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Spirit Rover Lands Successfully

Posted by michael on from the airbags-save-lives dept.

So, as I write this, the latest word is: the Spirit rover has landed and NASA has received a signal indicating it landed right-side up (so it shouldn't have any problems in the unfolding process) and will shortly be retracting the protective airbags which kept it from splattering all over the countryside. Y'all can fill in later news in the comments below. There's a nice site with up-to-the-minute text updates.

6 of 849 comments (clear)

  1. NASA TV press conference by dev_alac · · Score: 5, Informative

    Press conference here at 9:30pm PST, so in about 25 min.

  2. Re:Take that Beagle 2! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ah you say that, but today (January 4th) we should know if Beagle 2 is actually alive or not. As I understand it, when The Beagle goes this long without having made successful communication, it starts to transmit all the time. This, coinciding with the oribiter being in the right orbit to pick it up, should let us know whether it's ok or not.

    Fingers crossed!

  3. Re:Mars Rover Spirit Lands, Goes Radio Silent by rufey · · Score: 5, Informative
    In watching the whole thing on NASA TV (realtime), the radio signal did disappear for about 10 minutes right after landing (and everyone at JPL was bitting their nails), but that was expected since the lander would be bounding all over the place until it came to rest.

    Although the roughly 10 minutes was longer than anyone expected the signal to be gone, it wasn't all that unusual. When NASA's DSN locked back onto the signal, it was strong. It is then that NASA learned the lander landed right-side-up and the airbags were still inflated (which is very good news). Airbag deflation, petel opening, and the first survey of the landing site is up next. We might even have our first pictures within the next 12 hours or so.

  4. PowerPC-powered rover by Bigbluejerk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Cool. The rover is powered by a PowerPC chip:

    "The computer in each Mars Exploration Rover runs with a 32-bit Rad 6000 microprocessor, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC chip used in some models of Macintosh computers, operating at a speed of 20 million instructions per second. Onboard memory includes 128 megabytes of random access memory, augmented by 256 megabytes of flash memory and smaller amounts of other non-volatile memory, which allows the system to retain data even without power."

  5. Total Mission Bandwidth & Data Constraints by aldheorte · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is an interesting and informative entry on the NASA site regarding how much data can be transmitted back and forth between Earth and the rover:

    http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/comm_data.html

    If we assume best case scenario for the transmission potential stated there and assume the direct-to-Earth rate averages the midpoint between the stated 12000bps and 3500bps, the total daily data for a single Martian day, direct-to-Earth and orbiter relay potential combined, is on the order of 17MB. The total data for the entire mission is on the order of 1,550MB.

    Of course, this has to include protocol overhead, error, and operating instructions, but it provides one quantitative, if not qualitative, answer to how much data can be retrieved by the mission. In this case, a bit more than 2 CDs worth.

  6. Re:Why bounce? by codepunk · · Score: 5, Informative

    The density of the atmosphere of mars is only one percent as dense as our atmosphere on earth. Due to the thin atmosphere a parachute alone is not enough to slow the craft sufficiently for a safe landing. Spirit used a parachute then retro rockets fire just above the surface to practically stop the craft. The airbags inflate and take up the small drop that is left.

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