Mars Landers - Opportunity, Bedrock, Aerosmith?

Iphtashu Fitz writes "As was reported last week, the first Mars rover Spirit had some communications problems that the folks at the JPL have finally managed to trace to problems with its flash memory. Reuters is reporting that Opportunity seems to be having some power-related problems, too. It appears a faulty thermostat is turning a heater on overnight without being told to do so. While NASA isn't concerned about the rover overheating, they're exploring the long-term effects of continued power drain on the second rover." The article also notes: "The first three-dimensional, panoramic images beamed back from Opportunity showed an intriguing outcrop of exposed bedrock" - there's now a color version of the same image. Finally, lightwaveman points to the Spaceflight Now status page regarding new priorities for the Mars mission: "The airing of today's Mars rover news conference is being delayed on NASA TV to show the band Aerosmith touring International Space Station Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center."

Comments

Said it before, I'll say it again

[AKAImBatman]

Let's use nuclear power so we can go there. If the thermostat incorrectly activates, someone will turn it off. No more of this multi-million dollar robot BS. I love the robots to death, but we don't need to send them in our stead.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[glinden]

• If the thermostat incorrectly activates, someone will turn it off.

Not so sure about that. Send people up there and, if the thermostat incorrectly activates (Opportunity) or a software error causes the entire system to shut down (Spirit), people die. Manned space exploration is expensive and dangerous.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[karnal]

Yea, but the opportunity doesn't have scissors to cut the lines to the heater.

Granted, might get a little tingle splicing them back together to turn the heat back on, but I'm sure there would be other accomodations in case of a heater / thermostat failure (i.e. have 2 of them?) if humans were on the surface....

If the entire system shut down, since humans are on the spot (most likely engineers and scientists) they'd probably be able to hack something together. A little more difficult (not impossible) from this distance to a robot.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[iabervon]

Sure, someone could turn it off if they were there. Then they'd freeze to death when it actually did get cold. For that matter, NASA could probably do that now, from Earth.

Having somebody there would be useful if they had a spare part to install. It only makes sense for a manned mission to go to Mars after there's a reasonable amount of supplies already there. A long-lasting power source is one piece of that, but there are plenty of others. Also, before we can just "use nuclear power", someone will have to design a power plant that will reliably survive EDL and produce a significant amount of power afterwards. Playing around with rovers is giving NASA (and humanity) the experience necessary to supply a crew and get the crew there safely.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[ThomasFlip]

There is more to going to Mars then just using nuclear power. ie producing rocket fuel on mars, finding out how to send people on a 6 month trip in 0 G, finding a rocket ship with enough lift capacity, bringing enough food/supplies for multilple weeks/months, creating a suitable living environment etc... Robots are suitable for now because they don't require any of the things I have just mentioned, and they can still pull off most of the science a Human can. You think we have problems with robots, wait till humans go there.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[blockhouse]

I would like it if someone could give a real scientific or at least monetary reason to send people to mars.

As if science and money are the ultimate ends of the human experience. They're not.

You could just as easily have asked what the scientific or monetary reasons were for Marco Polo to go to Asia, da Gama to go around the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus to go to America, or Magellan to sail around the world. Or what the scientific or monetary reasons for NASA to put men on the moon 40 years ago. While each voyage had scientific and/or monetary justifications, they only became clear in retrospect and were in any event secondary to the experience and the human achievement.

Re:Said it before, I'll say it again

[beefneck9]

I think that the problems with Spirit and Opportunity might show we need to take it at a cautios pace before sending folks out there. Its been pointed out that these rovers took 10's of G's just to get there and land, and thats gotta be rough. Most pilots and astronauts to this point have seen about 10G's worst case, and for very short periods of time.

One of the largest concerns about space travel is radiation exposure. Once you enter the Van Allen Belts, which lie outside the protection of Earth's magnetic fields, you risk becoming a slow-cooked turkey. The only way to prevent this is to shield, and the best gamma shielding is lead, whereas the best for the particles seems to be lots of free hydrogen, as found in water and polyethylene. All of this is a lot of weight, and well, that all costs money. Lots. NASA has all of this in mind, no doubt.

Now, the most ominous problem with sending us isn't all of the things we can think of, but more those we cannot. God forbid we end up on Mars and find something cannot be fixed. Lets get the tech up to acceptable risks, and if we can get a robot to work for more than a couple weeks without going down, we're on the right track. Finding out your computer is unstable and is incapable of running/monitoring your REACTOR is not cool.

Keep up the good work, NASA! You guys are fighting the good fight, and most of us realize its not if, but when.

Re:solar power

[Anonymous Coward]

How in the world did this ignorant post get modded +1? The Rovers DO have solar panels on top of them.
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecra ft_surf ace_rover.html

The problem is most likely that they can't recharge the onboard batteries enough during the day to make up for the heater sapping energy.

There's always Mars

[spun]

Bad economy, war in Iraq, dodgy dossiers, terrorists on the loose, no WMDs, Gov. Schwarzenegger (I live in California...), rising national debt, companies fleeing offshore in droves, corporate scandals, high unemployement. I'm depressed.

Then there's Mars. Drama, excitement, scientific adventure: I feel proud of our messed up little species. Stuck somewhere between monkeys and angels, we manage to pull off some cool stunts once in a while. Go Team!

