both scientists and engineer
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Way to go, team!
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.
There can be only one reason for their success... (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously!
GM should be inspired by this (Score:2)
At 3,100 miles, trouble started with strange sounds in the cabin area till I gave up on it. GM, take leaf from the rover engineers, you'll surely benefit.
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1) GM doesn't make Dodge vehicles. Daimler-Chrysler does, so you're an idiot.
2) Reliability is pretty consistent across-the-board now. American cars generally aren't any worse than Japanese cars (generally.)
Of course, the fact that you don't even know what company makes the car you thought was so terrible makes me wonder if you're just trolling here in the first place.
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Did the GP say GM makes the Dodge Caravan? I guess you're the idiot. I only stated how I wanted GM to get inspired by the rover's performance.
You are involved in what I normally call sysntax distortion! Sheesh!
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In recent Consumer Reports evaluations, Toyota has fallen out of the top spots of reliability in 6 and 8 cylinder models, and Buick (GM) is in the top 10.
Extremely cool... (Score:2)
"I've been a Mars Rover for many a year..."
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.
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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)
So what is a good ROI for the Hubble? (Score:3, Insightful)
When NASA says "90 days" of useful life ... (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, kudos to the engineers and operators for keeping both of the beasties running for so long. It would have been even better if they had planned for an much extended lifetime for the rover
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Read "Roving Mars" (Score:2)
If you want to know just how amazing these machines are, you *must* read Roving Mars [amazon.com]. It is amazing how on several occasions, one person made the difference between utter failure and spectacular success. And often these decisions were against NASA brass, scientist's opinions, and conventional wisdom.
In fact, I have to admit that once the book gets to the point where the Rovers actually land, it gets a little less exciting.
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Imagine if sifting through the data of someplace the Mars Rover had been a year and a half ago we discove
Re:Manned Exploration is a Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
I consider that a fine investment of my tax dollars.
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