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

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

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.

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: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: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

[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: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