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News from Mars
An anonymous reader writes "While the Beagle 2 may have been gobbled up by Mars--Eater of Spacecraft, the main part of the ESA's recent Mars mission is doing well. The Mars Express Orbiter has sent back some amazing pictures of The Grand Canyon of Mars (Valles Marineris). Yes, this is the same gigantic geological feature that was missed by Mariner 4, 6, and 7 but finally found by Mariner 9. In other news, the Spirit rover is getting ready to grind the rock Adirondack (picture)."
The ESA site appears to be getting quite slow. A mirror of the large image of Valles Marineris is here.
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RTFA, and "The lower part of the picture shows the same region in perspective view as if seen from a low-flying aircraft."
Still annoying, though. And should be disclaimered better somewhere on the picture or at least on the detail page where you get the high-res version.
temp is between 5-15 degree's celsius. here's a fact sheet, i tried to post it here but it said there as too many "JUNK" characters... fact sheet here
If you fly lower, you'll make more orbits per day, making the images zip past the camera even faster. With a pushbroom-type sensor such as this appears to be, this can actually lead to worse resolution in the direction of travel. But, being closer would make the perpindicular direction a little better -- it's all about compromises.
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"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Check out Lunokhod, two Russian moon rovers from the early 1970s that drove around for months. Not to bring down the Spirit guys or their great work, but their talk of pioneering 30cm moves sound a bit dull compared with Lunokhod.....
Lunokhod had the advantage of a 2-second message turnaround time instead of the approx. 20 minutes one gets from Mars. Thus, Lunokhod did not have to carry a brain of any kind. Spirit can travel quite a distance on its own, making navigation decisions if one lets it. However, they are being cautious at this point in the mission. They are likely to get braver toward the end of the mission when there is less to lose.
Lunokhod was just a RC car more or less. But still a bold craft for its time. I read that it took 5 guys to drive it.
Table-ized A.I.
1) It is less complex to insert a craft from earth near the equator than at the poles.
2) There is more solar energy available at the equator.
3) They are more interested in the geology of a lake bed [IE, history of liquid water than they are looking at ice.
4) Not much is known about the surface of Mars. The two landing sites are good candidates for exploration.
You've already had one. There's been a theory that NASA was coloring the all of the images Red, and that the sky is really blue just like earth. Of course this theory was rapidly debunked Here. But hey - no one seems to be happy with the truth.
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No. Mars Express was always the main mission.
Beagle 2 was a last-minute afterthought, built in a hurry, on a shoestring. It also had a very limited mass-budget, so that it could piggy-back on the same launcher.
temp is between 5-15 degree's celsius.
From that fact sheet you linked to:
Average temperature: ~210 K (-63 C)
Diurnal temperature range: 184 K to 242 K (-89 to -31 C) (Viking 1 Lander site)
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The top part of the picture is the actual image. The part along the bottom is a 3D rendering of what it would look like to a low-flying plane.
You can see both images seperately on this page.
if the purpose of these landers is to discover water or traces, why didnt they land at the poles where some people are convinced there is water instead of landing in the middle of a desert
They are there to solve a mystery, not just find water. The crater area of the landing site LOOKS likes like it used to be a lake because it is filled in like a dry lake and because it has (now-dry) river-like channels flowing into it. What made the channels? If Mars used to contain large lakes near the equator, that is an important find. It could mean that Mars was once more Earthlike.
Table-ized A.I.
Solar powered, there were solar cells under the lid. It used a polonium 210 source to keep it warm during the 14 (Earth) day long lunar night.
Since at least one Lunokhod failed to make Earth orbit (February 1969) that means a lot of one of the nastiest radioisotopes known to man came raining back to Earth.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Is it true that spirit makes use of Java? Or does only the "client" software used to control it,use Java.
Much software ON THE GROUND at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is written in Java, but not software on the spacecraft.
I wrote some of the software used for the mission in Java, and it worked very well for our purposes, namely due to platform independence and quick development time. We had a heck of a time with some of the GUI code, however.
