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Two New Mars Rovers Will Be Launched In June

Posted by timothy on from the a-roving dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a story which talks about the next two rovers to explore Mars which will be launched in June of this year. NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. From the article: 'The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart, will have more power and greater mobility than the Pathfinder's Sojourner rover. Both should be able to trek up to 44 yards across the surface every Martian day (24 Earth hours and 37 Earth minutes).'"

26 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Golf cart? by ErnieD · · Score: 1

    Is it me, or are these things getting really big? If I recall correctly, the first mars rover was no bigger than a PC tower. Guess they need the space for a lot more instrumentation and tools?

    1. Re:Golf cart? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've seen these rovers first hand and they are NOT each the size of a golf cart. Check this picture and get a better idea of their size:

      http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/spacecraft/ hi res/roverteam.jpg

    2. Re:Golf cart? by barakn · · Score: 3, Informative

      Your link has an extraneous space in it. Here's the functioning version: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/gallery/spacecraft/hi res/roverteam.jpg

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  2. Yeah whatever by NanoGator · · Score: 1

    "NASA is borrowing some things from the Pathfinder mission to help insure a success as well as doing extensive testing which was apparently not done for the Mars Polar Lander. "

    Either way, they should still call it Jupiter 2.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  3. wheee by Joe+the+Lesser · · Score: 2, Funny

    The two new rovers, which are about the size of a golf cart

    They are so having a race!

    --
    "I only speak the truth"
    Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
    1. Re:wheee by barakn · · Score: 1

      ...at the blazing speed of 44 yards every Martian day (24 hours 37 minutes). Why, that's over 5 feet an hour!

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  4. Oh No! by SN74S181 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This will become a high profile project. So it won't be at all the skunkworks project that the earlier rover was.

    It'll be full of egos, and every department of NASA will want to be involved.

    We'll be lucky if it even lands on Mars.

    1. Re:Oh No! by uncoveror · · Score: 1

      This mission will be only as successful as the Zhti Ti Kofft allow it to be. They won't tolerate us discovering anything substantive, like any more hard information about them. Read about what they did to Mars Climate Orbiter, and Mars Polar Lander. We already learned all they want to show us when we found their death ray on the dark side of the moon.

      --
      The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
  5. Everytime I see pix of Mars by PateraSilk · · Score: 1

    I wanna sign up for the next packet tour. When's Dick Rutan getting his Marz-EZ lander done?

    --
    Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
  6. Argh by Bob+Vila's+Hammer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After reading the article, I again became frustrated after finding that the length of these rover's operational lives seems to be limited only by the amount of dust collecting on its solar cells. These new rovers were supposedly built upon designs and characteristics of the old Sojourner model operated in 1997. Why wouldn't they improve upon this restricted system and incorporate something to prevent the dust from covering its energy supply?

    --


    --"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
    1. Re:Argh by robslimo · · Score: 1

      Same here. Couldn't they devise a simple mechanism similar to a windshield wiper to keep the dust off? Or perhap something akin to the plastic sheet roll that they use in racecams to keep the rubber/tar/smoke/dust from blocking the view? Maybe a low volume air compressor that would occasionally blast a little jet of martian air over the panel surfaces?

      That ain't 'rocket science'.

      -robSlimo

    2. Re:Argh by rk · · Score: 1

      That's certainly a constraint, but there's also a mission ops constraint in that there has to be a highly coordinated mission planning team on duty 24 by 7 for each rover. That's much more expensive than doing mission ops for something like Mars Odyssey's THEMIS that two people, working (more or less) normal working days can handle.

  7. Earth hours? by bravehamster · · Score: 2, Informative
    An hour is an hour, regardless of where you are in the universe (relativistic effects aside). Days and years vary with the planet you're on. So if you want to compare the Martian day to the Earth day, you could say that a Martian day equals 1.0256945 Earth days. Just please don't ever use the words Earth hour or Earth minute ever again. Unless, that is, the reigning body of mars decided to create a new system of measuring time based upon the martian day as a base unit. If that ever happens, I would hope they have the sense to not use the same units (hours, days, etc.) Perhaps Marklars? Have you got the time? Sure, it's Marklar Marklar's past Marklar.

