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)."

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Re:Ah yes... The MAIN mision...

[VdG]

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.

Re:Fake

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Spirit not that impressive...?

[QuantumFTL]

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

Re:Spirit not that impressive...?

[mikerich]

The Russians sent, what, 9 probes to Mars in the 70s as well -- only one survived. And only for a few seconds at that.

I make it seven.

1. Kosmos 419 (May 1971). Mars orbiter intended to beat Mariner 8 to the planet. It reached Earth orbit but the booster failed to restart, it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere a few days later. The only positive point is that it did get further than Mariner 8 which ended up in the Atlantic.
2. Mars 2 (May 1971) . Mars orbiter and lander. Reached Mars and deployed lander which entered the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle and crashed. The orbiter successfully returned data for three months.
3. Mars 3 (May 1971). The twin of Mars 2. The probe succesfully deployed the lander which touched down on Mars - the first craft to do so. Data was returned from the surface for 20 seconds - the reason for the failure is unknown - either the probe was toppled by a raging storm or there was a failure with the uplink to the orbiter. (The same storm delayed the return of images from the US's Mariner 9 orbiter). The Mars 3 orbiter failed to enter the correct Martian orbit and was put into a highly elliptical orbit. It returned data for almost three months.
4. Mars 4 (July 1973). A Mars orbiter intended to serve as part of a fleet of four ships. It was damaged by radiation on the voyage to Mars and failed to fire its retro engine. The orbiter passed by Mars, taking some pictures of an astonishingly high quality (better than those obtained by the US to the time) and performed some work on the Martian atmosphere.
5. Mars 5 (July 1973). The twin of Mars 4, but this one entered an orbit around the planet. It returned surface images before after less than a month. Again the images were superb.
6. Mars 6 (August 1973). A heavy lander intended to use Mars 4 and 5 as relays to Earth. It entered the Martian atmosphere and relayed data to Earth during the descent. It is believed the retro rockets failed to fire and it smashed into the surface at high speed. Nevertheless, the Soviets were the first to make measurements of the Martian atmosphere, sadly much of the data was badly mangled during transmission.
7. Mars 7 (August 1973) The twin of Mars 6, but this one didn't even land on Mars. For some reason the lander was ejected from the bus stage far too early and it missed the planet. Both stages went into solar orbit, neither returned any data.

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.

Re:Spirit not that impressive...?

[ScottMaxwell]

Is it true that spirit makes use of Java? Or does only the "client" software used to control it,use Java. Does it have an OS and if so which/or what type? Does it use a RTOS or Linux or a BSD?

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.