Re:Shame

[ttldkns]

After being launched into space, experiencing many Gs, travelling hundereds of thousands of miles to fall onto a big rock, bounce around and then to be controlled from earth... I think its a wonder they both work at all.
Kudos to NASA for doing so well

Go Nuke -

[jzarling]

Weren't the Viking probes powered by some sort of plutonium or uranium / ceramic batteries - they lasted for years.
If NASA is concerned about dust build up on the panels don't use them.
If they are concerned about dust on the camera lenses perhaps they could lease the "on car" camera technology from CART or NASCAR.
As for Aerosmith - they even less to do with science (unless your a chemist) than they do with football. - They and all the popstars f'up my Monday Night Football Intros, and now they delay delay NASA TV, Im gonna pirate thier latest album just to delete it.

Two out of two isn't bad

[infolib]

- so how about reusing the Spirit/Opportunity platform for further robotic missions to Mars? They seem to work (somewhat) and the remaining problems will probably be ironed out. Has the time come for commodity Mars probes?

What's all you space geeks saying? Is there something we would really miss by using slightly modified versions of these landers that would justify development costs? Or is the question moot since Bush wants manned missions anyway?

Is it me?

[BTWR]

Or is the press just dying for some bad news? I mean, everyone knows the news saying "You report the one house on fire, no one reports the 10,000 that didn't burn today" (or something like that).

For the media, bad news is good news (storywise). Here we have unprecidented sucesses of the MERs (and Mars Express - within DAYS of working it has found evidence of it's top mission objective), and now there's all this press about the "failures."

Or has NASA been "asking for it," as they keep saying how "amazingly perfect" things are going, setting themselves up for scrutiny when they fail? My opinion: no, but what about you?

Re:Is it me?

[timeOday]

Well, one rover is incapacitated completely. The other has problems that may (but hopefully not) be a major problem. "Perfect" would be if both rovers had been successfully deployed and functioned as planned. That's not what happened.

I certainly hope Spirit can be rehabilitated; that in itself would be a triumph. On the other hand, ith the Rover's lifespan of 90 days or so, each day on Mars costs several million dollars. Each nonfunctional day makes the mission a day shorter and that much less successful.

I'm sure you're not suggesting that these things shouldn't be reported, so what's the problem?

Re:Shame

[BTWR]

NASA seems to be having so much trouble with them

I can't think of a single mission in which everything was sucessful:

-Hubble had it's famous initial "disaster."
-Galileo had it's near-catastrophic antenae failure (which made the mission produce like 10% of the intended science/pictures).
-The Voyager Probes had various instruments which conked out before Neptune (granted the mission was only engineered to work for Jupiter and Saturn)
-Mars Express's Lander has presumably failed (but it's primary mission appears to have already found some evidence of it's main goal - finding water)
-The Soviet Venera Probes each had problems (one mission in particular returned no pictures due to an unremoved lens cap!)
-Pathfinder, like Spirit, had periods of breached-communications (including a much-longer delay in communcating with Earth after touching down on the surface).

Yet each of the above missions were HUGE sucesses in their own regard. NASA (and ESA and USSR) all has problems with them, but they were all very much redeemed themselves. It's like having a kid who turns out to be a hero firefigher/scientist or something. Just cuz he/she had a few temper tantrums doesn't mean that they're a failure. Look at the big picture...

Re:Spaceflightnow charges for nasa footage?

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, they knew they would be on the front page of slashdot every other day. Maybe thats why!

Good scientific reason...

[Goonie]

While others can point to the romantic reasons for crewed missions (points I agree with, by the way), there are IMO good scientific reasons to send crewed missions.

Basically, a human crew, even with the disadvantage of space suits, could work a lot faster, cover a lot more territory, and try a far greater variety of scientific techniques than any robot probe, or large set of robot probes, could do.

Re:Opportunity got really lucky

[linoleo]

if we could have picked any landing site on mars, it would be Opportunity's.

Actually, if we could pick *any* landing site, there are *a lot* more interesting ones on Mars to choose from. You have to decode Nasa-speak - what they're really saying is: "to be on the safe side, we always land in very flat regions, which tend to be (geologically speaking) rather boring. We are thrilled to have stumbled upon a flat region that looks *different* from all the other flat regions we've landed in before."

In other words, we've graduated from Kansas to Oklahoma. The Rockies, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Rift Valley, Himalaya, etc. of Mars are still waiting for us to develop more robust landers and capable all-terrain robots. Check out ESA's first Mars Express images for a taste of some more dramatic scenery. Can't wait till we get a rover into *that*!

- nic

Re:heaters..

[NewtonsUrge!]

why is it that early posts always get rated highly even when they're idiotic? Guess we will never know

Re:Open Source the Rover Code ?

[DerekLyons]

Why doesn't NASA Open Source this rover code? Not for the outside world to contribute to the development, but for review. The collective intelligence of the open source community could certainly provide productive and insightful reviews.

Why? Because it's unlikely that the open source community will provide much in the way of useful commentary. They don't have simulators to run the code on. And I find it unlikely that they will spend the months needed to understand a complex, tightly integrated, and utterly specialized set of code.

Perhaps problems such as file management could be avoided.

Probably not. The problems are caused because the real rovers have done something the test rovers haven't... They've run for months on end, whereas the test rovers and computers are frequently rebooted to reset for a new test sequence.

At the very least the open souce community would be able to document weak points in the design that could be improved or avoided in production use.

Maybe, maybe not. For the reasons I list above, I doubt the open source community will educate themselves deeply enough on the design to actually be useful. (O.K., one or two uber-geeks might, but that would be it. And, like often happens on open source fora like Slashdot, the few useful comments would be buried among the noise.)