    --
    ---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
    1. Re:Earth hours? by LMCBoy · · Score: 1

      There's actually nothing wrong with saying "Earth hours". The fundamental unit of time is a "Day"; the time it takes between two successive transits of the Sun. (Actually, if you want to get technical, a Day is really defined as the average time between successive solar transits for a particular year: 1820). A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day, a minute is *defined* to be 60 seconds, and an Hour is *defined* to be 60 minutes. The point is, they are all tied to the length of an Earth-Day, so using "Hours" on Mars is just as arbitrary as using "Days" on Mars.

      Still not convinced? Merriam-Webster defines Hour as "the 24th part of a day", as does dictionary.com.

      --
      Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
    2. Re:Earth hours? by bravehamster · · Score: 2, Informative
      A second is *defined* to be the 1/86,400th part of a Day

      Actually that's not quite correct anymore. Look at the link you provided, or anyplace else where the SI units are spelled out. The second is the SI's basic unit of time, and is defined thusly:
      The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.


      That's the *current* definition of a second, not the historical definition that you were quoting. So, an hour represents 33,093,474,372,000 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom, and is no longer defined according to the length of the day. This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long. While useful for writing high school term papers, the definition from Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate source in science.

      --
      ---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
    3. Re:Earth hours? by LMCBoy · · Score: 1

      Ahem, like I said, the definition of a Day I was using was the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820.

      Where do you think they got the 9,192,631,770 periods from when defining the atomic second? That's right: it's the number of Cesium 133 periods that makes a second equal to the 1/84600th part of one Day (as defined in terms of the average interval between successive solar transits in 1820).

      This is a good thing, considering that an Earth day is a bit less than 24 hours long.

      Actually, the current interval between successive solar transits is a bit longer than 24 hours. Better read that USNO page again.

      While useful for writing high school term papers, the definition from Merriam-Webster is not the ultimate source in science.

      Ah, a thinly veiled insult. How nice. Can't we just exchange pedantries without stooping to such sophmoronics? Anyway, your insult is poorly motivated, seeing as I actually pointed you to the USNO link first, whose credentials should be more than adequate for the present conversation.

      --
      Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
    4. Re:Earth hours? by bravehamster · · Score: 1
      Ah, a thinly veiled insult. How nice. Can't we just exchange pedantries without stooping to such sophmoronics?

      Indeed we can. All I was attempting to point out was that your use of the definition from Merriam-Websters dictionary should not *convince me* of anything. I retract the thinly veiled insult, but my point remains: Dictionary definitions are annoying as hell, and usually useless, in the context of a scientific or historical discussion.

      Nothing you have said refutes my original point. While the definition of the second may have its origin according to the length of the day, it's *current* definition has nothing to do with the length of Earth's day. A second remains a second no matter where you are, and this is true also for hours, and minutes. It is true, as you said that the day was once the basic unit of measurement. This is no longer true and has not been true for many years. The second is now the basic unit of measurement for time, and it's length is based upon a physical constant. And so minutes, and hours are also based on physical constants that remain the same no matter where you are in the universe.

      --
      ---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
  8. This time around... by kescom · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...the images you see should be true-color, too.

    A large majority of publicy-available Mars images--particularly maps taken from orbit by Mars Odyssey and most of the Sojourner images--are not really color-calibrated at all. Mars is actually a lot redder than you think, and you really can't see clouds at all.

    Here at Cornell, we're working on properly calibrating the images for the new missions. With some luck, everything that's publicly released next year will be sRGB! (Check out progress.)

    1. Re:This time around... by barakn · · Score: 1

      Color manipulation has often been employed to enhance otherwise subtle variations, like the afore-mentioned clouds. I suppose you'll color-calibrate infrared images so that they are invisible to the naked eye? Anyway, Mars is not redder than I think. I've seen it with my own eye, I know what color it is, and I'd prefer to see enhanced images of it.