The rover runs VxWorks from Wind River. Very solid. Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
Whoever told you Beagle2 was the main part, was wrong. I am sure it's been said many times before (and judging by the number of people still not knowing what it's all about, it was said in vain, nevertheless...), it was not the main part of the mission. It may have recieved most press and media attention, but it was not the main mission. Ah, why do I bother.
ok... since some people still seem convinced that beagle 2 was the main point of the misson, check this news release from ESA dating back to 1998 where they endorse the initial mars express payload:
News release
No mention of beagle 2. "Possibility left open of a small lander"...
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I make it seven.
So a pretty depressing story for the Soviets (especially compared to their successes on Venus), it has been suggested that a good number of the failures were caused by solar radiation eating away the microchips in the probes causing them to die or malfunction. Certainly when you think of the longer flight times to Mars than to Venus it appears to suggest that it was something going on in-flight that caused the failures.
Having said that, they did achieve some successes and I can only imagine the elation of Mars 3's controllers when they started getting that first grainy image of the Martian surface - only for it to suddenly stop.
Best wishes,
Mike.
From NASA/JPL info on Rover and wheels:
So moving one meter takes very roughly ~100 seconds (about a minute and a half). Grinding takes roughly two hours. But grinding is just grinding, and you still would want to do some science after that. Also consider that moving will generally be interrupted by other delays such as taking photos. Check the link in the sig below for all kinds of info and links on this type of stuff.
--
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
(AXCH) 2004 Mars Exploration Rovers - News, Status, Technical Info, History.
We do use Java to write the rover command sequences. I wrote the software, RoSE (the Rover Sequence Editor), that we use for that; RoSE was also used to command both spacecraft in cruise.
RoSE is part of a suite called RSVP, the rest of which does 3-D visualization, simulation, and playback. Our 3-D stuff is very, very cool (I feel OK about saying this because I didn't write that part :-): we do kinematic simulations as the rover drives across the terrain; you can see it articulate realistically. If you've watched the press conferences, you've probably seen one of our playbacks. That visualization stuff is all in C and C++, though, not Java.
Java is also used upstream of RSVP, to do image browsing and to plan science goals for the sol. That's Maestro's role.
The rovers themselves run VxWorks, a well-known real-time Unix variant that's used a lot here at JPL.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
I should clarify that RSVP as a whole is used to write the rover command sequences now that we're in surface ops, not just RoSE. RSVP provides a visual editing environment for command sequences, so that you can (for instance) mark a spot in the virtual 3-D world and tell the rover to go there. This adds a command to the sequence just as if it had been added in RoSE.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
Pedantic: VxWorks is not a Unix variant; it has some Unix-like properties, since Wind River started tacking on POSIX API support. But every task lives in the same address space (although I think they added support for different address spaces recently?). Coding for it felt like linux kernel module coding, but with a better interface, but without accessible source code.
The only hard real-time Unix variant I know of is QNX.
You can get a taste of the VxWorks API here.
The images will never be perfect. The page you reference on the space.com article was not the exact image stored on the rover. When the images are transmitted from the Rover back to JPL, there is a transmission loss in the retro-bias diagonal frequency bass carrier that causes the image to be distorted. The fuzzy look we receive is then dithered and poly-metrophased with the dark "shadows" you see. This brings the image back to what we could theoretically predict it would be if the image was proper.
Somewhat offtopic, though much software ON THE GROUND at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is written in Java, but not software on the spacecraft. This doesn't have any problem, but due to Java's slow execution rate on the Rover's computer we actualy lose tetra-physical carbonic exposure rate because the camera simply can't be operated as quickly in Java as if the comman protocol were operated through a more iffecient lower-level language such as C.
Needless to say, I wrote some of the software used for the mission in Java, and it worked very well for our purposes, namely due to platform independence and quick development time. We had a heck of a time with some of the GUI code, however.
The rover runs VxWorks from Wind River. Very solid. Cheers,
Jim Cobgrobbler
Science Activation Planning Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
There are several problems, some of which interrelate. You touched on a couple of them. Things that I can think of offhand:
There are probably many other conditions; I'm not a hardware guy. I just drive 'em. :-) Per my original point, most of the problems can be mitigated by using RTGs, though some would have to be attacked in other ways.
Spirit and Opportunity will not reach sol 90 and immediately shut down, of course. Instead, they will slowly degrade, like a human body entering old age. It will be a matter of morbid curiosity to see what goes first. It makes me sad to think about it.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins