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Air Bag Blocks Spirit's Path
cosog writes "bad news everyone: 'Two sections of the air bags used to cushion Spirit during the landing phase are obstructing the vehicle's path.'. Fortunately scientists have a solution for it: 'We'll lift up the left petal of the lander, retract the airbag, then let the petal back down[...]'. This means that: 'The earliest the six-wheeled Spirit rover will get rolling is Jan. 14, about three days later than originally planned, NASA said'."
Every system is working as designed, so there won't be much to worry about. I believe they could likely solve that problem. And they still have days to test the rover before they could roll it off anyway, so even if lifting the panel doesn't work, maybe by the time they tested the system and agreed on where to go, the airbag would have deflated enough on its own in the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Drive off another ramp, if it comes to that. The rover has six wheels and was designed to worked even if the landing site didn't turn out to be as flat as it is.
It seems that despite those gorgeous panaromic pictures they have got, the boffins haven't decided on where to go. Perhaps this little inconvenince will give them a few extra days to come to a hopefully good decision.
Being stuck in an airbag. Getting anything entangled around the wheels. Sitting betweent rocks that are too large, all problems that would be trivial to solve -- if someone could go there and untangle the thing.
As it is, a single wrong command can make the probe immobile for life. The mission cost 820$ million.
I think you'd also be a little bit more careful about pushing buttons if you knew that pushing the wrong one *once* could waste $820 million and strand a major part of the science people have worked hard for a decade to land on Mars.
There's no real down-side to being *too* careful. 3 days more or less on the lander is unimportant. They can always extend the mission in the other end if there's still more interesting stuff to do. (planned is 90 days of exploration)
I disagree.. you have a fixed # of days for exploration. If this thing can't drive off the ramp it *came* to Mars with, it probably won't fare well out in the open terrain. They sent it into a desert on a hostile planet and they are worried about it brushing against the airbags. Please, maybe they need to do *something* with the rover in case a wind storm comes along and blows it off the lander first.
They most likely want to follow procedure. It would be rather unfourtunate to spend approx. $800 million, travel the approx. 78 milliom kilometers to Mars, land successfully and then do something stupid like flip the rover or get an airbag tangled in it's wheels because we did not want to spend a few days to get things sorted. While I do think that NASA needs to be a bit more "ballsy" to be blunt, I believe that this is a case in which procedure should attempt to be followed.
Why not rechargable? What in the environment prevents it? Inquiring mind wants to know.... and for the dust, maybe they could use a few peeling skins like racecar drivers' visors.
Two reasons: First, rechargable batteries would have required charging circuits, adding weight and complexity. Second, the mission was not to do an extended exploration. It was "Pathfinder", a demonstration of the new technologies that would be used to better effect on later missions. Pathfinder was one of NASA's Discovery missions, which all had this goal to some extent. The little rover worked for about 30 days, and performed some experiments. At the end of those 30 days, there was really little more that it could have added to what it already did.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!