      --
      "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
    2. Re:This time around... by rk · · Score: 1

      The majority of the data taken by Odyssey would not be terribly useful in true color, since most of the THEMIS data is IR, and therefore is invisible to the human eye. :-)

      Yes, I know there's a visible component, too. I look forward to seeing the true color images, especially at up to 17 meters resolution. Whee!

    3. Re:This time around... by corleth · · Score: 1

      In addition, even visible instruments tend to be at wavelengths that are imperfectly aligned to human eyesight. The apparently true colour images produced by the Viking Orbiters in the 1970s were derived from only two wavebands (approximately blue and orange), therefore requiring some interpolation and guesswork to come up with RGB. Still, they appear to have done a pretty good job, despite initial problems (they assumed that the sky should be blue, and calibrated the colours accordingly). Anyone working with colour film scanners will have encountered the same sort of problems unless they employed professional calibration techniques.

      I might be wrong, but I think that THEMIS is the first successful orbital instrument to carry a sensor (the VIS component) with 3 wavebands close to the colour receptors of the human eye (0.425 microns, 0.540 microns and 0.654 microns). Perhaps there was something on Phobos, but that hardly returned any data.

      True colour is largely useless for studying geology, as rocks show more spectral variation at longer wavelengths.

    4. Re:This time around... by kescom · · Score: 1

      THEMIS does have five (realistically four) visible bands, which let us cover the entire visible colorspace (replying to lk). And while true-color isn't directly useful for geology, astronomers do want to see what the surface looks like anyway.

      On the THEMIS imager--yes, the bands are definitely close. However, output images were never plotted in a standard colorspace. There are also latent sun-illumination effects that need to be removed.

  9. Re:Programmed? by K3lvin · · Score: 1

    Mars Express website

  10. Why so much "faster, better, cheaper" bashing ? by Murphy(c) · · Score: 1

    I don't understand why so many people are constantly bashing Goldin's faster, better, cheaper (FBC) approch. And it's not only our own /. crowd I'm thinking about, but even journalist like the person that wrote the abcnews article.

    I mean, the first part of the article somewhat describes that FBC sucks, then it explains that this new mission is going to use trusted technology like, [guess what ?], bouncing airbag landing, aeroshell insertion (probably aeorbreaking too). Guess when all this "trusted" technology whas first tested ?

    I'm sure Goldin must have done some things badly, but I personally don't think that FBC is one of it. Given the budget cuts that NASA has gone thru and the pressure for more "exciting" science from the general public, I really think that FBC was the logical answer. Sure it fumbled on a couple of occasions, but I won't even count the loss of the Mars Polar lander (the Metric vs US, snafu) as a cause of FBC, more like the exact reason why having common standard is a Good Thing(tm).

    I still think that some wonderfull experiments have come out of FBC, Pathinder is certanly one, DS-1 too (first autonomous navigation, first Ion Drive), and not to mention the Mars Global Surveyor.

    I liked the idea of trying and squeezing every last bit of science out of a project. Like the NEAR Shoemaker's landing on Eros /rant
    Murphy(c)

    1. Re:Why so much "faster, better, cheaper" bashing ? by Rxke · · Score: 1

      yea, DS-1 and NEAR, that was fun! It was a real adventure to follow all the technical solutions and extensions to the misions, the daring experiments (the unplanned landing on an asteroid!) Think FBC just made it psychologically possible to be that daring with the hardware, like, its cheap stuff, cobbled together, what would happen if we tried to mcguyver this broken startracker, if its not gonna work, well, pity, but, the bird was beyond its primary mission anyway. With expensive hardware, there wwill be alot more hesitation to experiment, the financial risk being too big. Afraid these rovers will be idling al lot of times when nervous technicians see a big bad boulder in front of them -pushing that big red emergency stop button on their consoles, afraid to bump into it, despite the auto-anti-collisionwhatsoever software built in. (and 15 minutes later, the lander grinds to a halt, the boulder already far behind... sigh)

  11. Re:This is great!!! by Rxke · · Score: 1

    No, there are years of work going into a mission like this. its not like, "Whoa, colombia desintegrated! let's put sum rovers on mars quick!" the building of these complex thingies can't be done in a couple of months, we're nowhere that far technically speaking.